Metacritic reviews

Per usual, Johnson is the key cog of a movie built for his physical presence, but it's the relationship between Davis and George that fuels the plot, even when everything around them gets convoluted and haphazard.

Morgan's performance is a gem of comic timing and audience-directed winks. He elevates a movie that’s mostly about watching stuff get stomped down.

Rampage won’t set the world on fire (our world, at least; it sets plenty of its world on fire when George and his two giant pals arrive in Chicago), but it does exactly what it says on the tin: It’s a big, goofy romp about creatures who lay waste to a major American city while the Rock cracks jokes in a light brown shirt.

Ridiculous, of course, but not as ridiculous as it might have been. As much fun as it has with the idea of animals stomping cities to rubble, it seems shy of going completely over the top, and it’s the poorer for it.

It is entertainingly over the top, although perhaps the CGI work isn’t quite out of the top drawer.

Rampage doesn’t really offer much of anything new as a giant monster movie, a video game adaptation, or a Dwayne Johnson vehicle, but it still checks all the boxes expected from it, offering one just enough entertainment value to not make you completely hate it.

It never makes up its mind whether it wants to be a what-hath-science-wrought disaster movie like those old John Sayles cheapie classics Piranha and Alligator, or just a big, dumb, and loud tongue-in-cheek action comedy. It’s a movie that’s afraid to pick a lane.

Rampage is a movie that gets buried in its own top-heavy plot, collapsing itself under that weight just like the Chicago-area buildings do on screen.

What does Rampage have? No satisfying action beats, no memorable images, and so little to say that it’s virtually impossible to say anything about it in return. It’s not a movie for critics, that much is clear. The problem is that it’s not for anyone else, either.

You know what might make an intriguing, revealing movie? The story of how, over 30 years after its debut, a relatively innocent arcade game starring a giant ape and other oversize beasts underwent a corporate transmogrification and became a turgid, logy sci-fi/action blockbuster.