Skyscraper

The tallest, most wooden, most hollow character in this action is - surprise! - not The Rock (who is actually quite charismatic, always, and even in a dopey exercise like this) but the elaborately cgi-animated 'Nakatomi Plaza' that is this action movie's title-skyscraper 'The Pearl', a cloud-puncturing phallus full of stupid hi-tech with no purpose to exist except for a silly movie "house of mirrors" showdown - so, while the action movie starts strong, the minute it enters the hard-to-fathom cgi insides of The Pearl, things plummet into a void.

★★★☆☆

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Rampage

Chris Pratt, I mean, Dwayne The Rock Johnson is a dinosaur wrangler, I mean a primatologist, who has developed a special friendship with a velociraptor, I mean a gorilla, but when a mutagen is released on Earth that causes the gorilla and several other beasts to mutate into city-wrecking colossi, it takes the white-shirted hero, himself a big mutant cinematic monster, to overcome the dinosaurs, I mean, the genetically-mutated animals and the fact this B-grade Jurassic Park action blockbuster is all based on an arcade game series is unimportant except that it sort of helps to explain the movie's pair of villains, a remotely located pair of buffoons so dastardly they make Lazy Town's Robbie Rotten seem like Hannibal Lecter.

★★☆☆☆

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Baywatch (2017)

22 Jump Street showed it is possible to simultaneously send up and update a 90s tv show on the big screen, but the promise of this big screen update of David Hasselhoff's unashamedly dopey 90s tv soap lasts just ten minutes before an erection joke plunges the tone into a deep skull-against-a-rock dive off a jetty from which it can't be revived; two loooong hours later, all that has been achieved is an overlong episode of the tv show with the attempt to justify the big screen treatment consisting of waves of adolescent humour that really could have seen the movie more successfully released as Police Academy 8: Officers on Beach Patrol.

★★☆☆☆

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Central Intelligence (2016)

A refreshing change from the laugh-free Judd Apatow-style gross-out comedies that dominate cinemas, this hilarious comedy is about the coolest kid and the most bullied kid in school reuniting in adulthood to fight crime; it is refreshingly free of genital references, features terrific performances from its two fantasic leads, and as well as being frequently very funny, it is also very touching in its portrayal of a man-child still haunted by the bullying he was subjected to in high school.

★★★★☆

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