There is a moment in Skyscraper when Dwayne Johnson’s Will Sawyer stands on a crane high above Hong Kong, looking across a gap toward a burning tower. The leap he is about to attempt is absurd. It is also the sort of moment that ought to make an audience grip the armrests. The film has built an enormous machine for producing fear of heights. Its one problem is that the man at the centre of it looks built to survive the machine.
Released in 2018, Rawson Marshall Thurber’s action thriller gives Johnson a straightforward objective: get into the Pearl, a spectacularly tall skyscraper, and rescue his family from a fire and the criminals who started it. It is an efficient premise, the kind that can be explained in a sentence and understood from the back row. The building keeps getting more dangerous. Will keeps finding another way through.
When the star is bigger than the threat
Johnson’s screen presence is part of the attraction. He is reassuringly solid, capable of selling a ridiculous physical feat through sheer commitment. The trouble is that reassurance and suspense are not always friends. When Will hangs above the city, the camera tells us how far he could fall. Johnson’s familiar action-hero persona quietly tells us he will not.
That does not make the crane jump dull. The scale is dizzying, and the image of a lone figure crossing the open air has an immediate, almost cartoonish clarity. But the thrill is closer to watching someone complete an impossible stunt than fearing that a particular person might not make it. Once the film has established that rhythm, every new obstacle has to be taller, hotter or more elaborate than the last.
It is an unusual predicament for a disaster movie. The Pearl is designed to dwarf everyone inside it, yet the film’s star seems to grow with each challenge. The building can threaten his route. It rarely seems able to threaten his certainty.
Will Sawyer has a history the film could have used more
Will is not introduced as an invulnerable superhero. A failed FBI hostage rescue has cost him his left leg below the knee; years later, he works as a security consultant and wears a prosthesis. That history gives him experience, a changed life and a reason to understand what a rescue can cost. In a 2018 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Thurber explained that he wanted Johnson to solve problems through thought rather than simply overpowering them. It also distinguishes him from the effortless action figures Johnson has played elsewhere.
At its best, Skyscraper makes the prosthesis part of Will’s practical ingenuity. It can alter the mechanics of a fight or become an unexpected tool when the usual options run out. The film does not need to turn his disability into a lesson or make him helpless to create suspense. It could simply allow more of his plans to fail, more of his decisions to carry consequences and more of his physical effort to register as effort.
Instead, the story often treats each difficulty as the setup for an ingenious solution. Will is wounded and exhausted, but the pace rarely lets those conditions accumulate. The next problem arrives before the last one has changed him. His vulnerability is in the script; his invincibility is in the rhythm.
The film finds real stakes when it looks away from him
The more convincing danger belongs to Will’s family. Sarah, played by Neve Campbell, is not simply waiting for a rescue. She makes decisions, protects the children and uses her own knowledge to navigate the crisis. Campbell gives the film a grounded counterweight to Johnson’s near-mythic determination. The children, meanwhile, make the fire feel less like an elaborate stunt course and more like an emergency.
These scenes reveal the movie’s strongest idea: Will cannot be everywhere at once. He can calculate a route through the tower, but he cannot control what happens to the people he loves while he is elsewhere. That is a more human source of suspense than another few hundred feet of empty air.
The film sometimes undercuts that idea by hurrying back to the next feat of strength. It wants Will to be a worried husband and father, but it also wants every shot of him to announce a hero who can solve anything. Johnson plays the concern sincerely. The filmmaking does not always give that concern room to become doubt.
A spectacular building with nowhere to hide
The Pearl is a terrific action-movie invention: a vertical city of glass, gardens, security systems and impossible views. Industrial Light & Magic’s account of its visual-effects work describes building the digital tower and its fire to evoke scale, vertigo and danger. It is both the setting and the film’s most expensive-looking antagonist. As the fire spreads, familiar spaces become traps, and the distance between two rooms can suddenly seem insurmountable.
Thurber and cinematographer Robert Elswit understand the value of looking down. A shot of Will clinging to the building’s exterior can make the ground feel horribly distant. The film is also unashamed of its more extravagant ideas, including a high-tech hall of mirrors that turns the climax into a visual puzzle. These are pleasures worth defending. An action film does not have to obey ordinary physics to be exciting.
What it does need is a sense that the next decision matters. The best sequences briefly restore that feeling by making us follow Will’s problem-solving step by step. Duct tape, a narrow ledge or a door about to close becomes interesting because we can see the limited options. The weaker moments simply ask us to admire the next impossible thing he can do.
Why the Die Hard comparison keeps returning
The comparison is unavoidable: a lone man enters a skyscraper occupied by criminals to save his family. But the useful distinction is not that Skyscraper borrows a familiar setup. It is how the films ask us to relate to their heroes. John McClane’s discomfort is part of the entertainment in Die Hard. He hurts, complains, improvises badly and sometimes seems genuinely outmatched. His survival feels like a series of narrow escapes.
Will Sawyer is earnest and resourceful, but the film seldom allows him the same messy uncertainty. He is more often a solution arriving at speed. That choice suits Johnson’s star image and makes for clean, crowd-pleasing spectacle. It also reduces the gap between what we hope will happen and what we expect will happen. Suspense lives in that gap.
There is room for both approaches. Not every action film needs a battered, sarcastic underdog. But when a movie builds its entire premise around a man facing impossible danger, the audience needs at least a moment when impossible looks like it might mean impossible.
Enjoy the leap. Question the landing.
Skyscraper remains easy to enjoy as a big, sincere piece of summer escapism. Johnson commits to the family-rescue story, Campbell brings welcome capability to Sarah, and the tower produces images that are memorable precisely because they are so excessive. The crane jump still works as spectacle.
What the film never quite solves is the difference between showing danger and making us feel it. The Pearl can burn, collapse and loom over Hong Kong, but its hero rarely seems to be running out of answers. The Skyscraper production archive explores how the tower’s design and effects turn that height into an action setting. The movie keeps raising the stakes in metres. A little more uncertainty about Will Sawyer would have raised them far higher.