Movie Review: San Andreas

The Rock, me, San Andreas!

Before Fast & Furious 7 hit cinemas, Vin Diesel predicted it would go on to win Best Picture at the Oscars.

If only his fuel-injected masterpiece featured more of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Then it might have had a sporting chance. When you’re watching the impossibly charismatic former wrestler on screen, you’ll not only forgive the movie around him, you’ll want to throw Pulitzers, Nobel Prizes and even Miss World crowns at it.

Sadly, Johnson was too busy filming San Andreas to do much except be hospitalised in F&F7. That’s Vin Diesel’s loss and San Andreas’ director Brad Peyton’s gain, because Johnson’s megawatt star power alone makes this otherwise clichéd, cornball disaster flick… kind of watchable.

In it, Johnson plays Ray Gaines, the best damn Fire & Rescue helicopter pilot in California and, as is both suggested and demonstrated, the known universe.

When a record-breaking earthquake strikes San Francisco, it’s up to Gaines to save his soon-to-be ex-wife (Carla Gugino), teenage daughter (Alexandra Daddario) and, by extension, the very idea of a nuclear family from the wreckage.

Sometimes Peyton cuts away from Johnson’s heroism to Paul Giamatti’s doomsday-anticipating scientist, who found a way to predict the Earth-shaking tremors, but who everyone ignored because, well, do you want to hang out with that guy at a party?

The cast also includes Ioan Gruffudd, Archie Panjabi, Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson, not to mention, briefly and bizarrely, Kylie Minogue. All of them play potential crevasse fodder. The line-up from The Towering Inferno this ain’t.

Screenwriter Carlton Cuse is credited with the final version of the script – congrats? – and he leans in to the most tired tropes from act-of-God cinema history.

(I don’t want to give too much away, however, an American flag may or may not be unfurled in the final scene.)

If it weren’t for Dwayne Johnson’s knowing comic timing, particularly as he deploys an inspirational catchphrase or openly threatens Mother Nature, we’d have to call San Andreas’ screenplay unforgivable. Yet, The Rock is just so innately winning you can’t help but root for his movie to work.

The special effects are indeed spectacular. Peyton sure makes buildings crumble convincingly, even if he can’t achieve the same with human interaction.

I also enjoyed watching Gugino get increasingly agitated with arousal as her estranged hubby kept proving his manly skills in front of her, either by lifting her from burning buildings or punching out looters.

San Andreas’ only pleasures are the base ones. Still, the basest are sometimes the best.

3/5

In cinemas now.

Rated M for disaster themes and coarse language.