Skyfire – Review

Building a resort and theme park on an active volcano: what could go wrong? Well, I mean apart from that one very obvious thing that could easily, and in fact, almost certainly will go wrong. What else could possibly happen?That’s the attitude of Jason Isaacs’ character in Skyfire, a John Hammond-like businessman, full of hubris, who – in his Western arrogance – refuses to listen to any of the brave, noble and intelligent Chinese scientists (this is, of course, a Chinese production) who keep trying to point out the bleedin’ obvious to him, until it’s too late.

In fact, the early parts of Skyfire don’t just settle for resembling the Jurassic Park films in plot, theme and structure – the volcano park looks almost identical to the one in Jurassic World. To be even more precise, it looks a lot like a park that one might build in the park-building game, Jurassic World: Evolution. About 90% of the film was shot on a greenscreen – one can view a highlight reel playing over the end credits – and while the result is a very obviously artificial world with which characters barely interact, it somehow carries its own, videogamey charm to it.

Chinese cinema has, for a decade or so now, been trying its best, with films like this and The Meg and The Wandering Earth, to recreate the sort of brainless, effects-heavy, cheesy disaster blockbusters that ruled Hollywood in the 90s and 00s. Skyfire might be their best attempt yet; films of this type are usually two hours-plus, in contrast to Skyfire‘s breezy 90 minutes, and waste whole reels of film on characterisations and backstories for cardboard cut-out characters. Ordinarily, volcanoes go off over the course of hours, perhaps days, as the film acknowledges early on. But this one is no ordinary volcano and so, just as we’re trying to get invested in the perfunctory love story, bam! Off the volcano goes, there’s lava everywhere, and the remaining runtime is spent in imaginative, if highly implausible, disaster scenarios. Some of them are borrowed from from Jurassic Park, Jurassic World and, for good measure, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, while the inevitable car-chase-against-the-lava comes from Volcano. Or was it Dante’s Peak? There’s even a shot plagiarised wholesale from, of all places, The Shape of Water.

Simon West, specialist in such switch-off-brain-and-crack-a-beer action joys as Con Air and The Expendables 2, follows fellow reliable action journeymen Jon Turteltaub (3 Ninjas, National Treasure, The Meg) and Renny Harlin (Die Harder, Deep Blue Sea, Legend of the Ancient Sword) in taking his skills where the yuan is. His two-picture contract includes the forthcoming The Legend Hunters, based on a Chinese bestseller series very much in the vein of West’s own Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. On the basis of that and this, it should be another Saturday night action gem.