J. Michael Shearer's Way Late Movie Reviews: RAMPAGE

Well, maybe not so late this time...

You know, as weird as it feels to type this, I gotta say, this may be the best video game movie out there right now. It's certainly the best one I've ever seen, and given the natures of the other two I can recall having seen, it's really not that high a bar. I'll get into that at the end of the review, though.

To begin with, however, I should probably talk about the video game this movie is at least loosely based on. The video game RAMPAGE is basically one in which the player is given a choice of two or three characters and turned loose on the world to smash the hell out of major regional cities around the US or world, depending on the version of the game one is playing. You know, like you do when you're basically playing a Kaiju.

Spoilers from here on, so for those who want to avoid them, I'd say this movie's worth a look if you're into action movies. Just don't pay full price if you can avoid it.

Since that's about the size of the game, I'd say the folks at New Line Cinema did the best thing they could by making this an action movie. The movie starts on an exploding space station where some crazy genetic research was going on. It seems there was this private contractor who had put the station up there so they could create their stuff, and when they used their product on a rat, it got loose and pretty much nuked the place, leaving one scientist left alive, who just barely gets off the station before her escape pod crashes too, causing their muto-virus to get loose into three environments back on Earth.

Planetside, we meet Davis Okoye, a primatologist working in San Deigo and his albino gorilla friend George, who will be one of the three Kaiju we could have played in the game. Davis and George are pretty much our heroes. Overnight, a cainster of the muto-virus from the space station lands in George's enclosure and infects him, and only him, oddly enough, considering that there were other gorillas in the enclosure with him at the time. No word on what happened to the other gorillas, considering that it's established pretty much right here that one of the effects this virus has is that it makes those infected with it go nuts and kill just about everything in their general area, in addition to giving them super advantages in things like size, speed and strenght plus regenerative abilities that would make Doctor Who piss himself. Or herself, with this latest regeneration.

Two other canisters of the virus come down and break open as well, infecting a wolf, later named Ralph, though I could have sworn his name was Wolfie, and an alligator, not named in the film, but if memory serves, she was called Lizzie in the games. Ralph starts out in Wyoming and Lizzie starts out in Florida and goes undetected for most of the movie, as she's actually my second favorite character in the game after Ralph/Wolfie, though I usually played George in the copy of the game I owned when I was a kid.

While Davis and a geneticist named Kate work on trying to keep George under control, the heads of the company responsible for the virus send a paramilitary group after Ralph. The head folks are a brother and sister named Brett and Claire Wyden, who are pretty much unnecessary characters in this movie but still get what they've got coming by the end. Their mercenary team gets literally eaten alive by Ralph, which means Brett and Claire, or really just Claire, really, activates Plan B, which is a giant radio tower on top of their headquarters, which is meant to summon our three Kaiju, causing them to converge on the place, in downtown Chicago. Now, there's a couple things that the gamer and Internet geek in me is kind of disappointed about not seeing here. One is that there was no giant bee monster that attacked when the radio tower started broadcasting. The other was no surprise cameo by Doug Walker, AKA the Internet's Nostalgia Critic, considering that he's based out of the Windy City. Maybe when I'm done with this, I'll have to see if there's a Nostalgia Critic review of this one.

When our heroes, along with their government agent pal Russell, get to Chicago, the one thing I had really hoped to get out of this movie started happening: giant monsters trashing a city! After all, that is the very escence of what the Rampage games are about, giant monsters smashing the shit out of cities. The military's there, too, for all the good they are. But at least they do have a purpose in that they provide the time limit for Davis and Kate to stop the signal that's making George, Ralph and Lizzie trash the city and maybe give them the counteragent that at least stops the Kaiju from getting bigger and being all crazy, because ther's an airstrike a half hour out, and if our heroes can't fix things before then, the Air Force is gong to drop a few MOABs on the city.

As I said at the top of the review, George is one of our heroes, so he's the only one who actually gets a dose of the counteragent. I'm not quite sure how, since it all happened kinda fast, but I'm assuming it was when he ate Claire, which is a take on one of my favorite mechanics in the games, as eating people is one of the ways to restore your health. It takes awhile for the counteragent to take effect, though, and the headquarters comes down before then. I would think this is when Ralph dies, sadly, but it happened kind of quick. I'm just assuming here because we don't see him after that.

There's a bigger fight with Lizzie, which kind of makes up for her lack of screentime before the third act. While George, now in his right mind, pounds away on the giant reptile, Davis uses conventional weapons to help. Eventually, George gets the upper hand and takes out Lizzie with the flag pole he got impailed on during the fight. Not long after, it seems that the strain was too much for George as well.

With the fight over, Russell manages to convince the head military guy to call off the air strike. As Davis and Kate look over the damage while the military helps evac survivors, we find that George isn't dead after all, and that kind of bothers me. I've seen movies where sequels were nice or even necessary things, but this is not one of them. While I think this was a damn good video game movie, for a change, I also think there only needs to be one of it.

My final thoughts on RAMPAGE are that I'm glad I went to see it because it's probably the best straight-up video game movie I've ever personally seen. At the same time, I'm glad I waited until it was in my local second-run theater so I could see it for what ammounted to only $15 instead of whatever regular ticket price plus goodies might have been, because I think the only benefit would have been popcorn that didn't suck, whereas I think I might have felt I overpaid had I seen it in first-run theaters.

Now, as for how it compares to the other video game adaptation movies I've seen, this is the best of only three that I can recall that I'm using for comparison. The other two are the live-action Super Mario Brothers movie from 1993 and the unfortunately ill-fated Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within from 2001.

The problem with Super Mario Bothers is that it simultaneously took itself too seriously and not seriously enough to work in any appreciable way. It was certainly like the games and it had talented people in it (Bob Hoskins, Dennis Hopper, John Leguiziamo before he was famous), but they went about it all wrong. If they'd made it like the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, which was a silly for-kids thing starring “Captain Lou” Albiano and Danny Welles as the title characters, it might have worked. It wouldn't have aged any better, but it might have worked.

On the other hand, Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within was not a bad movie, all things considered. It was actually pretty good, for the most part, especially for an all-CGI movie in 2001. It was just not the sort of thing Final Fantasy fans like myself were expecting to see when we went into the theaters, and I honestly don't know who else they could have been trying to market to by putting the words “Final Fantasy” in the title. Sure, there was the crazy human villain, the mystical MacGuffins that had to be all gathered up and a scary demonlike final boss in this movie. And they even had the guy named Cid in there for good measure. But for as good a movie as it was in the end, it lacked that certain something fans of the games had come to expect. There's more to be said about that, I'm sure, but I don't really have the space for it here.

I do know there are other video game movies out there that people might be inclined to ask me about, so I'll just make a few quick notes on them here. I know, for example, that there are a few Tomb Raider movies out there, but I've never seen them, nor do I have any real desire to do so. I also know that there's at least one Final Fantasy movie based on Final Fantasy VII, called Advent Children. I'm pretty sure I have a copy of it someplace in my apartment, just like I'm pretty sure I've got a copy of The Spirits Within on VHS somewhere in here, but I haven't thought about trying to watch either of them in years. Maybe one day I'll dig those up and do reviews of them as well.

And then there's Wreck-It Ralph, which I reviewed here several years ago. I don't really count that one because, to me, it's only video game related, merely about video games, in general. A good movie, but not the kind of video game movie I'm talking about here.

But, as far as RAMPAGE goes, I'd say 3.5 stars out of 5. I would like to have seen a little more of the monsters fighting and destroying things, but given what the producers had to work with, I think they actually made the best movie they could have out of the source material. Plus, I don't know how Dwane “The Rock” Johnson was as a professional wrestler, but he's a pretty good actor. I'd say this is definitely a video game action movie worth checking out.