Rampage review: Impressive special effects but with a half-witted script

Written and directed by Mike Judge and released with little fanfare in 2006, it is about a librarian who gets cryogenically frozen and wakes up 500 years in the future to discover an America ruled by morons.

The hospital is called St God’s, execution is by demolition derby and the crops are dying because they are being watered with an energy drink.

These innovations are the brainchild of the president, a former wrestler called Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.

I’ve been thinking about Idiocracy a lot over the past couple of years, (usually whenever I come across Trump’s Twitter feed) and it popped into my head again last week when reading about another former wrestler called Dwayne.

This is, of course, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, former WWE champion, highest paid actor in the world and, if his pre-release interviews are to be believed, the next president of the United States. The likeable Johnson wouldn’t be the most unlikely figure to have led the free world but his new film Rampage isn’t the best way to launch an election campaign.

A few decades ago this monster movie would have been a B-flick made for a few dollars with a handful of Plasticine to be shown before the main feature.

In 2018 it’s an £85million blockbuster that boasts Oscar-nominee Naomie Harris in a supporting role.

The special effects are impressive but the half-witted script could have been knocked out in an afternoon. Johnson plays Davis Okoye, a black-opsspecial-forces-operative-turnedprimatologist (it could happen).

This beefed-up David Attenborough looks after San Diego Wildlife Sanctuary’s gorillas but has become close to a wisecracking albino silverback called George. Davis rescued the ape from poachers when he was a little CGI cutie, taught him sign language and the art of the juvenile joke.

But their friendship hits a rough patch when George is blasted with a growth and aggression-boosting green gas. This is a “weaponised” serum that was somehow cooked up in the International Space Station on the orders of moronic tech billionaires Claire and Brett Wyden (Malin Åkerman and Jake Lacy.)

After a big explosion, three canisters crash-land on Earth and by an extraordinary coincidence each lands on American soil right next to the nostrils of one of Earth’s most fearsome predators. As George experiences growing pains in San Diego, a giant wolf is scoffing soldiers in Wyoming and a crocodile is growing to the size of a blue whale in the swamps of Florida.

The Wydens are clearly in big trouble but Claire has a not so cunning plan. She’ll set up an ultrasonic beacon on the roof of her Chicago office that will make the monsters even angrier, send them rampaging through one of America’s most populous cities and draw them right to the scene of the crime.

It’s here that the film betrays its video game origins. Director Brad Peyton (who made the equally thickheaded San Andreas) cooks up a string of ridiculously entertaining action sequences.

Skyscrapers are crushed, fighter planes are swatted away and boats are tossed about like rubber ducks. Amid the mayhem we also get a perfectly judged turn from Jeffrey Dean Morgan as a shadowy CIA fixer. Smartly realising there’s little point trying to deliver this guff with a straight face, he goes for a hammy Southern drawl and a knowing wink.

“When science ****s the bed, I am the guy they call to change the sheets,” he explains, with perfect comic timing. Naomie Harris has less room for manoeuvre in a rote role as a rogue scientist and love interest but she delivers the appropriate worried look in the right places.

Meanwhile it’s business as usual for our ambitious leading man. As the monsters trash downtown Chicago, the primatologist calmly switches to action mode.

We already know Davis prefers animals to humans (he’s been traumatised by Eye-raq), but it’s still disconcerting to see how calmly he takes the death of thousands of his fellow citizens.

Perhaps, he’ll make a great president after all.