Voices: Dwayne Johnson, Neve Campbell, Chin Han, Roland Moller, Noah Taylor, Byron Mann, Pablo Schreiber Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber PART “Towering Inferno,” part “Die Hard,” and part test to see how much a physics-literate viewer can take before his or her head explodes, Rawson Marshall Thurber’s “Skyscraper” is one of the most idiotic action movies to come down the pike in some time. It’s also a lot of fun if you’re willing to go with it. The performer now known as Dwayne Johnson brings more earnestness than wit to this performance. Johnson plays Will Sawyer, a former special-ops guy who, since a decade-old tragedy that cost him half of one leg, has stayed behind a desk. Now working as a high-level security consultant, Sawyer has landed a peach of a gig: He’s vetting all the safety and security systems on the Pearl, a Hong Kong skyscraper that is the world’s tallest, three times the height of the Empire State Building. The Pearl is a curvy, biomorphic thing, with a 30-story park in its interior and a mysterious sphere cradled up top. The building’s billionaire owner, Zhao (Chin Han), brags that the vast array of high-def monitors inside that sphere makes it the Eighth Wonder of the World, which really only means that he needs to leave his skyscraper more often. Zhao has an enemy whose crew steals control of all the Pearl’s systems and nearly kills Sawyer while he’s away from the building. Sawyer’s wife (Neve Campbell, playing a military surgeon) and twin kids are still high up in the tower, though, when the bad guys start a massive fire on the 95th floor and shut down all those precious safety systems, locking down the building’s entranceways and exits. If you think you can keep “The Rock” out of a flaming skyscraper while his wife and kids are inside, you’re welcome to try. But do yourself a favor and make sure there aren’t any giant construction cranes nearby. In the first of many guffaw-worthy daredevil sequences, Sawyer scales a crane’s exterior, uses its hook to smash a hole in an upper floor of the Pearl and takes a running leap from the crane into that hole. It’s possible that no other film has made such frequent use of the device in which a character falls from something very tall but catches himself at the last possible moment in a completely impossible way. Sawyer is barely inside that hole in the building before he’s finding far-fetched reasons to go back to its exterior. Inside the building, Campbell’s Sarah Sawyer isn’t exactly a helpless damsel. Up in the 220th-floor penthouse, Zhao has locked himself in a titanium-walled safe room, and the men who want him out decide they can get Sawyer to help open the room by taking his kids hostage. With no real personalities to play against on the villains’ side, the film’s human-on-human (as opposed to human-on-the-laws-of-physics) action is more ordinary than it might have been. But it’s gratifying to see Johnson play Unstoppable Dad, even in such a setting. The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen. (SD-Agencies) | 