Falling just shy of $100 million domestically on a $120 million budget, but ultimately making $424 million worldwide, Rampage can be considered a moderate success, and something of a critical one in that its 52% Rotten Tomatoes score is still the highest ever for a videogame-based movie. It’s also the third-highest grossing of same, just underneath The Angry Birds Movie and Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. It’s arguable that it’s more liked mainly because it’s more blandly crowd-pleasing; certainly, movies like Silent Hill and Super Mario Bros. were actually trying to do interestingly weird things with the material, where Rampage goes the most traditionally crowd-pleasing way it possibly can. Its home entertainment release in 4K (VOD now, disc July 17th) is a savvy move, as a mega-budget giant monster movie is exactly the sort of thing people want to test the limits of their new technology with. And the results? Well, we’ll get to that.
First, though, I have to give kudos to Rampage‘s extras, despite there being no commentary track. This is maybe the first time in years that the featurettes have actually persuaded me to rewatch and reassess. My initial take on Rampage, based on the ’80s arcade game in which you play as either not-King Kong, not-Godzilla, or not-giant Wolfman to smash a city–inspiring Wreck-It Ralph, which is a better movie–is that it’s fine: neither offensively bad nor genre-toppingly great. As a fan of the Transformers movies (take that for what you will) I’ve seen cities including Chicago trashed by giant things with more personality (like it or hate it, you know it’s true) than George the ape, Ralph the wolf, and Lizzie the lizard. And as much as I like Dwayne Johnson, he sometimes seems too smart for this material in a way that Mark Wahlberg never has.
Does a kaiju movie need more than that? I’d argue that Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island, and Shin Godzilla, to name the most recent such features, all take some creative left turns that keep them interesting and off-kilter, where Rampage is Transformers: Dark of the Moon with San Andreas‘ hero, Hudson Hawk‘s villains, the plane crash sequence from that Tom Cruise Mummy remake, and a set-up that mixes Life with Congo. It gets things right in making the characters broad, including Jeffrey Dean Morgan as “Good Negan,” but only gives one out of three of its monsters any kind of personality (seriously, you show us a wolf can fly and then kill it off a minute or so later?). I kept hoping that Johnson would make like Jason Statham in Crank 2 and take the chemical to become a giant monster himself, just as the original game had it. If there’s a sequel, I still hope that can happen.
But then I watched the extra featurettes. And yes, Johnson feels like a shill going on and on about how much the original arcade game was his favorite thing ever; I can easily imagine him doing the same act for almost anything. If there isn’t yet a Tooth Fairy special edition where he says the Tooth Fairy was his favorite imaginary character of all time, I’m sure there soon will be. Working for Vince McMahon greatly increases one’s ability to sell utter BS.
But then you watch Jason Liles doing the mo-cap acting for George the gorilla. And the folks at Weta showing off how they recreated the entire city of Chicago digitally so they could trash it accurately onscreen. Or even Joe Manganiello geeking out in a more honest-sounding way about the game. And if you’re me, you think, maybe I’ll give this thing another look. And you skip to specific scenes, and they rock (no pun intended, because it’s not necessarily due to Dwayne). Maybe that’s the secret–the overall plot is needless filler, but when you get straight to the money shots, they do what they need to do. I don’t necessarily have to see an entire feature of a giant gorilla giving Dwayne Johnson the finger and making dirty jokes in sign language, but in short bursts, it’s funny.
The 4K transfer showcases just how the special effects game needs to be stepped-up next, however. One of the most memorable aspects of the much-maligned Spawn movie is how the CG Violator monster had artificial film grain added to it so it would blend in better to the shots in a way that previous CG creations hadn’t, and Rampage needs the next generation of that. Its creatures are super sharp, as you can see every hair in their forearms, but particularly in the case of Ralph the wolf, they can be so sharp that they don’t quite merge with the backgrounds as they should. A scene in which George devours a significant human also shows the seams of layering in a big way, and I suspect it’s because of the higher resolution.
Deleted scenes showcase more of Jake Lacy and Malin Akerman’s evil siblings, along with Manganiello committing stone cold murder, as well as a final scene that overly emphasizes the casualties and human toll (bad idea in a monster bash movie), and what was probably intended to be a post-credits tease in which we get a hint of a new creature ready for the next installment. A gag reel features lots of swearing, but unlike, say, I Feel Pretty, it’s beeped out to keep everything in the disc at a PG-13; some of the flubs even emphasize that the movie has already used up its sole contractual f-bomb.
Rampage is a movie you’ll probably want to mostly rewatch with a fast-forward button close at hand, but that’s not necessarily a condemnation. It’s just an advisory that while you watch it for all the obvious reasons, you may well find yourself imagining how it could be improved.
