Publication Date: 07-28-2025

Skyscraper (2018) review

Dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★½

“This is stupid” is an actual line of dialog uttered by Dwayne Johnson in Skyscraper, and it’s the most damning statement in the whole film. It’s both painfully accurate and self-aware. The intermittently entertaining yet too sporadically investing would-be blockbuster has moments of vertigo-inducing peril, especially if you’re petrified of heights like myself, but it’s too often labored for its own good. By the fifth time Johnson has escaped certain doom or made an impossible, physics-defying leap into the air that should’ve resulted in him sinking like, well, a rock, Skyscraper dissolves into the ether as a film that produces the effect of a bad superhero movie. If the hero has proven himself to be “too super,” so to speak, for everyone and everything in his way, why should we assume a given moment won’t end conveniently just like the moments that came before it?

The titular building is by far the most intriguing subject in the film. Located in Hong Kong, the fictional tower is more than half a mile in the sky and 240 stories tall, equipped with turbines that generate energy and electricity as well as an unprecedented security and fire extinguishing systems that make rightfully go beyond the call of duty in making it comply with safety regulations. That’s precisely why the building’s financier, Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han), has former-Marine-turned-security-adviser Will Sawyer (Johnson) come inspect the structure in the unfathomably large tower. Will, who lost his left leg below the knee while in the service, relishes this newfound life that allows him, his wife, Sarah (Neve Campbell), and their twins (McKenna Grace and Noah Cottrell) to live comfortably and safely — they assume.

It all seems grand until Will is ambushed by his partner and a group of thugs break into the skyscraper and douse the 96th floor with flammable chemicals, rendering Sarah and her children trapped inside the mile-high burning building. The men tinker with the building’s security system so that the fire systems do not function properly, thus prompting Will to go into “hero dad” mode and attempt a daunting rescue of getting back into the tower to rescue his family. Because the security systems are disabled, however, the flames make their way up the building, climbing higher in conjunction with the implausible circumstances.

Johnson is a fiend for this kind of material: shallow, derivative entertainment capable of satisfying the carnal instincts of people. Any opportunity for him to look good, save the world, and employ his charisma is a win in his book, and Skyscraper feeds his ego in a way we’ve come to expect. It’s Neve Campbell who impresses the most thanks to her presence being more than a damsel and actually a compelling, self-assured protagonist. Also along for the ride is director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who directed Johnson in 2016’s breakout comedy Central Intelligence. While Johnson proves he can schmooze the screen in innumerable ways, Thurber shows a mostly steady hand when it comes to nonlinear action directing. It’s nothing game-changing nor worthy of over-praise, but it’s competent work from someone who was shooting films like Dodgeball and We’re the Millers not that long ago, both in vastly different leagues than his two most recent efforts.

But Skyscraper can’t overcome the familiarity of its predecessors that made its very existence possible. Although it pays homage to Die Hard and The Towering Inferno through similar shots and sequences, it never feels as fun as those films. It caries a laborious, manufactured quality, one not too distant from this year’s mega-disappointment The Hurricane Heist. Both films could’ve been laudable works had they recognized from the start that they should be fun and lively. Instead, the two carry themselves like contractual obligations for their respective stars in terms of the excitement they inspire.

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Neve Campbell, Chin Han, Roland Møller, McKenna Grace, and Noah Cottrell. Directed by: Rawson Marshall Thurber.