We had DIE HARD on a boat and DIE HARD in a bus and DIE HARD on a train and DIE HARD in a hockey stadium and a couple DIE HARDs in malls and DIE HARD on piano and DIE HARD still in a building but not as good with Anna Nicole Smith (called SKYSCRAPER) and now we have DIE HARD still in a building but not as good without Anna Nicole Smith (but still called SKYSCRAPER). Dwayne Therock-Johnson plays Will Sawyer, former FBI agent turned small time security consultant given the huge break of overseeing the opening of the residential upper half of a fictional 225 story world’s tallest building in Hong Kong.
“The Pearl” as it’s called due to a round structure at the top is owned by rich dude Zhao (Chin Han, THE DARK KNIGHT, GHOST IN THE SHELL), who we later find out is being shaken down by some tactical mastermind guy (Roland Moller, ATOMIC BLONDE) whose guerrillas infiltrate and set the building on fire. Will is outside of the building when it happens, but he gets blamed for it and must evade the police THE FUGITIVE style and figure out how the hell to get onto the building because his wife (Neve Campbell, WILD THINGS!) and twins (McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell) are on the 96th floor. (read the rest of this shit…)
Have you ever seen a sprawling, nearly 2-hour-plus epic about a gang of bank robbers in Los Angeles, the special police unit trying to bust them, the parallels between the groups that make them as bad as each other and give them a macho bond, the chance public encounters they have in neutral spaces before the robbery, and the absurdly high capacity shootouts they have in broad daylight among the public… but that is only heavily influenced by Michael Mann, not actually directed by him? Oh yeah, it sounds like you saw DEN OF THIEVES too. It was okay though, right?
