SAN ANDREAS – The Review

I’d gladly pay $12 to again watch San Francisco reduced to rubble in the exhilarating, mother-of-all-disaster movies SAN ANDREAS. Director Brad Peyton’s popcorn epic closely mirrors the films of Roland Emmerich (especially 2012 but also THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW), with the protagonists having to venture far from safety to rescue wayward loved ones caught up in the chaos. If you go simply to see the left coast get hammered by an angry bursts of unstoppable power, trust me, you won’t leave disappointed.

The recipe hasn’t changed much since the days of tasty Irwin Allen disaster meatballs like THE TOWERING INFERNO and EARTHQUAKE. In SAN ANDREAS, Dwayne Johnson plays Ray Gaines, an LA Fire Department first-responder separated from his wife Emma (Carla Gugino) after a daughter’s drowning leaves him racked with guilt. Emma is ready to move in with her wealthy architect boyfriend Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd), while daughter Blake (busty Alexandra Daddario – introduced in a black bikini) struggles to adjust to life without her father. Ray plans on spending time with Blake before she begins school in San Francisco but a major earthquake hits Nevada and his team mobilizes to respond, so Daniel flies Blake to Frisco on his private jet.  A parallel story has Paul Giamatti as Lawrence Hayes, a seismologist who predicts ‘The Big One’ and tries to warn others of the impending carnage. The quakes hit LA and SF in spectacular fashion and soon the two cities lie in ruins. Emma and Blake are both trapped but Ray quickly plucks his wife off a rooftop with his chopper and their daughter is rescued by polite young British engineer Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) and his younger brother Ollie (Art Parkinson). Those three quickly flee what’s left of San Francisco and plan to rendezvous with Blake’s parents.

Did I mention SAN ANDREAS is great fun? Only a movie critic without a sense of humor would question whether you could really fly a helicopter straight through a gauntlet of collapsing skyscrapers. Or how you could power your boat over the crest of a tsunami wave. That’s not to say SAN ANDREAS isn’t cheesy. It is, but purposely so. The screenplay by Carlton Cuse is parody without becoming too self-aware. Dwayne Johnson barks out lines like “We’re going to get our daughter!” without resorting to jokiness and winking like he’s done in other films (except when he parachutes onto the infield of a ballpark with Emma in tandem and says “It’s been a while since I got you to second base” – the film’s single big laugh). Johnson is the perfect square-jawed action star to sock this dumb stuff home and I can’t imagine another actor in this role. Carla Gugino is very good at looking worried/terrified while Alexandra Daddario (I wish she was in more earthquake movies!) is mesmerizing and has some nice chemistry with the Brit brothers. Ioan Grufford is appropriately hissable as an ill-fated weasel while Paul Giamatti is perfectly earnest as the all-knowing earthquake expert who spends most of the film in his office looking at monitors and drawing diagrams while furrowing his brow and muttering “this is not good”. But the true stars are the visual effects wizards and the main reason to see SAN ANDREAS (besides Miss Daddario’s rack) is for the gargantuan mass destruction set pieces. The Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, AT&T Ballpark, and pretty much every other nearby landmark are all annihilated in spectacular, eye-popping 3D (but not in Sensurround). CGI has gotten so photo-realistic that these sequences have great sweep and power and, in places, an almost eerie beauty. But the problem with CGI-heavy films is that the effects rapidly pall. Scene after scene of CGI bodies falling out of toppling CGI buildings and into CGI crevasses carry little emotional weight. In a film like TITANIC, we had spent time with people on the ship. When they died we grieved. We feel nothing for the cannon fodder SAN ANDREAS dispatches so callously but hey, what does it matter that millions die if it ultimately brings Dwayne Johnson and his family together for a group hug? Did I mention SAN ANDREAS is great fun?

 4 1/2 of 5 Stars