Skyscraper has Anna Nicole Smith as a helicopter taxi pilot that gets a job from some baddies that are trying to get some top secret weaponry. When their deal goes bad, they need to take over the skyscraper they're in. The one thing they didn't count on: that the scrappy helicopter pilot that flew them there would be the fly in their ointment.
This is pure PM Entertainment goodness. In the opening 15 minutes, we have Malibu from American Gladiators wearing only the vest and pants of a three-piece suit while spraying a bunch of guys with an uzi, who then try to escape by backing their car out of the alley they're all in, leading to them crashing through a Bud Dry truck and causing an explosion. Re-read that run-on sentence again. Is that not the most amazing thing ever? Give me that all day. Now this is a bit more Skin-a-max than your usual PM flick, as they tried to take advantage of Anna Nicole Smith by giving her a couple sex scenes that show off her assets, and which I think makes this a bit harder of a sell for a bad movie night, depending on your audience; but if you're looking for a fun PM Entertainment actioner that you can stream on most services, this does the trick about as well as any of them.
While I was on hiatus Dolph, Seagal, and Van Damme had been very busy, not to mention Scott Adkins, Michael Jai White et al., so when I came back, I felt like I needed to catch up on all that stuff and get it reviewed, which meant movies like this were getting lost in the shuffle. After seeing Skyscraper, I realize what a mistake that was. They don't make movies like this anymore. They wish they did. They think they do. The fact that they made a movie with The Rock that has the same name as this tells me that they think they're better than this. They're not. What should have happened was, this should have been released in the theater, and instead of making Skyscraper, The Rock should have made another Fast and Furious spin-off, this one called Hobbs and Hartley, where Bob Newhart reprises his role from The Bob Newhart show, Dr. Bob Hartley, and he and The Rock have to save the world from a ruthless super criminal, played by Kelsey Grammer. That was a round-about long-winded way of saying I'm going to put more of a priority on these older movies.
You're probably waiting for me to go for the low-hanging fruit of making fun of Anna Nicole Smith's acting in this. It's not going to happen, in part because she's no longer with us, but also in part because no one cares about anyone's acting chops in a PM Entertainment flick! Part of what makes PM Entertainment so great is that they can do a film with Anna Nicole Smith in it and make it so great that we can love it unironically. I mean, if you want to look at models in action movies, this is definitely superior to Cindy Crawford's Fair Game with William Baldwin. And I don't think this is good in spite of Anna Nicole Smith either--in fact, I think the need to shoehorn in two gratuitous sex scenes to take advantage of Anna Nicole Smith's Playboy past wasn't necessary for this movie to work, but rather detracted a bit, because, again, it loses something in a bad movie screening if you can't show those scenes.
PM Entertainment is not the only DTVC Hall of Famer attached to this film. Art Camacho did stunt work in this, which makes this the 40th film on the DTVC that he's been involved with in some way--40 that we know of, because I often go back and find his name attached to something we've reviewed before that I missed. Either way, the 40 Club is very exclusive at the DTVC, as he's now only the fourth member, along with Dolph Lundgren, Gary Daniels, and Albert Pyun. The reality is, I thought this was only his 39th movie, and I had a film that he directed to be his real induction into the 40 Club, but before I wrote this review, I discovered that I hadn't tagged him for his fight choreography on T-Force, which bumped this up to number 40--and like I said, who knows if he hasn't been in the 40 Club long before this and I just haven't caught up to tagging it yet.
This movie brings up a real ethical issue surrounding the exploding helicopter trope in movies: how often are the helicopter pilots baddies themselves, and how often are they independent contractors like Anna Nicole Smith was here? How heroic does that make our hero then when he blows them up? I went back through some of the more famous ones, and more often than not they don't seem like contractors, but rather part of the gang, and I guess if you have the resources that some of these criminal enterprises have, finding a baddie pilot who can handle that part of the operation doesn't seem too far beyond the pale, so maybe it's Skyscraper that's the outlier. A gang that has guys dressed like Malibu here maybe look great, but probably don't cross all their Ts and dot all their Is, which leaves them in a situation where they need to contract out something that would have been better handled in-house.
I guess that's as good a note as any to wrap this up on. You can currently stream this on Prime and Tubi. If you haven't seen this before--like I hadn't--there's no excuse to not get it taken care of. This is pure PM Entertainment gold, and well worth your time.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114467/
Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/
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