By Susan JAMES

Viewer alert: If you fall anywhere on the spectrum from “heights are not my thing” to “I get nose bleeds in two-story buildings,” maybe you want to wait to see Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in “Jumanji 2.” Because height is everything in writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber’s “Skyscraper,” a movie about tall buildings and the men who love them. If, on the other hand, you dig The Rock playing a modern day Tarzan, swinging from ropes off a 240-story vanity project called The Pearl and are fascinated by scenes filmed in the bustling back alleys of Hong Kong, head down to your local theater this weekend.

You won’t need a complicated diagram to figure out the story. All-around good guy Will Sawyer (Johnson), a former FBI agent, suffered a slight accident with a suicide bomber while responding to a domestic situation that lost him the lower part of his leg and gained him a Navy surgeon wife (Neve Campbell) and two kids. Sawyer now owns his own security systems company run out of his garage and best buddy Ben (Pablo Schreiber), also a victim of the same accident, has recommended Sawyer as the security check guy for fabulously wealthy Hong Kong entrepreneur Zhao Long Ji (Ng Chin Han).

Long Ji has built the tallest building in the world, The Pearl, and needs Sawyer’s security sign-off for insurance purposes to open the top half to buyers. Don’t ask why a Chinese billionaire would hire an American running a company out of his garage; just go with it. Nefarious plots are afoot as they always are. To ensure The Pearl’s construction, Long Ji was forced to pay protection money to three of the most violent mobs operating in Hong Kong. As both insurance and as revenge, he created a computer program that tracked the movement of the funds and discovered the names and locations of all the recipients. He now has leverage and the mobs want it destroyed. So they send in a team of crack killers under the command of Kores Botha (Roland Møller) to retrieve the information, burn down the iconic Pearl and frame Will Sawyer who, for some reason, they have decided would make the perfect patsy. The killers, of course, reckon without the skills and grit of Sawyer, prosthesis and all (move over Bruce Willis). When they take his family hostage above a sea of flaming floors, Sawyer swings into action to save them.

The relatively short running time, 102 minutes, seems longer than it is without any story to really hold our attention. There are plenty of stunts, one breathtaking jump from building crane to burning building, and lots of heart-stopping CGI, especially if you are challenged by heights, but there is never any doubt that Sawyer will save his family or that the bad guys will get torched.

Duct tape gets a lot of product placement and the casting of Hannah Quinlivan as a baby-voiced, cold-eyed killer who in real life would have trouble aiming a gun for all the hair in her eyes, is a lesson in the folly of casting models in acting roles.

Johnson isn’t asked to do anything he hasn’t done a hundred times before in better films. “Jumanji” and “The Fast and the Furious” series come to mind. But with this film sitting squarely on his shoulders, he does his best to make the action move if not actually soar. And move it does, through shattered glass, raging fountains of fire and the hard hail of bullets. But in the end, back down on the ground, as we knew from the beginning, all’s well that ends well.
See you at the movies!

  susan james