RAMPAGE REVIEW

Normally I would start out one of these reviews with a hopefully clever joke, observation about society, or some type of abstract idea that the film made me think of.  This time is different.  This time I have a video game movie to review .  If I'm being honest, this time I just want to jump into it and get it over with.  So without further ado, let's review the stupid video game movie. 

Rampage, starring Dwayne Johnson (San Andreas) and Naomi Harris (Moonlight, Skyfall),  is an adaptation of an old 1980's arcade game in which you play as a monster and smash up cities and kill massive amounts of people with no consequences.  Yes, you read that right.  That is pretty much it. 

This was not the worst movie I've ever seen or anything like that.  In fact, a good bit of it is perfectly fine for what it is.  The problem here is that there was too much movie in this video game.  The people who go to see this are wanting to see cool monsters smashing things.  That's it.  The movie  has some of that but it tries to weave in a bunch of poorly executed movie drama and it takes away from where the focus of the movie should have been; massive amounts of CGI destruction.  The kind of thing I usually hate but I will give it a pass this time considering the source material. 

I always enjoy watching The Rock, or Dwayne I guess now, doing whatever he is doing.  The guy is just extremely likable and entertaining.  That being said, I thought he was out of place in this film.  The human characters were not going to be the stars here and trying to make Johnson one of the stars is something that hurt this movie.  Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Walking Dead) plays an FBI agent in this movie and he is really annoying.  He basically played a cartoon version of Negan and it does not come off well.  His dialogue was the worst in a film full of bad dialogue.  Every line he spoke had to include some kind of sarcastic joke.  It got real old real fast. 

The worst thing about this movie to me was the way over the top generic antagonist and her beta-male sidekick.  They were watching everything happen on monitors from an office building and it was some of the worst cheese I have seen in quite some time.  It was basically Rita Repulsa from the Power Rangers show back in the 90's. 

Overall, this movie wasn't absolutely terrible and I think the target audience will enjoy parts of it.  However, it falls short of what it should have been doing and has no real redeeming qualities that would allow me to call it anything close to a good film.  THE MOVIE MAN GIVES IT 2 OUT OF 5 STARS.