Movie Review: San Andreas – Review by Tom West
October 26, 2015 12:16 pm | Leave your thoughts
Pop Culture Leftovers Ratings System:
Toss It = Hated It
Taste It = Liked It
Tupperware = Loved It
San Andreas
Director; Brad Peyton
Writer: Carlton Cuse
Starring; Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddiaro, Paul Giamatti and Ioan Gruffud.
Do you like Earthquakes? Do you like the Rock? Do you like falling masonry and explosions? If the answer to all three is yes, then I recommend this disaster film, which has a bigger budget and more stellar cast than Into the Storm, which I will never watch again. 
This appears to be an action star vehicle, but what surprises me here is that it features Dwayne Johnson at all, given how these disaster films go for an ensemble of character actors and up-and-comers. The plot follows the usual narrative line; progressively more violent and destructive events threaten our characters, with Ray (Johnson) and his family going through separation, and the smooth, new architect boyfriend (Gruffud) of the estranged wife, Emma (Gugino) shows Ray how rich and successful he is.
Meanwhile a relatively small quake hits the Hoover Dam and destroys it, killing Paul Giamatti’s associate, just after they’d successfully tested their earthquake prediction software. Giamatti is the Caltech professor who introduces his class (and the audience) to the largest quakes in history, and is the subject of an interview with an attractive reporter, who he bonds with during the events of the film.
Ioan Gruffud and Ray’s daughter Blake (Daddiaro) go to San Francisco, where she befriends two nice British brothers, Ben and Olly. Ben is there for a job interview, and Olly is there because his parents are on a cruise. In keeping with British male characters in American films, they are mesmerised by Blake’s beauty (and other charms), and Ben is typically embarrassed, clumsy and apologetic in her presence, while Olly says he ‘can’t wait to be twenty’, because even British children want a piece of American ass.
Although Daddiaro is now an attractive actor (you may remember her from the Percy Jackson films), she is an oddly blue-eyed choice as Johnson’s daughter. Still, she’s competent with reaction shots and screaming, which is what most actors in disaster films are limited to.
The quakes get progressively more violent, and the eponymous fault heaves and splits into a series of chasms, the coastline lowered and Los Angeles rocked as ripples travel under its urban sprawl. This is where Ray picks up Emma in his incredible flying machine, a Huey that hovers perfectly while fifty-storey buildings collapse around it. With his ex on-board, it’s time to head north to fetch the daughter, who has been left for dead by Ioan Gruffud, because he’s a rich architect, and one of one-percent, and Johnson is a firefighting chopper pilot. Ben uses his engineering (he was going for a job under Ioan the architect) brilliance to save Blake from being crushed by falling concrete.
The film divides its time between the daughter and the parents, but also the expositional scenes at Caltech, where Paul Giamatti warns the media that the next event will be unprecedented and those on the east coast will feel its effects.
The action and destruction in San Francisco is more of what we had in Los Angeles – falling masonry, crumbling skyscrapers and sundry structural failings, but then a huge spike in the seismometer at Caltech sets off alarms around the bay area, and water retreats out to sea. Cue a flotilla heading under the Golden gate bridge and headlong into a huge tsunami, dragging a container ship with it and hurling it against the bridge, which is of course where Ioan Gruffud gets his comeuppance, although it’s too similar to the exact same scene in Godzilla, but with a cargo ship instead of an obese lizard. The tsunami destroys most of san Francisco and the kids get trapped in Ioan Gruffud’s super-strong building, which it turns out is useless. Ray and Emma, having survived the tsunami by riding a rib over the crest and dodging the container ship, find the building and save Blake and her British chums from a watery grave, just in time, but Blake is semi-drowned (a flashback establishes their other daughter drowned years ago in a white-water accident), and Ray doesn’t give up trying to resuscitate, almost crushing his daughter’s ribcage (seriously, I’m surprised her body didn’t expel its contents and shoot off the deck from being compressed by those arms). Eventually she coughs up the bay and comes to.
The last scene is all helicopters, FEMA/Army camps. Blake resting her comely chin on Ben’s shoulder, and Ray answering his wife’s plaintive ‘what now?’ with an assured ‘we rebuild’, as the stars and stripes is unfurled near the wrecked bridge. It’s epilogue-by numbers, and the flag is the icing on the cake.
In summary, I don’t feel I missed anything by not seeing it in the cinema – I guessed the plot before I even saw it, and it is, as Ben might say , ‘bollocks’, but enjoyable bollocks, and I am a sucker for Disaster/monster/invasion films, more so than superhero films (by that I mean I’m more forgiving with bad disaster flicks). I’m one of those sad people who enjoyed Skyline, although I draw the line at 2012. With this one, you will see everything coming, it’s a story recycled by Hollywood and owes tons to other films, such as The Day After Tomorrow. You feel like you’ve seen it before –CGI tsunamis crashing into city streets – so for those who have no great love of this genre, perhaps avoid it, but for me to toss it would deny my enjoyment of the nature-versus-humanity carnage. I’ve never heard of the director, and that’s probably because he’s a studio babysitter. He’s not giving us anything new, but If you can disarm your critical thinking software for this epic silliness (and like me can still happily watch crap like Meteor, starring Sean Connery) then grab some beer and soak in the scurrying extras, the CGI gas explosions and the Rock being an everyman, almost.
This film gets a low taste it.
Tags: Dwayne Johson, pop culture leftovers, San Andreas, The Rock
Categorised in: Movie Reviews
This post was written by Leftover Brian
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