Movie Review: Rampage

Bacon cheese burgers.

When you see it on the menu you know you want it. But you also know you shouldn’t have it. You scan the menu. Salad? Yeah, right. Pasta dish? Ummmm, maybe. But you keep coming back to that BCB.

You’re still not decided when the waiter asks for your order, but your mouth opens and, “The bacon cheese burger,” comes out — much easier and less fattening than it will go in.

[pullquote]Rampage is the cinematic equivalent of a bacon cheese burger. There’s nothing good for you in there, but man is it fun.[/pullquote]

As someone who basically sees every movie in the guilty pleasure genre, this one was better than most. The characters were just a little more idiosyncratic than what is typical in this genre and the story didn’t go overboard trying to force feed the audience into believing this could actually happen. Best of all there were a handful of good hearty laughs that got the whole audience going. Credit has to be given to The Rock. When he throws out a humorous line it lands squarely.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, as Harvey (Agent) Russell, was an unexpectedly fun and original character. That sort of role is usually played much more seriously, but the writers created something fresh and fun for him and he played it perfectly.

It was interesting that the movie opened with a little on screen exposition about CRISPR. If you haven’t heard of it before then just wait. It will be big news soon. The good news is that CRISPR doesn’t work like that, except… Yeah, it does sort of work like that. It is essentially a word processor for gene editing.

Grade: B

Book description: Not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about its use. Not, that is, until the spring of 2015, when biologist Jennifer Doudna called for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new gene-editing tool CRISPR—a revolutionary new technology that she helped create—to make heritable changes in human embryos.