One would think that a movie like San Andreas wouldn't need a villain. It already has a disaster as a natural antagonist, it characters up against the most powerful earthquake in all of human history. But the film gives itself another narrative agenda, trying to convince that it's muscled rescue workers protagonist makes for a better dad than a weasely real estate developer. The film turns the disaster into a backdrop for this asinine family drama, in the end losing sight of the bigger issues at play.
Rescue chopper pilot Ray (Dwayne Johnson) is looking forward to driving his daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) up to Seattle for college. But an earthquake in Nevada derails his plans, and Blake ends up going to San Francisco with her mother's new boyfriend Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd) instead. But it turns out that the quake in Nevada was just a precursor to a bigger disaster in California. Ray heads into the ruins of San Francisco to find his daughter and get her to safety.
It isn't enough for the movie to sketch out what would happen if the big one actually hit. It asks us to care about the internal drama of one family. We learn, through the course of the movie, that Ray lost a daughter years before, and that friction may have caused the end of his marriage. A chunk of this picture is devoted to proving that Stokes is a better mate than his ex-wife's new beau. And Blake doesn't just try to survive; the movie finds time for her to develop a romance with British engineer Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt), and make friends with his little brother Ollie (Art Parkinson).
This all just get in the way of the immediacy of the disaster. There is one point in the film where Stokes parachutes in AT&T field with his ex-wife. The movie lets him deliver a groanworhty quip about getting to second base. It's hard to take the film seriously when it finds the time to be gross in the middle of what is supposed to be a major crisis. As a whole, the movie has trouble finding a good way to split its time between its narrative threads. Part of the film documents the efforts of the Caltech seismology team, whose advanced warnings are meant to save lives. But their part of this story feels like a diversion at best.
The visuals are reasonably impressive. The film certainly has a knack for the depiction of widespread destruction. But once it gets in close to action, it never feels entirely convincing. The green screen work isn't particularly well done, the actors clearly made to react to things that just aren't there. Director Brad Peyton’s aesthetic might work for a fantasy story like Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, but it doesn’t fit in a realistic setting. The acting isn't great, either. Dwayne Johnson is always a charismatic presence, but he works best in larger-than-life contexts. The focus on the family turmoil makes the actor ill-suited to the role. Stronger members of the cast, like the great Paul Giamatti, are stuck basically delivering swaths of clumsy exposition.
The one good thing about San Andreas is that it occasionally offers good advice on how to survive a massive earthquake. There are sequences in the film that offer practical instruction, which in theory could help save a life someday. But a lot of that is lost in the clamor for bombast and the inane family reunion plot. This story just doesn't lead to anything good. This plot ends up asking the audience to root for the death of a human being, with Daniel revealed to be so despicable that his comeuppance is played as a victory. In a real crisis, there's no room for that kind of thinking.
My Rating:
