In a movie about 50-foot mutant animals, you shouldn’t find yourself noting implausibilities unrelated to 50-foot mutant animals. Dwayne Johnson reunites with
San Andreas director Brad Peyton for another disaster epic, this time playing Davis Okoye, a former Special Forces operative who has made a career change to studying primates in a zoo—you know, as one does. Okoye’s albino gorilla pal George is exposed to an experimental toxin—the same one that also affects a wolf and an alligator—and suddenly monstrous beasts are attacking Chicago. Rampaging, if you will. Like many 21st-century disaster movies, this one gets a little awkward as it traffics in imagery that has gone from cool to horrifying, like a skyscraper collapsing to the ground. Jeffrey Dean Morgan gets an enjoyable scenery-chewing role as a drawling government agent, and it’s finally exciting once the creatures start fighting each other rather than simply swatting down helicopters. It’s just sluggish enough of the time that you might start to focus on how Johnson’s character spends the final half hour running around with a gunshot wound to the abdomen, clutching it occasionally as if to say, “Oh yeah wait, I should be almost dead.”
By
Scott Renshaw