I’m not gonna lie. It took me forever to see this movie partly because I didn’t want to spend the money to see it in theaters and partly because, even almost a year after it’s come out on Blu-Ray, it still hasn’t dropped in price. Most importantly though, I honestly thought it was gonna suck. Well, the other day, I finally figured I might as well buy it any way and Dala and I ended up watching it the next day.
Sweet, hormonal, gorilla rage guys. This movie was fun. Blah blah blah. Science experiments. Blah blah blah. Gene editing. Blah blah blah. Humble yet overpowered hero with plot armor and a super smart sidekick, super evil corporate schemer with a lacky, incompetent military intervention. Blah blah blah. Screw the plot. It exists to service the action and does it well and once you get out of the doldrums of the first act, action is what you get and you get it aplenty.
Sweet mercy, is the action good too. In order, you get to watch a band of mercenaries that have a very bad day with a very angry wolf. You get to see a totally unbelievable but totally kick ass airplane crash sequence. Then, for the final third act, you get to see a giant mutant gorilla, a giant mutant wolf, a giant mutant crock, and a giant non-mutant Rock completely wreck downtown Chicago. By the way, when I say the third act, I mean the whole third act. Being based on a videogame aside, the title Rampage is perfect because that’s the best way to describe the whole third act. Buildings are being wrecked, military vehicles are being destroyed like they’re nothing but little toys, people are in a massive panic, it’s just an amazing spectacle.
What amazes me the most though, is just how tight the pacing of this movie is. Once things get rolling, no scene drags on for too long, the movie doesn’t spend too much focus on the monsters or the humans to the point where I was getting frustrated or bored as an audience member, the action scenes are just on the right side of being over the top without being too overwhelming or outliving their welcome, on and on I could go. Pacing wise, this movie just works, and I don’t say that for a lot of movies.
Know what else amazes me? The monster designs. They’re so dumb but I still like them. George is a giant, vanilla gorilla. The only thing special about him is that he has white fur, which works because it really allows battle damage to stand out. I know that sounds boring, because it is, but it’s the right way to go because it allows him to stand out not only as the hero, but as a baseline character as well. Because he’s plain, the villains get to be weird, and boy howdy, they are. Ralph is a wolf with the membranes of a flying squirrel that allow him to glide and for good measure he’s got porcupine quills to spare. Lizzie a giant crocodile with warthog tusks and fish gills and armor plating and a club tail like an ankylosaurus. Man, just typing that out makes me want to hate these two guys because they sound like something a five year old would come up with but somehow they just work. Know what’s best about all three of these guys though? Compared to a lot of kaiju, these guys are small. Barely even a couple of stories tall. But they’re so frenetic, so unhinged, they’re just as destructive as their bigger genre breathren.
UGH! THIS MOVIE IS SO DUMB BUT I CAN’T HELP BUT LOVE IT!
I give it four out of five stars. One star for each monster in this movie. George, Ralph, Lizzie, and last but not least, The Rock. I really hope for an equally childish yet equally entertaining sequel. Just one though.