The disaster movie model holds up better than the hundreds of
crumbling, shattering buildings in the earth-rattling San Andreas, a film that finds
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (and his biceps) battling Mother Nature to
a stalemate. Expecting the film to live up to the staggering heights of classic
'70s disaster flicks is probably too much, but director Brad Peyton, who teamed
up with Johnson on the equally campy Journey
2: The Mysterious Island, knows that he's got a star who can literally
carry this kind of old school action spectacle on his broad shoulders.
The tropes of disaster films have become
so ingrained at this point that we no longer expect any variation, and San Andreas certainly doesn't try to break the
mold. Johnson plays heroic helicopter rescue pilot Ray Gaines, a guy so good at
what he does the Los Angeles news sends crews to chronicle his exploits.
Basically, Johnson is playing Johnson here; his t-shirts are a size too small,
he always looks like he just bathed in baby oil and anything can be solved with
a flex of his biceps and some strong words. That's the Johnson audiences paid
to see and they get it in spades. Gaines has a soon-to-be ex-wife (Carla
Gugino) and a beautiful young daughter (Alexandra Daddario), who we all know
will be in need of rescue when disaster strikes. But they also need to be
rescued from the mother's new boyfriend, a sleazy architect (Ioan Gruffudd,
always good at playing the rich sleaze bag) who builds skyscrapers we know are
destined to crumble.
So lots of easy setup here by screenwriter
Carlton Cuse (Lost), who gives us some family drama to tug at our
heartstrings while the entire west coast shakes, rattles, and rolls into
oblivion when the largest earthquake in history strikes. Paul Giamatti plays
CalTech's Dr. Lawrence Hayes, and gets all of the geeky geological stuff about
fault lines that nobody really cares about. His job is to make everything sound
ominous, and to predict stuff we already know is going to happen. When he tells
us the worst is yet to come, we already know it.
That San
Andreas is predictable as
Johnson sweating buckets won't surprise anybody. That the film is
still largely entertaining throughout is all that really matters, and that is
due to Johnson's alpha male performance and genuine chemistry with Gugino.
While their characters' marital issues are laid out pretty thin, the past
tragedy they share is what inspires their dogged quest through Hell (meaning
Hollywood) to save their wayward daughter. That we can buy into easily, with
Gugino and Johnson delivering solid performances as the frantic parents. As
great an actor as Giamatti is he's had more than his share of junky roles and
this is another one. But he also knows how to calibrate his performance
perfectly to the level of the material, so we can sense him having quite a bit
of fun as the stodgy professor urging citizens to evacuate "because your
lives depend on it".
Peyton acquits himself well with this
Emmerich-sized disaster, delivering an impressive mass destruction of San
Francisco and Los Angeles, with the decimation of the Hoover Dam the biggest
payoff scene. But when you've seen one CGI building collapse you've seen a
thousand, and pretty soon it loses any real shock value. It doesn't help that
Johnson and Gugino's characters are often above the fray, literally flying over
the worst of the chaos. The bulk of the survival action involves Daddario and
co-star Hugo Johnston-Burt as a British tourist and potential love interest,
plus Art Parkinson as his precocious little brother.
Reverberating like massive aftershocks,
the film goes from one exciting set piece to another with little time to catch
a breath in-between. It also doesn't leave much time to think about the plot,
such as it is. Disaster movies may be the most reliable genre Hollywood has to
offer, but as a recent flick like Into
the Storm proves, they're
also remarkably easy to screw up. San
Andreas is predictable fun,
but with Johnson swinging in to the rescue it also delivers plenty of muscular
thrills.
Rating: 3 out of 5
