Chi-Town Urban Renewal

Movies adapted from video games can’t be taken seriously and are often scoffed at.  I mean, are Hollywood’s best creative minds so bankrupt in imagination that they have to mine ideas from simple and mindless video games, of all things?   Then again, some video games (console or PC) have enjoyed success and even spawned franchises in cinemadom.  Regardless, for every success story such as ‘Resident Evil’ or ‘Tomb Raider’ we get a handful of dismal failures like ‘Doom,’ ‘Prince of Persia,’ ‘Super Mario Brothers’ and ‘Assassin’s Creed.’

‘Rampage,’ based on one of my favorite old-school ‘80s coin-op arcade games, seeks to beat the odds.  Anchored by one of Hollywood’s hottest leading man working today, action superstar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (who also starred in the aforementioned ‘Doom’) and featuring three giant beasties rampaging through the densely packed urban sprawl of Chicago, ‘Rampage’ certainly has a lot going for it even if it wasn’t much of a movie. While the 1986 Bally Midway game allowed us to unleash our inner King Kong (George), Godzilla (Lizzie) or—why not—giant werewolf (Ralph) to our heart’s content, the film managed to stay true to the spirit of the video game with some tweaks such as making George an Albino ape who learned sign language, giving Ralph flying squirrel wings and changing Liz into a mutated super mega A-10 Warthog-chomping alligator like it’s some cut-rate B-movie produced by the Syfy channel.

This isn’t to say that ‘Rampage’ was terrible, or even bad for that matter.  In fact, I found it to be great rollicking fun, a highly enjoyable pop-corn flick of the first order.  As a fan of Japanese Kaiju, seeing this movie was a no-brainer.  And Dwayne Johnson has proven once again that he is the “Arnold Schwarzeneggar” of today with the same muscles but better acting chops.  Nothing else really matters in the final analysis.

Grade: B+