Rampage Review

I remember playing the video game Rampage: Total Destruction on the PlayStation 2 when I was a kid and having a pretty good time with it.
From I can remember, it was a fun enough game to just shut your brain off and go and create carnage for about an hour.
Now, I will admit, it took me a while to realise Rampage was actually an adaptation of this video game series because, if I recall correctly, the game did not have animals turning into giant monsters but people.

Going into Rampage I expected to have fun with it as just a big dumb action movie.
What I did not expect, however, was to get a big dumb action movie with with a lack of satisfying action.
But that is exactly what I got.
Directed by Brad Peyton, Rampage stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as primatologist Davis Okoye who looks after the gorilla George.
However, when George is infected with a genetic editing virus and grows to monstrous size, along with a wolf named Ralph and a crocodile named Lizzie, Davis has to find a way to save his friend.
To this movie’s credit, it does have enjoyable moments.
Rampage can be pretty funny at times and the final action sequence is enjoyable, for the first 10 minutes at least.
Then there is Jeffrey Dean Morgan who plays Negan-oh, I’m sorry, I meant Agent Harvey Russel.
Seriously though, they might as well have just named this character Negan because Morgan is giving the exact same performance he gives in The Walking Dead.
That is not to say this is a bad thing though, since Morgan delivers a lot of the exposition in this film and his charisma makes what should have been boring scenes a lot more entertaining.

Apart from this however, the movie is a slog to get through.
The characters, except for Morgan’s, are boring and one dimensional, especially the villains who were so comically evil just for the sake of it.
The movie also requires a huge suspension of disbelief since the characters survive some of the most un-survivable things.
Characters surviving impossible things is a common cliche in action films but in Rampage they take this cliche to ridiculous extremes.
Then there is the action, which, let’s face it, is probably the reason most people are going to see this film.
Unfortunately, the action sequences do get very predictable, with one sequence having a jump scare that I knew was coming a full ten seconds beforehand.
I never thought I would get tired of giant monsters fighting each other but it felt like the final fight should have been cut by at least five to ten minutes, as well.
Overall, Rampage is just another video game movie, that meaning not very good.
It does have its moments of exciting action and good character moments, when Morgan is in the scene at least, but other than that it does not deliver that much of a punch.