San Andreas (2015) – Review

This latest disaster epic once again pushes the theory that the surest way to patch up any relationship is to wait for an earthquake, twister or some other natural disaster to occur, and then bingo-bango-bongo all your problems will be solved and you can walk off into the sunset together. Of course countless other lives may be destroyed in the process, but you know, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a tectonic plate or two.

San Andreas, by director Brad Peyton, presents the theory that if you are going to be in a massive earthquake your best bet to survive is to have Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as your father – or at least be dating his daughter – and this time out The Rock is playing Raymond Gaines (Dwayne Johnson), a search and rescue helicopter pilot with balls of steel, and we are first introduced to him as he and his team save a woman trapped in a car that was swept off the mountain road by a rockslide, and because this is the world of disaster movies when our hero takes insane risks that jeopardize the aircraft, and all onboard, it all turns out fine, while if this had been the real world he most likely would have been fired.  Or more likely, dead.

“It’s all good, I’ve read ahead in the script.”

Now one can’t hang much of a plot on a natural disaster – just look at 2012 – so it’s important to weave in human drama, and this is where the “estranged couple” trope fits in, an element that this film plops it in amongst the destruction like a week old rotting fish. Ray isn’t happy that his wife Emma (Carla Gugino) has found a new boyfriend and filed for a divorce, but it gets worse when it turns out that said boyfriend is construction tycoon Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd), a complete one percenter asshat who proves he isn’t worthy of Ray’s wife when the crisis kicks in and he abandons Ray and Emma’s daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) to certain doom, when his building starts falling apart. Lucky for Blake she ran into a couple of brothers in the lobby of Daniel’s office building, Ben (Hugo Johnson-Burt) and his kid brother Ollie (Art Parkinson), who are able to get Blake out of a trapped car before the parking garage collapses. The adventures with Blake, Ben and Ollie as they wind their way through a city crumbling around them makes up for most of the interesting drama in this movie, and all three actors give nice credible performances, and the key to a good disaster film is creating characters that we actually care for and hope for them to escape. Films like Armageddon, Volcano, and Twister seem to forget this.

“We need a bigger plot.”

Now you can’t have a disaster film without at least one scientist who can spout off scientific gibberish while pointing at a computer graph, and filling that role today is seismologist Dr. Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti).  As much as I love me some Paul Giamatti his character in this film is completely useless, not only does Lawrence have almost no effect on the “plot” but at one point he goes on the air and claims that they have discovered a way to predict earthquakes but his warnings were ignored. This is a complete fabrication on his part – that or those scenes of him being ignored are on the cutting room floor somewhere – either way his “doom saying” usually comes minutes before the quakes hit, so I’m not sure what the authorities could do with that kind of “advance” warning.

“I don’t think this role is going to land me that Oscar.”

Of course the star of this kind of movie is not the actors but the visual effects, and in that area this film delivers in spades. The earth tears up, buildings topple, and seas rush in, all to give us a rollercoaster of action and carnage, but never to the goofy levels reached by the the aforementioned 2012, as it delivers it in a “somewhat” more believable manner.  For the most part I found myself at the edge of my seat as our heroes scrambled from one horrific disaster moment after another – and there are a lot of them, Murphy’s Law must really hate these people – and even though in my head I knew they were all going to be fine, all except that jerk Daniel who we all knew he was going to die, the suspense was still there.

When Ray and Emma drove a boat up the face of a tsunami I was too busy laughing to be in suspense, but overall the script by Carlton Cuse kept me invested in the characters and what was going on. Could it have been a bit shorter? Sure, and it could have easily have jettisoned that whole backstory about Ray and Emma’s youngest daughter, whose death is what tore their relationship apart, but as it still manages to be under two hours long – something many “epics” need to try – I’ll cut it some slack there.

Who cares about a long dead kid when that’s coming at you?

So if you come into this movie expecting to see amazing visual effects showing San Francisco being torn apart by the San Andreas Fault you will not be disappointed, on the other hand if you came to see nuanced family drama you may have possibly wandered into the wrong theater. In conclusion this is a fun disaster film, much in the vein of the Irwin Allen films of the 70s, only with modern CGI allowing even greater excess in destruction. So sit back, eat your popcorn, and watch Dwayne Johnson and friends run for their lives. It’s a hoot.

“It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.”