San Andreas *** (2015, Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Paul Giamatti) – Movie Review

Taken with a huge pinch of salt, San Andreas is quite a lot of old-style disaster movie fun, slickly done and fast moving. Dwayne Johnson’s a good hero and very pleasant company for a couple of hours of escapist hokum.

Dwayne Johnson’s marriage to Carla Gugino is in so much trouble she’s about to divorce him and get married to Ioan Gruffudd, But it takes an earthquake, killing millions of people no doubt and reducing California to rubble to make her come to her sense and make it alright. They could just have gone to a marriage guidance counsellor or a grief counsellor after their daughter died, and saved a lot of work and cost on mega CGI effects.

Some might say the lives of two people (and their daughter Alexandra Daddario and new English boyfriend Hugo Johnstone-Burt and his little brother Art Parkinson) don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Others might realise this is just the plot grinding along in a Seventies-style disaster movie, the kind of which we haven’t seen for a while, since The Day after Tomorrow (2004) and the ill-fated 2006 Poseidon remake, both of which films this one brings easily to mind.

San Andreas isn’t a great work of art or even of popular cinema, but as with the Seventies-style disaster movies it always good to enjoy seeing other people (not real ones) in trouble and desperately trying to get out of it – alive!

Dwayne Johnson’s a rescue-chopper pilot – though the movie never explains why rescue-chopper pilot would have quite so many muscles –  who seems to have a superhuman, or superhero, talent to rescue anybody, anytime, anywhere, which comes in very handy when he needs to rescue wife Carla Gugino or later daughter Alexandra Daddario from ridiculously impossible situations, with skyscrapers tumbling around them and the very building they’re in collapsing under them.

There’s a problem with scale, as with Godzilla, that the heroes are battling such huge, monstrous odds that they couldn’t possibly survive. Nevertheless, taken with a huge pinch of salt, San Andreas is quite a lot of old-style fun, slickly done and fast moving. Dwayne Johnson’s a good hero and very pleasant company for a couple of hours of escapist hokum. Ioan Gruffudd has such as terrible role as the cowardly would-be step-dad that you feel really sorry for him, instead of hating him. The real acting, though, comes from Paul Giamatti as the scientist who predicts the quake and saves lives.

There’s intense disaster action and mayhem throughout, and brief strong language, though Johnson’s exclamations are oddly mostly just ‘s**t’ as something incredibly bad happens, so this is a Disney version of a disaster movie. You can imagine how it all ends about half an hour into the movie. Even as the world collapses round our five heroes, it’s all as predictable and safe as a romcom.

Actually, with just our five heroes, it’s not strictly a disaster movie at all, more a group jeopardy movie. A much larger cast of characters, say around 20, being killed off at regular intervals so you have to guess the survivors is the usual ‘fun’ of the disaster movie, This one’s all about how on earth can the script get the heroes out of this scrape or that one along the way to the inevitable happy ending. Happy, that is, provided you forget that California has been more or less wiped out!

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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