rampage (brad peyton, 2018)

This is the twenty-fourth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2021-22", "A 33 week long challenge where the goal each week is to watch a previously unseen feature length film from a specified category." This is the 7th annual challenge, and my third time participating (my first year can be found at "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-20", and last year's at "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2020-21"). Week 24 is called "Video Game Adaptation Week":

The problem with most film adaptations of video games is that it's hard to properly transpose the level of immersion from controlling to observing. But that don't mean they can't try! So why don't we give them a chance? Or another chance, to those certainly burned before.

This week's challenge is to watch a previously unseen film adapted from a video game. Here is a list that contains purely adaptations, and here is a list containing some documentaries and video game-adjacent films.

Can we really say a movie is disappointing when we know going in that it features The Rock as a primatologist who communicates via sign language with an albino gorilla, that due to Science Gone Rogue that gorilla becomes enormous, that he joins a couple of other altered animals on a rampage that destroys much of Chicago, and that the whole thing is based on a video game? But that was my feeling after watching Rampage: it was disappointing.

I am all for dumb fun, and I enjoy Dwayne Johnson. Johnson's earlier movie with Brad Peyton, San Andreas, is one of those pictures I will always check out if it turns up when I am channel surfing. But didn't get any of the kind of enjoyment I was looking for from Rampage, and so yes, it was disappointing.

It didn't completely suck. Johnson does whatever it is he does that makes him such an appealing action star. There were a couple of interesting people in the cast, like Naomie Harris (I got bored trying to search, but is Harris the first Bond Girl to star in a movie with The Rock? ... Granted, Harris has objected to the term "Bond Girl".) Jeffrey Dean Morgan was properly over-the-top, as if he knew he was in a dumb movie and thought he'd have some fun. Malin Akerman was an argument for the importance of wigs in movies ... I didn't recognize her, forgot she was in the movie until the credits, because she had dark hair. Best of all, Peyton and company had a clear love for kaiju (made me wish Guillermo del Toro was the director).

But still. I can't really put my finger on why San Andreas is so much better than Rampage. But seeing the latter didn't convince me otherwise.