EDIFICE WRECKS..........BQ DE-CONSTRUCTS 'SKYSCRAPER'.......

Skyscraper (2018)    I feel like the amount of time I spend posting about this movie should equal the amount of thought that went into it........

                     Three minutes, maybe?  Four?  Five?

                     A fair chunk my adult life was spent as a buyer for video stores (you remember, them, right? )  After the success of "Die Hard" in 1988, I found my desk inundated with advance screener copies of God-Only-Knows who many 'Die Hard' imitations.........

                      You know the formula well........one lone wisecracking hero versus an army of commando thugs........and so we had endless variations of "Die Hard" on a --------- (fill in your own location here)..... as in 'Die Hard' on a plane, 'Die Hard' on a train, 'Die Hard' on a boat, 'Die Hard' on a mountain.....yada, yada, yada.........

                       And that's not even including the official 'Die Hard' sequels themselves..........

                       So about 30 years later, here comes "Skyscraper".......which is 'Die Hard' on a you-know-what.....accomplished almost entirely with CGI......,most likely made  inside a warehouse loft covered with green-screen wallpaper.....with the movie itself to be animated in later by the usual platoons of digital artists.......

                       Hardly a movie at all, it's a corporate sausage blueprint of the last 50 'Die Hard' ripoffs......a blatantly generic nothing of a film that feels like it might have been written and directed by one of those disembodied cyber-voices from one of our devices.......(as in, "Siri...make me a Die Hard movie"......)

                        And for such a schematic enterprise untouched by human hands, they found the perfect actor.........the all-purpose generic He-Man, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson.......

                        I'll say this much for The Rock.......he convincingly sweats, strains and gasps as he hurls himself around that green-screen warehouse.........which the computer animators then color in to make it look like he's doing all this stuff inside a burning, super-duper futuristic skyscraper......why, they even digitize him a prosthetic leg, just to amp up the handicap factor as he faces off with the baddies.......

                       Oh yeh, the bad guys.......led, per the usual blueprint, by some Euro-psycho with a thick accent.....his minions enjoy machine-gunning scores of innocent people.......not because it has anything logical to do with the plot, but cause it looks cool to see them machine gunning scores of innocent people.........

                        25 years ago,when 'Die Hard' clones ruled,  this would have a gigantic huge hit. I probably would put have put in a purchase order for dozens and dozens of copies to fill up the store shelves......

                        But in 2018?  It looks like a Lego-assembled version of every Die Hard ripoff ever made.......shiny, plastic, soulless.........re-fitted and re-hashed for ADD-afflicted video game players living out their lives in their parents' basements......

                        As for The Rock......he just missed getting the ultimate accolade for a movie like this, the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Blimp.........sorry, big guy......there's always the MTV Movie Awards coming up, where you'll have to compete with 87 Marvel super-heroes.......

                        Now that I've officially spent way more time on this post than anybody involved in 'Skyscraper' worked on their movie, let's wrap it up.........Zero Stars (0)........watch 'Die Hard' instead.