SAN ANDREAS

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs  

GRADE: C +

Dwayne Johnson, Paul Giamatti, Alexandra Daddario, Carla Gugino, Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Ioan Gruffud
Screenplay by Carlton Cuse
Directed by Brad Peyton
Rated PG-13 (a great deal of peril, some of it in the Monty Python sense of the word, and mild profanity)

The '90's and early 2000's saw something of resurgence of the '70's disaster movie formula, beginning with Twister, which put a fresh spin on it by combining it with the chase genre. This lead to a couple of bad volcano based flicks, and then between Armageddon and the various films of Roland Emmerich, suddenly, if the disaster wasn't on a global scale, it wasn't big enough to care about.  And nowadays, when the world, or at least a major city, is threatened, Marvel and DC are right there with a superhero to make sure that the maximum amount of damage is done but it can still somehow be labeled a victory.

But starting with Into the Storm, 2014's crowning achievement in crap, there seems to be a move toward bringing back the more traditional entries in the genre. The good news is that San Andreas is decidedly better than that debacle. The bad news is that honestly, that's a standard that can be achieved by any Pizza Hut commercial. However, with the addition of 3D and D-BOX to the presentation (a combination I have never seen before), San Andreas is quite literally set up to be a thrill ride, and it's hard to deny that it does deliver at times, often more so as a ride than as a movie.

Dwayne Johnson stars as Ray, a Los Angeles Fire Department search and rescue helicopter pilot/He-Man who can save anyone or anything, except his marriage. Ray's wife Emma (Carla Gugino) serves the lumbering oaf with divorce papers and tells him, on their daughter's birthday, that the two of them are loadin' up the truck to move to Beverly. Hills, that is. Swimming pools and floundering, didn't quite make it movie stars (Ioan Gruffudd, filling the legal requirement that all American disaster films must feature a U.K. actor awkwardly playing an American.). Emma has a new boyfriend, who's a multi-millionaire architect who lives in a posh mansion that is big enough for him, as well as Ray's wife and daughter, as well as their ample breasts, not that I noticed, or that it was hard not to do so constantly, or that in the presentation which I attended, the distinct movement of my chair during Daddario's gratuitous bikini scene may or may not have been an effect of D-BOX.

Cut to CalTech, where Dr. Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) is a seismologist on a mission to warn California that a major quake that just hit Nevada and killed his young partner (that Asian actor from the Fast and Furious movies whose name you would think I would know by now, or at least bother looking up), was only the opening act for a series of major quakes along the San Andreas fault line that are about to level California.
 

Meanwhile, back at The Rock, Ray’s plans for spending a final weekend with Blake before she starts college in San Francisco are screwed up by the Nevada quake, so Daniel offers to fly the girl and her magnificent breasts up north on his private jet, giving him a chance to try and bond with his new stepdaughter and, if all goes well, callously leave her to die when things go bad.

When the big one hits, Emma is lunching in a highrise restaurant as the building begins crumbling around her. Giving new meaning to the term "dumb luck," Ray is aleady airborne and flying solo and just happens by (seriously) in time to plucks his wife to safety. Together, they resolve that they spent too much money on their daughter's implants to let them get destroyed in the quake and vow to track them down and save them together.

Fortunately, Blake has made friends with a young Brit engineer named Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) and his younger brother Ollie (Art Parkinson), who are there to save her when Daniel runs off to the bathroom when the T-Rex gets loose from it's paddock, leaving her alone in the car. Together, the brothers follow Blake's sizable bosom into the streets of San Francisco, where it is working on a plan to rendezvous with Ray and Emma.

The basic geological principals behind the plot are essentially loosely based in a form of reality, but in typical Hollywood fashion they are exaggerated to such extremes that it quickly loses any connection with reality, and at one point the entire state of California actually does "the wave" as if attending the football game to end all football games. The scenes become increasingly more ludicrous, but some are undeniably fun, including a sequence where Ray must race a speedboat over  the top of a tidal wave before it crests.

As an actor, Johnson does just fine with the grim determination, macho man elements, but there is far too much human drama inherent to a such a harrowing disaster, even without soap opera subplots thrown in, and when it gets more and more personal and he's called upon to feel other, deeper emotions, he chickens out and doesn't even try, opting instead to go for a vague look of intestinal discomfort. He has gotten to the point of being tolerable as an actor, even working well in the right glorified prop role, but I kept feeling that with a younger Dennis Quaid or even Sylvestor Stallone, the movie could have had a lot more emotional heft to it. Giamatti is largely reduced to 1. taking off his glasses and rubbing his face to indicate stress 2. Pounding his fist on the table to indicate urgency and 3. Looking just barely not at the camera and mentioning God (a standing "My God" as the camera does a slow push in, "May God help us" when he is looking at his Earthquake predicting program, which registers the upcoming quakes as a "kiss your ass goodbye" magnitude event, and "God be with you" as he goes on television to implore the citizens of San Francisco to get out of the city and go someplace/explains that the quake is going to spread until nowhere is safe.). Daddario is there purely for sex appeal and to give Johnson a specific goal (and she undoubtedly will provide a driving force for more than one Johnson, let me tell you right now), with Gugino playing the love interest/sidekick and being there to cry in the emotional scenes so her co-star doesn't hurt himself trying to emote. The most misused presence by far is the talented Gruffud in a thankless role as the villain in a movie that didn't need one, and the most endearing performance comes from Art Parkinson as Ollie, the little brother of Blake's unconvincing love interest. Truth be told, the only thing coming close to an emotional investment in any of these character's survival came from his natural charisma and sincerity.

The effects are undeniably good, and there is some nicely done action staging that was greatly enhanced by the 3D and D-BOX. As a fun immersive experience, this movie genuinely does deliver. But I suspect that watched on DVD at home it will lose a great deal of it's excitement level.

Overall, I have to give the movie credit for succeeding at what it's trying to do in being a diverting entertainment experience, but at the same time, a lot of that is due to the frills, and it's hard to enthusiastically recommend spending the rather inflated ticket price that comes with 3D and D-BOX together on a movie that is so disposable.