Director: Simon West
97 minutes (12) 2019
Patriot Blu-ray
[Released 23rd November]
Rating: 7/10
Review by Steven Hampton
Cinema’s first wave of CGI-candy catastrophes included Roger Donaldson’s Dante’s Peak, and Mick Jackson’s absurdly entertaining Volcano (both 1997), but this similarly themed Chinese disaster movie ups the ante of spectacular visual effects to an epic scale, with a knowing nod and a wise wink to various exemplars of its now familiar subgenre.
After the Tianhuo eruption, its Pacific island site becomes a theme park with geo-thermal power and stylised buildings, as if sci-fi capitalist futurism has conquered primal nature’s force. Professor Wentao Li (Xueqi Wang) is wary of his daughter’s involvement in the same research area that killed her mother, but headstrong scientist Meng (Hannah Quinlivan, Skyscraper), interprets tech sensor data with intuition, and conceals any raw fears. Her team’s ‘Zhuque’ system checks magma flows and gaseous emissions, and is supplied complete with handy 3D holographic displays. Resort mogul Jack Harris (British character actor Jason Isaacs, Star Trek: Discovery), is a token westerner in the picture’s main cast, and yet his performance dovetails perfectly with Asian co-stars.
“The snow is burning”
British filmmaker Simon West’s track-record as a director is patchy, with curious failures, and notable star-vehicles, but his work forms a diverse and quite interesting list, starting with prison-plane comedy-thriller Con-Air (1997), which helped establish Nicolas Cage as Hollywood action-man. Likewise, West’s adventure based upon a video-game, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), diverted Angelina Jolie’s Oscar-winning career into popular thrillers. Watchable genre remakes soon followed, including psycho-horror, When A Stranger Calls (2006), West’s successful 2011 updating of Michael Winner’s cult-worthy Charles Bronson drama, The Mechanic (1972), and then another picture starring Jason Statham, maligned unfairly by box-office failure, modern noir, Wild Card (2015), penned by William Goldman and previously filmed as Las Vegas crime drama, Heat (1986), starring Burt Reynolds.
West tried again, with British spy thriller Stratton - starring Dominic Cooper, and Antonio Banderas’ comedy-actioner Gun Shy (both 2017), before continuing his global quest for a witty re-mix that resulted in Skyfire. This glossy production harks back to the celebrated disaster movies of the 1970s, but cleverly builds upon the off-beat appeal of recent Asian movies, freshening up Hollywood clichés with cutting-edge imagery and wholly unfamiliar faces. Early scenes are busy with intros, of course, but also careful to position the heroes as central to exposition.
There’s one almost fairytale moment of romance just before the underground blows up, and from then onward it’s raining explosions, blazing landscapes, preposterous but fun scenes of rescue, with gravity-defying stunts, and deadly perils that just happen like falling off a cliff. A pair of monorail cable-cars, with escaping passengers, are endangered upon broken tracks. Eerie static charges haunt the very air, before rivers of lava surge in, wrecking the best laid plans of speculative investors, much like all those misbehaving dinosaurs that overwhelm Spielberg’s Jurassic franchise. Frantic searchers, looking for stranded survivors, soon have to contend with the localised doomsday, when this island’s model apocalypse arrives with hurricane style clouds of ash.
West brings his usual competence to journeyman action where no experimental creativity simply means we can always and easily tell what’s happening, despite the ongoing chaos. Thankfully, as tragic events are repeated, characters learn that most cyclical constants in human history are not about careers of discovery and invention, political gain, or cultural celebrity, or making mega-money for the building of empires. True tales of humanity are chiefly nothing more than a brave struggle for endurance against nature. Despite its composition from a range of recognisably international tropes, Skyfire is certainly one of those briskly paced and highly enjoyable stories.
