(Reviewed by the Movie Knight) Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) was an FBI Hostage Rescue team leader until a mission gone bad robbed him of his leg. It’s not all bad for him as this incident leads to the meeting of his future wife (Neve Campbell) and the birth of their children. Now he assesses security for buildings and is currently scoping out the tallest building in the world that resides in Hong Kong. Terrorist have set the building ablaze with his family trapped inside. Sawyer must find his way into the building, save his loved ones, plus avoid the bad guys and the flames. Hope he gets overtime for this job.
When you look at this story you may be thinking it is a combination of Die Hard (with a handicap) and The Towering Inferno. It’s not far off, but it’s more towards the latter. For one it doesn’t have as memorable villain as Alan Rickman played in the action classic. The primary action scenes involve Will Ford vs. the building. That’s where most of the tension and suspenseful scenes comes from and what helps separates this from other movies in this genre, usually we are treated to our hero shooting down the antagonists, so this is a good change of pace.
Sometimes all we ask from a summer flick is some mindless fun for a couple of hours. This fare does go a little above and beyond of just being mindless. As the story progresses it keeps raising the stakes and manages to fit in some humor along the way. It’s offered in 3D and this is one of the rare times where it is worth paying the extra dough to see it in that format. It’s hard to believe we are already half way through the summer movie season. We’ll be in the midst of Oscar contenders before we know it.