Skyscraper is a 2018 action thriller from Rawson Marshall Thurber, and it has one idea: a man with one leg climbs a burning building. Dwayne Johnson plays Will Sawyer, a former FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader who loses his left leg below the knee in an opening hostage standoff. Ten years later he is a private security consultant, and he is standing outside the tallest building in the world while his family is trapped near the top of it.
That is the whole machine. It runs for 102 minutes. It scores 5.1 out of 10.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
The Pearl and Its 225 Floors
The building is called the Pearl. It stands 3,500 feet tall in Hong Kong, holds 225 floors, and is not yet open. Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han), the tech entrepreneur who financed it, hires Will to review its security. Will’s wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) and their twins, Henry and Georgia, are staying with him on the residential floors.
Thurber wrote, produced and directed the film. It is his second collaboration with Johnson after Central Intelligence in 2016. Legendary Entertainment won a bidding war for a Chinese-set action adventure in May 2016, and the pieces fell into place from there: Johnson as lead, Thurber on script, direction and production, Universal handling distribution. Filming started in August 2017 in Vancouver, with location shooting in Hong Kong.
A Tablet, a Betrayal, and a Fire on the 96th Floor
Will inspects the Pearl and reports that the computerized fire and security systems pass his tests. Zhao hands him a tablet that gives him complete control over the building’s systems, locked to his biometric credentials. Then Will and his former colleague Ben Gillespie (Pablo Schreiber) drive to the offsite security center.
A mugger tries to steal the tablet. Ben betrays Will and attacks him for it. Will kills Ben.
The terrorist Kores Botha (Roland Møller) and his men then break into the Pearl and use a water-reactive chemical to start a fire on the 96th floor. The fire creates a barrier that makes the upper 130 floors impossible to enter or exit. Botha’s associate Xia (Hannah Quinlivan) takes the tablet, kills everyone at the offsite facility, and uses it to disable the fire-extinguishing systems and open the air vents, spreading the fire upward.
Botha’s plan is extortion. He wants millions of dollars in shakedown payments from the developer.
Will Sawyer Climbs the Outside of the Building
So the film becomes a vertical rescue. Will has to get back into the Pearl, get above the fire, and get his family out. He has one leg below the knee. The building is the tallest in the world. The tagline is “Don’t look down.”
Don’t look down
That is the entire pitch, and Thurber never finds a second one. The set pieces are built on a single contrast — a man with a prosthetic limb against a sheer glass face — and the film returns to that contrast again and again without escalating it. The suspense is real in the moment and weightless afterward. You watch a hand slip and you feel it. You do not remember which floor it happened on.
Neve Campbell Is the Best Thing Here
Sarah Sawyer is a former Navy doctor. She treated Will ten years earlier, after the amputation. In the Pearl she is not a hostage waiting to be saved; she is a second competent adult working the problem from inside while Will works it from outside.
Campbell plays her straight and hard, and she is the only person in the film who seems to be in a real place. Johnson is Johnson. He is likable, he is enormous, he is believable hanging off a crane, and he is playing a character whose defining trait is that he does not quit. That is not a performance so much as a guarantee, and the film leans on it until it thins out.
The supporting cast is a list of functions. Noah Taylor is Mr. Pierce, the corrupt insurance executive secretly working for Botha. Byron Mann is Inspector Wu of the Hong Kong Police Force. Adrian Holmes is Ajani Okeke, Zhao’s head of security. Elfina Luk is Sergeant Han. Tzi Ma is Chief Sheng of the Hong Kong Fire Services.
The Comparisons Are Not Unfair
Critics gave Skyscraper mixed reviews. They praised Johnson and the suspenseful scenes. They criticized the story and called it too similar to other films, naming The Towering Inferno from 1974 and Die Hard from 1988.
Both comparisons hold up. The Towering Inferno is the fire-in-a-tall-building movie. Die Hard is the one-man-against-terrorists movie, and it is also the movie that made a skyscraper a character instead of a set. Skyscraper takes the premise of both and adds a prosthetic leg, which is a real addition and not a sufficient one.
Here is the ranking that matters, and it is not a ranking of action sequences:
- The Pearl itself — 225 floors, 3,500 feet, a genuine piece of production design with a real sense of height.
- Sarah Sawyer — the only character in the film with an interior life.
- The 96th-floor fire barrier — a clean, legible obstacle that structures the entire second act.
- Will Sawyer’s climb — well staged, emotionally flat, repeated past the point of tension.
- Botha’s extortion plot — a motive that exists so the fire can exist.
- The tablet — a plot device that hands the villain the building and hands the hero nothing.
What $304 Million Buys
Skyscraper grossed $304 million against a budget of $125 million. It premiered in Beijing on July 2, 2018, and opened in the United States on July 13. By the standards of a mid-budget action film with a global star, that is a working result, not a triumph.
The money is the interesting fact here, not the movie. A Chinese-set, Hong Kong-shot, Johnson-led action film was a bet on a specific market and a specific star, and it paid. The film itself is the cost of that bet: a script that treats its setting as a backdrop, a villain with a spreadsheet for a motive, and a third act that resolves because the hero is the hero.
What the Climb Is Worth
Skyscraper is not a bad night. It is a film with one good image and no second thought. The image is a man with one leg on the outside of the world’s tallest building, and Thurber gets it on screen cleanly. Everything around it is scaffolding.
The part worth watching is Campbell. She is doing the work the script will not do for her, and she makes Sarah a person rather than a hostage. The part worth skipping is the plot, which is a series of errands that move Will from one ledge to the next.
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