Cranky T-Rex's Blog

Let's face it, the only reason anyone has any interest in  Skyscraper is because it stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.  Otherwise we'd all take one look at this Die Hard meets Towering Inferno homage and laugh it straight to "looking for something to fall asleep to on Netflix at 1 AM." But The Rock tends to make good, fun movies out of all kinds of stuff.  Hell he made a Jumanji sequel that was one of the most surprisingly enjoyable movies of last year.  Of course the last movie I saw him in was Rampage , and as I said in the review for that, he really let me down on that one. Since then I've also seen his version of Baywatch on TV and just...dear God why. So naturally my normal enthusiasm for a Rock action movie was blunted quite a bit going into Skyscraper .  My hope was that somehow he and his team would manage to do something fresh and original with this concept.  Alas, there was absolutely nothing fresh or original to be found h...

Ah Rampage , a game I spent untold hours playing on my NES as a kid, mainly because it had no save option so either you played it until the end or you had to start over.  Since punching every building in the United States to rubble takes a few hours, it was exceedingly rare that I got to play long enough to see the end. I also never expected to see it turned into a movie.  After all, it's a pretty sparse story. Humans get turned into giant were-monsters and devote themselves to leveling America.  I guess that means you're not especially confined by existing narratives when creating the movie, but it's pretty hard for that not to come across as a goofy Godzilla knock off. After all, that was kind of the point of the game, to be a goofy Godzilla spoof. But hey, as I said on Twitter at the time, if anybody could make a good video game movie, it'd be Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.  He's kind of the king of ridiculous action flicks today, and he was teamed up a...

I don't think there was anyone on the planet who thought "hey, we need a sequel to Jumanji !" and yet here comes Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle .  Even with the increasing pedigree of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson at its forefront, this was still a film met with incredible skepticism by almost everyone, myself included. Still, despite that, it's had more staying power at the box office than Star Wars: The Last Jedi , and I paid to see it almost 3 weeks early thanks to Amazon Prime offering special early screenings at local theaters.  I did that for the novelty, fully anticipating an absolutely cringe-worthy experience that I would delight in regretting. Strangely...that's not what I got.  In fact, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle turned out to be a lot of fun. Here's what I had to say about it:

You'd think the death of lead cast member Paul Walker and the touching sendoff his character was given in Furious 7 would've stopped the Fast and Furious franchise cold, but that one made all the money and Vin Diesel always imagined a trilogy of 7,8,9, so here we are with The Fate of the Furious . It's pretty impressive for any franchise to get to their 8th movie like this, but considering how hard it is to make one great movie much less eight, it hasn't always been a smooth ride (no pun intended.) The first one is essentially a great remake of Point Break , only with drag racing instead of surfing. The second and third ones are universally panned for their lack of Vin Diesel (and also for being terrible in general.) Diesel and Walker got back together for the fourth one that, despite some pretty awful CGI, more or less put the series back on track. Fast Five is the stand out of course, since it's an incredibly fun heist movie that brought in the additional...

Hey look Disney decided to make another animated feature, and this time they brought Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson along.  I haven't seen Zootopia yet, but I didn't much care for the previous two non-Pixar Disney flicks, Big Hero 6 , which was just kind of lame, and Frozen , which I have ranted at length about in various places.  Suffice it to say, that movie is completely broken because they simply couldn't bear to give their stupidly catchy song to the villain character since that would've undercut the whole GIRL POWAH message they were using their movie to send. That's why I didn't rush out to see Zootopia, and almost didn't go to see this were it not for The Rock always being entertaining and the wait time at the bowling alley being long enough to make seeing a movie a better option.  So, did Moana turn out to be a bunch of eye-roll worthy feminist agitprop you should skip?  Check out the full review to find out: