Rampage (2018)
There is a particular category of Hollywood blockbuster that exists not so much to tell a story as to fulfil a transaction: you hand over your ticket money, the studio hands back explosions, a recognisable face, and the vague shape of a plot. Rampage (2018) sits squarely in that tradition. Based, in the loosest possible sense, on the Midway arcade game series that ran from 1986 onwards, the film follows Davis Okoye, a primatologist with a background in special forces (naturally), whose bond with a silverback gorilla named George is tested when a rogue genetics programme causes the animal to grow to monstrous proportions. Two similarly transformed creatures, a wolf and a crocodilian, soon follow, and the whole thing accelerates, more or less inevitably, towards downtown Chicago being reduced to rubble.
Brad Peyton directs, and his CV is instructive. Before Rampage he had made San Andreas (2015) and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012), both big-budget, broad-audience disaster spectacles that performed perfectly well at the global box office without leaving any particular mark on the culture. The script here was worked on by three writers: Ryan J. Condal, Ryan Engle, and Carlton Cuse, the last of whom spent years as a showrunner on Lost. The result, produced across several companies including New Line Cinema and Wrigley Pictures, is the kind of film that reads on paper as a crowd-pleaser and arrives on screen feeling as though it was assembled by committee from a pre-approved list of parts. Dwayne Johnson leads, playing the sort of character Johnson was essentially born to play: physically imposing, emotionally earnest, morally uncomplicated. I looked at some of his earlier work in my review of The Rundown, a film from 2003 that showed considerably more personality than this. Naomie Harris plays the discredited geneticist who becomes Okoye's reluctant partner; Jeffrey Dean Morgan turns up as a laconic government operative doing his level best to inject some charisma into the proceedings; Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy play the corporate villains, which is to say they play villains in the most functional, get-us-to-the-third-act-please sense of the word.
Cinematographer Jaron Presant shoots the whole thing with the clean, well-lit competence you would expect from a production of this scale: wide establishing shots of cityscape devastation, close coverage of Johnson's face registering concern or determination, CGI creatures rendered in reasonable detail against backgrounds that never quite feel entirely real. The images are polished but unremarkable, the visual grammar entirely familiar. Andrew Lockington's score follows suit, muscular and percussive during the action sequences, softening to something more affecting in the moments between Okoye and George. Lockington had worked with Peyton before on San Andreas, and the collaboration produces a sound that serves its purpose without ever drawing attention to itself. Editors Jim May and Bob Ducsay keep things moving at a brisk pace across 107 minutes, which is probably the film's most defensible quality: it does not overstay its welcome, even if it never quite earns it.
I knew Rampage was going to be bad before I ever pressed play, and I watched it anyway, so some of this is on me.
What stings a touch is that I loved the video game it is supposedly based on. That was fun and comical and knew exactly how silly it was. This takes the same raw material and strips all the daft joy out of it, turning it into a straight-faced Godzilla clone that could not be more generic if it tried.
The frustrating thing is that you already know everything I am about to say, because everyone does. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of films can tell you precisely what this is from the poster alone: enormous kaiju-style monsters smashing cities to rubble, and one impossibly muscular man setting out to stop them. There is not a single element here you will not see coming, and the film makes no effort whatsoever to surprise you.
You might at least hope it would be a feast for the eyes, the one thing this sort of blockbuster can usually fall back on, but no. The effects are fine, competent, entirely adequate, and that is the whole problem: it is so utterly by-the-numbers that nothing lands, nothing impresses, nothing stays with you for a second after it ends. Look across Brad Peyton's filmography and you find more of the same. These films make their money at the box office, fair enough, but they are about as anti-cinema as it gets. One and a half stars, a loud, weightless and instantly forgettable way to spend two hours.
Rampage arrives and departs without ceremony, a film that cost a great deal of money to produce and asks very little of anyone watching it. For those curious about where Johnson's particular brand of action spectacle tends to land, I also covered Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw and Moana, two films that at least demonstrate the range of what he is capable of when the material meets him halfway. The video game it draws from was never going to yield Citizen Kane, and nobody was expecting it to. But there is a version of this film, leaning into the absurdity, embracing the silliness of its own premise, that could have been a decent Friday-night romp. Rampage is not that film. It is the other one, the one that plays it straight and pays the price.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2026-10-02
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Rampage (2018) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · HBO Max Amazon Channel · Now TV Cinema · Netflix Standard with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · Cinemax Amazon Channel · HBO Max · Cinemax Apple TV channel
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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