San Andreas
(USA, 114 min.)
Dir. Brad Peyton, Writ. n/a (yes, I’m aware
that writers should be credited, but really.)
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Carla
Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Ioan Gruffudd, Archie Panjabi, Paul Giamatti, Hugo
Johnstone-Burt, Art Parkinson, Kylie Minogue
Some Canadian directors are setting are
setting Hollywood on fire, but Brad Peyton definitely isn’t one of them. After
the successes of Jean-Marc Vallée, Denis Villeneuve, and others, Peyton puts
the ‘Eh’ list to shame with his poor man’s Roland Emmerich film, San Andreas. It’s about as bad and
pathetic as one might expect for a disaster film with a Canadian budget (see: The Colony for something along that
line), but San Andreas is a big bad
Hollywood production to the hilt and, wow, it isn’t pretty. This awkwardly
directed VFX pic scores mega points on the Richter scale but pretty low on the Cinemablographer scale. San Andreas, ironically, has many
faults.
Peyton, the director of Cats and Dogs 2 and “The Republic of Doyle,” teams up with Dwayne Johnson, né The Rock, for this good old-fashioned tale of family values and wanton destruction. Johnson plays Ray, a rugged firefighter/Real Life Superhero who valiantly knows how to survive any and all natural disasters. Ray’s smarts probably come from watching a bunch of Netflix recommendations he earned after giving The Day After Tomorrow five stars. San Andreas, simply put, plays like a bunch of aftershocks rippling from bigger and better films. It’s derivative, familiar, and disappointingly dull.
San
Andreas goes for a high-concept disaster story as
one scientist (Paul Giamatti, wasted) studies patterns that allow him to
predict earthquakes and—shocker—earthquakes start to happen once he and his
colleague are testing their theory in the field. This seismic shifting starts
at the Hoover Dam—a landmark so big it almost makes San Andreas resemble a legit Roland Emmerich movie—and it works its
way to San Francisco where Ray’s daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) is heading
with her mom’s new boyfriend (Ioan Gruffudd). Disaster strikes and Ray finds
himself en route to save his family along with his ex(ish)-wife Emma (Carla
Gugino). Along the way, they encounter earthquakes and tsunamis and floods. (Oh
my!)
There’s nothing especially remarkable about
the visual effects here even though Peyton and his team blow up tons of shit,
ruin roads, create waves in crappy 3D, and topple buildings like kids playing
Jenga. San Andreas flows like a
carefully calculated algorithm on both its narrative and visual planes.
Everything happens at such a precise pace that anyone who’s seen a disaster
movie, be it The Day After Tomorrow, Volcano, Dante’s Peak, The Towering
Inferno, Titanic, or, more aptly, 2012, is bound to go on auto-pilot. There’s no point in a seeing a
VFX-driven smorgasbord of destruction that fails to registers as urgent,
terrifying, or thrilling. How all this destruction and mayhem can be so boring,
though, is San Andreas’s biggest and
only surprise.
San
Andreas delivers carnage at an unrelenting pace and
it assaults audiences with CGI chaos, and it’s about as far as one can get from
this month’s other action-packed gong show, Mad Max: Fury Road. Both San Andreas
and Mad Max feature one elaborate set
piece after another with very little dialogue in between. However, whereas Mad Max proves a white-knuckler with its
frenzied orchestration of sound and fury, which also works on a level of art
thanks to the old-school practical effects, the algorithmic action in San Andreas just... happens. The
difference between the two films is mostly one of scale and vision, but the
crucial difference is that one film invests the audience in new and exciting characters
while the other recycles stock characters.
San
Andreas doesn’t work because the Ray and his family
are sketched even more half-assedly than the effects are. Audiences have seen
this family before: the parents are about to sign divorce papers, they’ve lost
a child, they desperately love their surviving daughter, and the mom’s BF is a
d-bag. Johnson and Carla Gugino are perfectly serviceable as the parents—at
times even convincing—but San Andreas
ups the family drama schmaltz so high on the Richter scale that it’s off the
charts. Johnson’s solidly as an action star, though, and as likable as ever.
The credited scriptmakers also completely
discard a third of the cast (namely Giamatti and Archie Panjabi) almost partway
through the film, and most of the deaths in the high body count are inconsequential.
There’s no sense of loss. The only novelties are a hilariously inappropriate
cover of “California Dreamin’” by Robot Koch & Delhia de France and a deliciously bitchy
cameo by Kylie Minogue as Ioan Gruffudd’s sister, who’s just as unlikable as he
is. It’s the most enjoyable throwaway role of the year.
San
Andreas mostly takes itself too seriously for
audiences to enjoy the ride. Peyton attempts to situate the earthquake terrors
as a kind of 9/11 parable, and it rings false. Buildings collapse and dissolve
like the Twin Towers do in oft-repeated images. Victims fall from the sky.
Firefighters save lives. Families surround a fence at Ground Zero and search
for loved ones. Finally, and worst, an American flag takes centre stage in the
finale as Ray solemnly yet proudly asserts that the next step is to rebuild. San Andreas earnestly attempts to use
contemporary traumas and disasters to maximize its payoff, but it ultimately
talks down to the audience and uses these touchy subjects for show in its
operatic disregard for human life. The only thing that could save San Andreas is a real-life earthquake
that shakes the theatre, collapses the ceiling, and turns moviegoers into
raspberry jam.
Rating: ★½ (out of ★★★★★)
San Andreas opens in
theatres May 29, 2015.
