San Andreas

There was a time when San Andreas would have been a cheesy B-movie, with fake explosions and cardboard debris raining down on a cast made up of washed up celebrities who would recite dialogue that only a screenwriter could love.  In 2015, it's a big budget summer tentpole movie with the best special effects out there, and a cast of recognizable faces.  At least the quality of the dialogue hasn't changed.

You know what you're getting with a movie like San Andreas.  The movie looks like it cost a fortune to make, but it ends up being the cinematic equivalent of watching money burn, because there's nothing really to get behind here.  The lead performances are likable, but they're not given any characters to play.  This is the sort of movie where the characters should all be wearing name tags that describe their basic character trait.  Such tags would include, "I'm the hero with the haunted past" (Dwayne Johnson), "I'm the ex-wife of the hero who still has feelings for him" (Carla Gugino), "I'm the hero's attractive teen daughter, who's going to get in a lot of dangerous situations, but never mess up my make up or hair" (Alexandra Daddario), "I'm the wealthy jerk who puts his needs before everyone else, so naturally something nasty will happen to me before this movie is over" (Ioan Gruffudd), "I'm the nerdy earthquake specialist who would have been played by Jeff Goldblum if this movie came out 20 years ago" (Paul Giamatti), and so on.

These character types...sorry, people...are brought together by a catastrophic earthquake that levels L.A. and San Francisco through a series of fires, floods, and tsunamis.  We actually get two different storylines, that never really intersect or meet.  In one, Dwayne Johnson plays a heroic rescue pilot who becomes determined to save his ex-wife (Gugino) and daughter (Daddario) when the ex-wife's new jerk boyfriend (Gruffudd) ditches them at the first sign of trouble.  The daughter is lucky enough to be teamed up with a handsome young British man (Hugo Johnstone-Burt), who comes equipped with a cute little kid for a sidekick (Art Parkinson).  As Johnson and his ex search desperately for their daughter by helicopter, truck, plane and boat, they begin to rekindle their relationship, which I guess is what's important when people are dying all around you.

That's the thing I noticed about this movie.  It doesn't seem interested in anything that's not happening to its main characters.  We get a few fleeting glimpses at some random extras meeting their end (an elderly couple are walking down the street, see a wall of water racing toward them, and embrace each other in their final moments), but the destruction and chaos are really just treated as special effects happening in the background as the main characters race to safety.  We never get a true sense of the tragedy of the situation, because the movie just stays with the characters that we know are going to be all right.  I'm not saying the movie should be sadistic, and kill off random innocent people every few minutes.  Just that a little more sense of loss would have added to the drama, instead of making it feel like a gruesome spectacle.

In the film's second plot, a college professor who is working on a device that can accurately predict earthquakes (Giamatti) tries to get his message out and warn the people about the danger.  Fortunately, he happens to have a TV crew with ties to CNN in his office when the destruction starts.  Giamatti's character shows a lot of promise, but the movie kind of drops him once he makes his dire television warning.  He comes back near the end of the film, saying this his work has been vindicated by the lives that were saved thanks to his warning, but we don't really get to see any of the after effects of this.  His character also doesn't feel fleshed out, as he exists simply to make doomsday warnings, then give a satisfied sigh when it's all over.

San Andreas has been made by professionals.  The production is first rate, and the lead actors are all likable with the types they are charged with playing.  Nothing ever offends, and some of the early effects shots are thrilling.  But I slowly realized that the movie wasn't really going anywhere, and was just hitting the familiar beats of the many disaster movies from the 1970s, such as Earthquake or The Towering Inferno.  Yes, everything has been done well, but it almost feels like the script doesn't deserve this level of effort.  It's underwritten, cliched and only cares about getting its characters from one set piece to the next without much thought.  I understand that we're supposed to be swept up in the action and special effects, but they never stood out enough that I could completely shut my brain off and enjoy this movie on the mindless level it so obviously wants to be enjoyed at.

If you want a pure action adrenalin summer thrill ride movie, I will have to recommend Mad Max over this.  San Andreas does it's job, but not well enough to stand out.  I wasn't exactly expecting a great movie walking in, but I really wasn't expecting the destruction of a large chunk of the West Coast to leave me feeling kind of indifferent.

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