#Skyscraper movie jump tv

That’s just enough for a couple hours of fairly mindless entertainment.īut should we ask for more? Maybe. So any surprise or intrigue comes from just seeing how our mighty protagonist will get himself out of this scrape. The big difference between this kind of video game movie and an actual video game is that you’re not playing it - you’re just passively consuming it, and you know how it will end before it gets going. But it’s not a particularly creative thing, either. And just like in a game, elements that will help the hero are seeded early on, placed strategically so that you’ll forget they’re there right before the hero needs them. It’s not a movie based on a video game (those are pretty much always bad), but one that takes the basic form of a simple video game, in which you play as the hero and are presented with an objective and a set of challenges, including a boss fight at the end.Įvery challenge is overcome, but then the hero is presented with a new twist or challenge. It’s also another example of what I think of as a “video game” movie. “They didn’t.Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark

“The first thing I did was I asked Rawson, ‘Do you guys have a police consultant?’ I thought they did,” Mann says. This mainly manifested in the bilingual dialogue, where Cantonese and English are often spoken in the same breath. While brought on as an actor, a conversation with Thurber led to Mann stepping up as one of three cultural consultants for the film to ensure an accurate portrayal of the Hong Kong police. “These comparisons are not accidental.”īut, Mann had an even more crucial role behind the scenes. “ said, ‘I would love to fashion your role after Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive,” Mann recalls.

While enjoying a coffee in New York City - a town with skyscrapers that can’t match the towering heights of the fictional building in Skyscraper - Mann tells Inverse that he plays “a grizzled veteran cop who’s seen it all.” It’s a common character type for action movies, and Mann is quick to acknowledge the trope, explaining that director Rawson Thurber deliberately looked to characters like Reginald VelJohnson’s “Sgt. His only real ally on the ground is Wu, a cop who monitors the crazy situation. Hitting theaters on July 13, Skyscraper follows Will Sawyer, a veteran amputee who climbs a towering inferno in Hong Kong to reunite with his family.

#Skyscraper movie jump tv

But that’s exactly how the filmmakers of Skyscraper approached one particular aspect of the blockbuster: the bilingual dialogue of the modern Hong Kong police department.īyron Mann, a prominent Hong Kong actor in Hollywood whose credits include 1994’s Street Fighter (he was Ryu!) and TV shows like The Expanse, Hell on Wheels, and Arrow, stars in Skyscraper as Inspector Wu. In an action movie where Dwayne Johnson climbs and conquers a mile-high megastructure, heroically making impossible leaps across vast distances, it’s easy to think “authenticity” isn’t the name of the game.