9. Rampage

The Rock doesn’t just fight giant monsters in this one, he fights giant monsters and has an enormous monkey for a best friend. Hard to see how it could miss.

If you’re a Gen Xer, you may remember the beloved arcade game on which ‘Rampage’ was based. They’ve added some stuff, but the story is the same – giant mutant animals fighting and smashing up a city.

In the movie, Dwayne Johnson plays a primatologist – his usual turn as a strong, silent, confident, supremely competent ex-military guy. Due to the machinations of some sort of evil biotech company, his money friend George is mutated into King-Kong proportions, along with a couple of other animals. The Rock and an attractive lady scientist must track the mutant animals to Chicago, whence the evil biotech company has summoned them, in defiance of all logic.

‘Rampage’ came out in 2018, and was directed by Brad Peyton, who you may remember from such Dwayne Johnson vehicles as ‘San Andreas’ – a reactionary disaster epic we reviewed earlier in the season – and ‘Journey 2: The Mysterious Island’ – a low-budget kid’s thriller that is honestly not worth the time it takes to watch. The Rock, in his desire to produce multiple feature films a year, has a notable fondness for directors like Peyton and Rawson Marshall Thurber. They may not bring much of an artistic perspective to the project, but they know how to produce content.