Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Targets July 17 For The Home Entertainment Launch Of Rampage

It is pretty apparent that Dwayne Johnson can star in the most insipid of films and deliver box office gold.   San Andreas, Baywatch, Hercules and a remake of Jumanji (which was actually pretty good) … it doesn’t matter, he’s gold.

The latest, director Brad Peyton’s film adaptation of the Midway Games series (something like a half-dozen versions going back three decades), Rampage, was a hit with audiences, while critics were lukewarm … audiences count, critics, well, not so much.   

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment announced this past week that Rampage will be heading home on July 17 as a four-SKU array of product offerings.  Included in the mix are a stand-alone DVD edition, a pair of Blu-ray Combo Packs — one configured as a Blu-ray/DVD presentation, while the other is a double-disc Blu-ray set featuring 2D and 3D viewing options — and a 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray Combo Pack.

The ARR is 95 days and the domestic box office haul currently comes in at $94.2 million.

The evil Energyne bio-tech company has been hard at work developing a new bio-weapon — safely at a space lab — but (naturally) things go wrong and samples of the goop end up crashing back to earth.   The weapon is actually a gene-altering concoction that causes extreme mutation (how that works out as a plausible weapon system remains to be seen).

The canisters end up in the Florida Everglades, a remote area of Wyoming and at the Wild Animal Park north of San Diego (of course, that’s not what they are calling it these days, but locals still know it by that name), where Dwayne Johnson is Davis Okoye, a Primatologist, who works with a white gorilla by the name of George.   

There are some pretty funny introductions that establish the relationship between Davis and George, which are important later in the film.   George is smart and playful.

In any case, George is exposed to the Energyne mixture and grows ten times his original size.   Meanwhile, a wolf in Wyoming is exposed and a crocodile in Florida … and the result is the same.  Giant, “rampaging” creatures of destruction who Energyne, as it turns out, can summon through sound (genetically engineered into the mutations).    

Poor Chicago, where Energyne is headquartered, as the trio of mutant monsters arrive and set about to destroy the city … the logic of beckoning the mutants is suspect, but then you wouldn’t have much of a movie if they simply saw the sights of the city and went to Cub games.

Rampage is an hour and 45 minutes worth of pure entertainment.  Johnson has fun … and George is a winner.   The film works at that level and that is all that counts.

As to bonus treasures, the featurette titled “Not a Game Anymore” is common to all home entertainment release configurations.   Exclusive to the Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD SKUs are deleted scenes, a gag reel and four additional featurettes — “Rampage: Actors in Action,” “Trio of Destruction,” “Attack on Chicago” and “Bringing George to Life.”