"Ok, I'm interested."
"But the gorilla gets exposed to Science Gas and grows big -"
"I'm sold."
"And then Johnson has to help his big gorilla friend fight two OTHER giant monsters -"
"Look, you're sweetening a deal you already closed, but keep going..."
Yeah, I liked it.
The problem with nearly every video game adaptation that has been ground out by the Hollywood system is the need to equally serve both masters of whatever narrative and/or memorable "beats" that drew people to the game in the first place while also turning an interactive experience into a passive one. And most of the solutions studios turn to involve over-complicating things to the point of video game fans feeling half-served and general audiences just feeling confused.
The solution Rampage comes up with? Just make Mighty Joe Young as a giant monster movie.
A good part of why this movie works - and it works far better than a film based on a quarter-munching arcade game reasonably should - is that it chooses to anchor the majority of its stakes in the relationship between Johnson's Davis Okoye (a poacher-puncher-turned-zoologist) and George, the albino gorilla he rescued as a baby. Johnson takes a character who would make even '90s-era Schwarzenegger go "Hold on, maybe he's too good at too many things?" and plays it 100% straight. There's no mugging for the camera or winking at the absurdity here, just a very charismatic actor totally committing to interacting with a CGI albino gorilla. And I'm being serious that I'd watch an entire film just about that, because. . . well, why wouldn't you?
But lucky for me, Rampage is based on a video game that looks like this:
The plot, such as it is, gets going when a science experiment being done in orbit (because it's technically illegal, but the company behind it doesn't care - I wonder if they're the Bad Guys) goes wrong and the samples crash to Earth, infecting a wolf, and alligator, and George the gorilla. The mutagen created by the Energene company, who's research was ostensibly done to cure diseases but is actually being shopped around for military applications by CEO Claire Wyden (Malin Akerman) and her brother (I wonder if they're the Bad Guys), not only makes these animals bigger and stronger, but it increases their aggression exponentially, so they. . . well, go on a rampage.
Davis teams up with Naomie Harris as Kate Caldwell, an ex-employee of Energene with her own beef with the company, to try to bring George in safely before he hurts too many people and/or the military has to put him down. Jeffrey Dean Morgan chews up almost as much scenery as the CGI beasties as Agent Russell, a drawling, swaggering operative of an undisclosed branch of of the government. There's a moment in the third act where Russell exclaims "Damn, that was a lot." which more or less sums up both the performance and the film as a whole, and between Morgan and Akerman, the cast has just the right amount of exaggeration to feel "right" for a movie where a wolf throws mutated porcupine quills at an attack helicopter.
Mostly because Johnson and Harris are never overblown and perfectly earnest in their respective "I only really like animals" and "I only meant for my work to help people" character avenues. There's just the right amount of personalities bouncing off of each other (figuratively and literally) to cement alliances and relationships before the big blow-out on and above the streets of Chicago.
This is where director Brad Peyton (Journey 2: Mysterious Island, San Andreas) really shines, showcasing just enough monster-on-military action for the "Look, our only hope is to make the potentially-friendly monster fight the other two!" hook remotely plausible, and then providing enough monster-on-monster beats to feel climactic without pummeling the audience with an overdose of destruction porn. There's also some small touches (yes, in a film this big and dumb) that caught me by surprise, from the hilariously machismo-laden entrance given to Joe Manganiello (a slyly smart subversion on the part of the movie) to the emotional payoff of a beat that's been in most of the trailers, there's a lot of work that didn't have to be put into a junky monster movie but genuinely lands.
That's this film's big secret to nailing the "video game movie" model. As stupid as the concept is, and as happy as the movie is to goof off and warp itself into a pretzel to get to its own endgame, it actually works on a basic emotional narrative level. Johnson is a charisma machine, so he genuinely makes you care about Davis helping his gorilla friend and beating the stuffing out of anyone who hurts his gorilla friend.
But if you just came to watch giant monsters eat people and smack each other around? You're covered there, too.
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