Director: Brad Peyton.
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Ioan Gruffudd, Archie Panjabi, Paul Giamatti, Kylie Minogue
Certificate: 12A
Running Time: 114 minutes
Synopsis: After a devastating earthquake hits California, a Los Angeles Fire Department rescue-helicopter pilot (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) and his ex-wife (Carla Gugino) attempt to leave Los Angeles and head to San Francisco to find and rescue their daughter (Alexandra Daddario).
San Andreas joins a long list of disaster movies that have been hurtled our way over the past few years; from the heights of Irwin Allen’s epics of the 1960s and 1970s (see The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure), to the more recent CGI affairs, most of which were thrown at the screen by German director Roland Emmerich (2012, The Day After Tomorrow). While most of those movies relied on high-octane effects and a multitude of characters led by one or two big name stars, San Andreas amps up the levels of CGI action, though chooses to focus most of its attention on just the one troubled family, led by man-mountain Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in perhaps his biggest, and indeed most important film role to date.
Here Johnson plays Chief Ray Gaines, a Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter pilot who is about to be caught up in one of the biggest earthquakes that California, and indeed the world, has ever seen. Also stuck amongst the destructible power of mother nature is estranged wife Emma, played by the excellent Carla Gugino (Entourage), and teenage daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario, who we last saw straddling Woody Harrelson in the brilliant HBO series True Detective). When Blake is worrying trapped in the slightly more northern climbs of San Francisco, the area which is hit the worst from the quake, Gaines must travel across California to rescue her.
San Andreas suffers from that typical big-disaster movie syndrome where there’s so much going on it’s difficult to take it all in, while on the other hand focusses in on such a small group of characters that we’re totally uncaring for the rest of the population who are succumbing to this epic disaster. We largely don’t care who lives or dies as there’s little to no character development in any of the smaller supporting roles. Paul Giamatti turns up to lend some heavyweight acting support, and give us the science behind the San Andreas Fault line and the scale of what is about to happen, but is largely wasted, and we have Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd cashing another paycheck in the stereotypical ‘asshole new-boyfriend-of-ex-wife’ part who we’re supposed to hate and applaud when the inevitable happens. Then there’s the fish-out-of-water English boy abroadBen (Hugo Johnstone-Burt – actually Australian and another Home and Away alumni), and his pubescent younger brother Ollie (Art Parkinson), both thrown in to appeal to the younger members of the audience and to create a little teenage angst in this rather messy, too-heavy-on-the-CGI (which is very ropey in places), cheesy dialogue-laden, Michael Bay-esque monster of a disaster movie.
All of this may seem like we’re selling this as a negative, though we must remember that we do have the presence of one Dwayne Johnson, who is really carving himself out quite the high-profile career in modern Hollywood. He truly has the power to sell a movie while having enough gravitas and personality to light up the screen in literally everything he is in. This is all too apparent here, and he provides all of the highlights of San Andreas, and it really would have been a different and distinctly average movie without him in the mix. His over-the-top, gung-ho heroism is very much on display here, as well as those cheesy one-liner that pretty much helped him save The Fast and the Furious franchise.
Director Brad Peyton and his band of CGI artists, along with scriptwriter Carlton Cuse (who FYI co-created Lost), throw so much as us in San Andreas that it feels more like a theme park ride than a movie-going experience. But that’s okay. This movie, like any theme park ride, isn’t designed to change the world. It is designed to entertain and thrill the audience. If you excuse the pun, it certainly won’t break new ground. It won’t bother the awards season in any way, shape or form. It definitely won’t please many of the critics. But it will make money, and because it makes money, that means that Dwayne Johnson can carry on making movies. Bigger, better, more ridiculous action movies like this. And that’s got to be a good thing, right?
San Andreas opens on Thursday 28th May, 2015 (UK), and Friday 29th May, 2015 (US).
