Let's Rip Off "The Towering Inferno." Basically.
Ever see The Towering Inferno? 2017’s Crystal Inferno, also known as Inferno: Skyscraper Escape wants to be The Towering Inferno so, so badly, and it doesn’t come remotely close. It doesn’t have the star power, for one thing. It’s not even a good movie on its own merits.
It all opens in Antwerp, Belgium, where a fancy new skyscraper is being built, and the building inspector is put out because the electrical system of the building is not up to par. Belgians make sure everything works properly, she says, while nasty Americans like Eric and Lucas like to cut corners. Eric’s response is to open up the service elevator shaft and accidentally-on-purpose give the inspector a little push.
Then we’re off to Paris, where American lawyer Brianna Bronson is working for Lucas and Eric’s architecture firm and climbing rock climbing walls. She misses her family but she’s keeping busy and out of trouble. On her way to a meeting she meets a guy on the street who pretends to know her and gives her a hug and so-on.
Unbeknownst to Brianna, someone is off to the side secretly taking photos. When Brianna leaves, a double comes in, and this guy lays several kisses on her while the camera is still snapping.
Six months later, the building is all finished, Brianna doesn’t work for Lucas and Eric anymore, and Brianna and her husband, Tom are on the verge of divorce because someone sent the fake photos to Tom and he thinks Brianna’s cheating on him. They’re meeting with their lawyers, funnily enough, in Eric and Lucas’s building.
Meanwhile, their kids, Anne and Ben are at home and are curiously looking at the photos from Tom’s phone because Ben is sure that the photos are fake. Once convinced, they rush off to the building where their parents are to presumably stop the divorce, and are in the elevator going up to the law firm when the gas leak happens and things start exploding. Oh, and the sprinkler systems don’t work. Imagine that.
Yep, it gets pretty crazy from there, and there’s a lot more involving that elevator shaft, plus a bit of derring-do on the part of Mom and Dad.
Ugh, this is an awful movie. It’s so bad that it could be an Asylum film, but it’s not, and anyway, Asylum films are normally way funnier. In the case of Crystal Inferno or whatever it’s called, it’s trying and failing to be a serious action movie. Not much happens, though, and we don’t care about these characters.
There’s even a tacked-on stab at romance between one of the guys in Lucas and Eric’s office and a receptionist who looks suspiciously like Gal Gadot. This guy asks her to dinner. That’s all. When all the trouble works out these two rush at each other like they’ve been dating for years.
The lameness doesn’t stop there. The acting is wooden, even from Claire Forlani, who must have been desperate for work or a paycheck or something, but she’s the one bright spot. The rest of the actors are embarrassingly bad. The first time we see the fire chief, for instance, he literally plants his feet with his hand gesticulating in the air and declares in a very flat monotone, “We must get those people out of there,” as if he’s John Kimball addressing his group of nervous kindergarteners.
Worse, there’s absolutely no logic anywhere in the story. That building inspector, for instance—why is it that no one looked for her when she went missing? Why was the building approved with so many corners cut? Why would Brianna and Tom agree to meet with the lawyers in Eric and Lucas’s building, knowing that it’s so unsafe?
And when the explosions and fire start happening, a bunch of the lawyers decide to take the elevator down to the lobby because it seems safer and quicker. Errrr…did no one train any of these people in fire safety? Apparently not. And apparently no one thought to put an emergency call button on any of these elevators, either. Fat lot of good the fire department does, as most of the firefighters stay outside the building staring up at the fire, and the ones who do go in can evidently teleport.
Then there’s Tom. Why is he so quick to believe Brianna’s cheating on him when they’ve had a good marriage up to that point? Just because some rando sends him photos that even his son can peg as fake doesn’t mean Brianna is duplicitous. Also, why did it take Ben six months to get a good look at those photos? These characters didn’t have to look so derpy but they unfortunately do.
So yeah, we’ve got a gas leak, faulty wiring, a bad sprinkler system, an explosion in a skyscraper and poor hapless souls running up and down trying to get out or something. It’s kinda like The Towering Inferno, only that Irwin Allen extravaganza was a lot more fun. The only thing Crystal Inferno has going for it is a much shorter running time.
Crystal Inferno (Inferno: Skyscraper Escape) is currently streaming on Tubi. Not rated.
My grade: F
Principal Cast: Claire Forlani, Jamie Bamber, Riley Jackson, Isaac Rouse, Nigel Barber, Anton Srebrev, Nathan Cooper, Lorina Kamburova, Delly Allen, JR Esposito, Yonko Dimitrov, Michael Fleming, Eva Ilieva, Bobo Karcharmazov, Emilia Klayn, Stefania Kocheva, Hristo Mitzkov, Radmil Nikolov
Directed by Eric Summer.
Written by Regina Luvett and Phillip J. Roth.