Two decades ago, this is the type of movie that would have cost $100 million and been backed by one of the major studios. Beyond Skyline reportedly cost an extra $5 million compared to the original, and writer/director Liam O’Donnell has certainly inherited the Strause Brothers’ knack for visual bombast on a dime store budget. Whether it’s Frank Grillo’s detective partner striding toward a giant, Cthulhu-like alien warrior and calling it a “puta” while cocking his shotgun, or Grillo swinging on cables through the massive interior of a spaceship in a desperate attempt to save his son from being lobotomized by alien forces, Beyond Skyline rarely pauses for the viewer to collect their breath before hurtling them towards the next setpiece. At 105 minutes, Beyond Skyline could have likely shaved off fifteen of those and been one of the most fleet-footed and fast-paced Direct to Video movies of all time, but as it stands the film is still entirely about one thing: action. Yes, this is one of those sequels that takes place contemporaneously with its prequel, sort of like Bourne Legacy and Bourne Ultimatum.Īs hundreds of Los Angeles citizens are vacuumed off the street and into the hovering alien mothership above, Beyond Skyline quickly shifts into disaster movie mode – and rarely takes its foot off the gas. Before you’re worried that this sequel is about to turn into a rehash of the dysfunctional father/son dynamic at the heart of A Good Day to Die Hard, an eerie blue light signals the arrival of the very same spaceships we saw in the original Skyline. cop saddled with a rebellious teenage son (who looks way too old to portray a teenager). You might think that an alien invasion film would be outside of the tough guy actor’s usual repertoire, but the opening of Beyond Skyline finds Grillo in a comfortable mode: playing a gruff, no nonsense L.A. Grillo is an actor who has spent the last several years building his genre movie cred, appearing as the villainous Crossbones in Marvel Studios’ Captain America movies, serving as the face of Blumhouse’s surprisingly popular Purge flicks, and more recently headlining the excellent Netflix crime thriller The Wheelman. Sure, some of that initial excitement may have diminished slightly considering that in the two years we’ve been waiting for Beyond Skyline see a release (filming was completed in May of 2015), the Indonesian martial arts duo made a cameo in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Uwais himself headlined the Mo Brothers’ Headshot. But there’s no denying that, even in 2018, Beyond Skyline still represents the action icons’ biggest starring roles in an English-language movie.īefore anyone gets the idea that Beyond Skyline is Iko Uwais’ debut Hollywood vehicle a la Jackie Chan in The Protector, it must be said that the lead of the film is definitively Frank Grillo. Granted, on its own a sequel to Skyline wouldn’t typically be the cause for much internet buzz – the movie maintains a 4.4 average user rating on IMDB – but martial arts buffs sure paid attention after the surprise announcement in November 2014 that Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian had been cast in one of their first English-language productions since achieving international stardom with 2012’s The Raidand 2014’s The Raid 2. Now, almost a decade later, Beyond Skyline represents Liam O’Donnell’s chance to slide into the director’s chair (the Strause Brothers remain onboard as producers) and prove he can deliver a coherent and entertaining science-fiction film when allowed creative control, potentially remedying the inconsistencies of the original Skyline in the process. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the siblings were almost solely concerned with Skyline‘s visuals, as screenwriter Liam O’Donnell has candidly stated in more recent interviews – claiming the duo were unconcerned with tossing out crucial pages of the script if it meant they could save some cash or get to the next plot point a little faster, much to Liam’s chagrin. The Los Angeles-set alien invasion thriller was primarily designed as a way for directors the Brothers Strause to display their uncanny knack for stretching a dollar to deliver digital spectacle on the cheap an ability they’d honed over the years working in the FX business and helming movies like (the universally panned) Alien vs. Despite a drubbing from the critics, the original film proved a financial success way back in 2010 – but that box office profit had more to do with its modest budget of $10 million rather than any goodwill it generated among science-fiction fans. The idea of producing a sequel to Skyline was initially met with a healthy amount of skepticism, and perhaps for good reason. Cast: Frank Grillo, Bojana Novakovic, Callan Mulvey, Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian, Lindsey Morgan, Betty Gabriel, Antonio Fargas, Samantha Jean
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