Category: REVIEWS

The last time Dwayne Johnson starred in a videogame adaptation we got Doom. I guess the only way is up from there. I’ve never played the Ramage games, but I get the gist of them; you’re a giant monster destroying a city – there’s not much more to say on that. I would call it an odd choice to adapt, but when we’ve recently been seeing new Godzilla and King Kong films, not to mention Pacific Rim and by looks of things the upcoming Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom and The Meg, I suppose this has come out at the right time for it.

Dwayne Johnson is a primatologist working at San Diego Zoo, where he cares for an albino gorilla he saved from poachers years back. However, a scientific experiment falls from the sky and infects the gorilla, George, who grows in size and aggression. The government gets involved when George gets too destructive, but that is the least of everyone’s worries. The experiment has also infected a wolf in Wyoming and a crocodile in the Everglades. All three soon converge on Chicago and their rampage threatens to level the entire city. The race is on to either cure the monsters or stop them at all costs.

Rampage was directed by Brad Payton, who has worked with Johnson twice before – Journey 2 The Mysterious Island and San Andreas. Thankfully Rampage is definitely the stronger of the three films, albeit not by much. The truest thing that could be said about Rampage is that it is at the very least an efficient monster movie. Certainly towards the end, it knows what you want to see and so goes about delivering it to you. It’s a film with little surprises and one-dimensional characters, but also one with some good, silly performances and dumb fun action.  Rampage’s saving grace is also it’s downfall.

The ending is fantastic. It’s silly, over the top and filled with non-stop carnage – exactly what you want to see in a film with giant monsters attacking large cities. But that only happens at the end. Don’t get me wrong, there is action before then – including a pretty fun scene with the wolf in a forest – but it is still a little too much of a wait to get there. I don’t know who decided to make it a rule that when making a film with multiple monsters, that they should only fight at the end. It’s a bad rule and has been the Achilles heel of so many films like this. We want to see them duking it out for a good chunk of the film, with the story and character moments coming out on the in-between parts. Without that, you do get a little bored and can only hope that the end is worth the wait.

The acting is very silly in Rampage. Dwayne Johnson is still charismatic, but he does feel like he has less to do in this film than he usually does. Not as bad as Naomie Harris mind you. She’s trying but this script gives her literally nothing outside of a tragic backstory and a scene where she breaks into a laboratory. Other than that, the villains are like old Power Rangers or Thunderbirds villains. No character outside of being evil, nothing to do outside of being evil and having no motivation to be evil, outside of that they just are. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, though, takes the cake here. He’s a government agent who likens himself to a cowboy – and he’s still chewing the scenery, even long after he’s eaten the whole film. It’s all that special, endearing kind of silly, where the actors and clearly having fun and you are enjoying the passion they bring to it. It is just strange that our human characters are more like cartoons than the CG monsters that are destroying buildings.

Outside of the film being very grey to look at and being surprisingly violent at times, there are some choices made that I don’t think worked. In the villains’ office there’s an actual Rampage arcade machine, which is weirdly out of place. There’s an animal rights message that comes out of nowhere and is probably a little too dark in tone for the rest of the film. The games also had this little detail in them – when the monsters die they shrink down and are revealed to have been human all along. If the film took that element then maybe a little more could have been added to the film dramatically. Not that you can’t sympathise with animals, but it might have made things feel more intense for the characters. Another reason to cure them before the army kill them, that sort of thing. The most distracting design choice was the creature designs. The gorilla looks like a giant gorilla, fair enough – but the wolf has spikes and can glide on small wings and the crocodile has tusks, a club-tail and gills. It was just very distracting – either keep them all as big animals or make the gorilla a monster too. I know it was for the ending, but that only made the ending more predictable to me.

Rampage is easily one of the better videogame adaptations – which is really just a nice way of saying that it’s mediocre at best. The action is a lot of fun, as are the performances. But you do have to sit through a lot of uninteresting stuff to get there. I am confident that one day we will get a great videogame movie, but it’s not this day. An efficient monster movie. If that is all you want to see then you won’t be disappointed, but if you want anything more than that, then you’re a little out of luck.

Chet (Dustin Coffey) is an agoraphobic man still living at home with his mother. When his mum moves away, Chet is forced to take on a lodger, a situation which doesn’t gel with his anxieties. Enter Maggie (Linda Burzynski), a former Marine with her own personal demons. She drinks heavily, has been living in a friend’s SUV and clearly suffers through the societal displacement of a returning veteran. The pair form an unlikely friendship as each deal with their own personal prison.

Few films do justice to either agoraphobics or persons leaving military service. For the most part they are paper thin caricatures with little consideration given to the fact that these are avatars for actual human conditions. Fear, Love and Agoraphobia is at its strongest when it focuses on the “odd couple” relationship between its protagonists. The ancillary characters are less carefully considered, with Lori Petty falling off the edge of the narrative in the final act. This is a terrible shame considering how good she is in the role of Francis, Maggie’s bar owning friend. As the only emotionally supportive character outside of the two leads, she is missed, even as Chet and Maggie’s story begins to resolve.

The chemistry between Burzynski and Coffey is easily the most potent element of this movie. Both performers imbue their characters with a dimensionality not afforded to them in the scripted dialogue alone. They are fully formed and wonderfully humanised. You care about their journey. It’s this emotional engagement that raises important discussions with regards to how we perceive anxiety disorders and the physical, mental and emotional health of returning servicemen and women.

However, the plot strand involving Maggie’s incarcerated husband wasn’t afforded the same nuance. While Ed Aristone does well within the role of Rick, his character has several faltering moments, one in particular involves a troubling line about sodomy (you know… because “prison”). It feels like low hanging (rotten) fruit in a film that so carefully traverses the pitfalls of character cliché with its two protagonists.

At its heart this is a film about companionship and empowerment, bolstered by two engaging lead performances. There’s an underlying thread of humour without necessarily courting comedy directly. Both characters have satisfying emotional journeys that acknowledge the ongoing process of healing, and to that end, Fear, Love and Agoraphobia is worth your time and attention.

Fear, Love and Agoraphobia launches on VOD and streaming platforms soon.