ACTION; 1hr 47min
STARRING: Dwayne Johnson, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Naomie Harris
When even The Rock looks itsy-bitsy...
San Diego primatologist David Okoye (Johnson) prefers animals to people. The big guy shares an extra-special bond with fellow alpha George (Jason Liles, motion-captured in hairy detail), a fiercely intelligent, cream-coloured gorilla with a playful sense of humour and a giant heart. Their bromance goes south, and then some, when a space lab explodes, sending canisters of weaponised DNA blasting to Earth, one of them into George’s leafy domain.
The changes are immediate and dramatic: overnight, George grows from seven to nine feet tall. He slaughters a grizzly bear, which he feels bad about in the morning, although not bad enough to curb his newly awakened, baser instincts. Nor is he the only beast gone rogue—a giant wolf in South Dakota and a crocodile in the Gulf of Mexico are also feeling their mutated oats, raising a hell deviously orchestrated by the brother-and-sister greedheads (Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy) whose firm dreamed up the mutating pathogen.
“Holy shit!” to quote maverick, thunderstruck “other” government-agency operative Agent Russell (The Walking Dead’s Morgan), while hurtling with David from a doomed plane. He got that one right: videogame-based movies don’t come much bigger than San Andreas director Brad Peyton in the chair and jumbo beasties running amok on the streets of Chicago. (And that’s not counting the gluttonous croc, who crashes the party while eating a plane.) Can David and his scientist sister-in-arms, Dr Kate Caldwell (Harris, aka Miss Moneypenny), put paid to the carnage by an antidote to the psychotic mutants? Not a question you’d ask every day, and in any case, it’s rhetorical since we all know there’s nothing impossible D.J. can’t accomplish when he puts his muscle mass behind it. Rampage is deliriously silly from go to woah and its thumping star goes all out for every cent of his pay cheque.
