Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Skyscraper! Don't read any further if you have not seen Dwayne Johnson's homage to Die Hard yet!
With the release of Rawson Marshall Thurber's Skyscraper, audiences finally have a chance to see Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson play the everyman in a way that they have seldom seen before. The one-legged Will Sawyer is far from invulnerable, and he gets his ass kicked several times throughout the course of the film. However, there's also a lot of emotional pain that carries him through the movie, and it turns out that the scene in which Will's daughter is taken from him was thought up by The Rock himself in order to up the stakes of the film. I recently chatted with President of Production at Seven Bucks Productions, Hiram Garcia, and he explained:
I remember, there was a specific moment, which was a Dwayne moment. We were filming Rampage and as we were still kind of fleshing out the script and Skyscraper was prepping, Dwayne called up and he was like, 'We gotta have a moment where the audience sees them take her from me and they know. Oh Shit. There's nothing gonna stop him from going to get her.' You get that great scene where they kind of hit him in the back of the head and they're pulling her away and she's screaming for daddy and you just feel that heart wrench of this little girl being pulled away and you just know there's nothing on this planet gonna stop this hero from hurting these guys and getting his little girl back.
The emotional core of Skyscraper hinges on Will Sawyer's love of his family and his fight to get them out of harm's way. Most of the movie revolves around scenes in which he nearly dies while trying to save them, but while filming Rampage, it sounds like Dwayne Johnson was thinking one movie ahead to how he could make Skyscraper even more impactful. With that in mind, the wrestler-turned-actor apparently came up with that third-act twist in which the terrorists take his daughter from him, which in turn brings the entire film to its explosive climax at the top of The Pearl.
Of course, the scene went over incredibly well when they went back to watch it. I addressed the impact of the moment with Hiram Garcia, and he spoke about the nervous laughs incited by Will Sawyer's death glare at the men who have taken his daughter. Garcia explained:
When he does the slow lookup, you're like, 'Oh that's it for you buddy. It's not gonna end well for you.'
Skyscraper is now in theaters in the United States and overseas, the latter of which is proving incredibly successful. Make sure to stay tuned for more information related to all of Dwayne Johnson's upcoming projects and check our Skyscraper review and To 3D Guide if you want more information about the movie!
