To say that “Skyscraper” kept me at the edge of my seat for the entire run of the film would be an understatement. I was fully expecting a fairly predictable Die Hard inspired action movie but nothing quite prepared me for the intensity level that the combination of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and a 225-storey building can deliver.

Synopsis: After losing his leg from a wrong call from an FBI hostage rescue several years back, Wil Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) now leads a quiet life as a small time security consultant that assesses safety and emergency measures for structures. Because of a recommendation, he gets hired by Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han), the billionaire owner of the Pearl, the tallest structure in Hong Kong standing at 225 feet with state of the art everything.. However, in the midst of his assessment, armed gunmen storm the building to force Ji to surrender confidential information. Trapped in the building is Wil’s wife Sarah (Naomi Campbell) and their two kids. Now, he must do everything to save them.

When I first saw the trailer, I was fully expecting a Die Hard/The Raid/Dredd concept because The Rock issued a caveat about trapping all of the safety and security hazards in a vertical structure. However, in the actual movie, a lot of the stuff from the trailer were edited out which gave the film quite a different flow from what was expected.

While movies like this usually result in a predictable outcome, I should say that Skyscraper really blew me away with the action and suspense. It did not involve The Rock beating up all of the bad guys. In fact, he actually gets beaten up and hurt quite a lot by the thugs. The excitement really stems from his sense of urgency as he races to save his family from danger and the fact that he was an amputee who had to leap from building to building to do so.

But wait, there’s more. He also had to risk his life by swinging on flimsy structures to get from one floor to another as a raging inferno surrounds him.

I loved the fact that The Rock is the type of hero that you can truly get behind, and that through this movie, where he plays a character that uses a prosthetic leg, he is able to show just how tough one can be, normal legs or no. I loved that they established his strong relationship with his family and the solidarity they had as a unit without being too cheesy. Props to The Rock for being super badass against the bad guys and vulnerable when it came to his on screen kids. It made me want to get adopted by him.

The character development was amazing, even of the secondary characters and I loved that everyone brought their A-game to the film, villains and heroes alike. This is one of the rare films where each character thought on their feet and that the police were smart enough to figure out straight off the bat who the real bad guys were.

It gave me a kick to see the crowd cheering for Wil Sawyer after he pulls one stunt after the other. I cussed like a sailor and held my breath each time he attempted one dangerous challenge after another. My only reassurance was that he was Dwayne Johnson after all and I had full confidence that he would survive. Whether he did or not, I will not spoil for you.

There may be some loopholes in the plot and the storytelling but I was too engrossed by the intensity of the film to actually pay attention to them. So for me, the movie deserves credit for getting the audience truly engrossed and involved in the film. And a shoutout goes to the writers for connecting everything from the beginning to the end. I noticed that all of the openings had their own closure in the end and that’s rare for a lot of blockbuster movies to focus on such details.

All in all, I would definitely recommend Skyscraper to anyone who would listen to my opinion. Its awesome and entertaining, and I haven’t really felt this way about an action film since “Olympus Has Fallen.” That’s benchmarking for you.

Kudos to director Rawson Marshall Thuber and the entire production for this great movie.