Let me just start off by saying this, San Andreas is a fucking awesome movie! Whew, I feel good that I’ve gotten that out onto the page and now we can move past cursing and exclamation points. San Andreas represents all that is wonderful about the summer blockbuster season: characters you can root for, crazy spectacle, and most importantly, elements that allow you to commune with it in pure ways. Cinema can do many things, but first and foremost, it must entertain.
Given the many elements that comprise this film, it’s not a shock to me that this movie manages to work on almost every level. You’ve got Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson giving you star power and action charisma from moment one, a complimentary cast that is more than serviceable (the always awesome Carla Gugino & Alexandria Daddario and the newly awesome Hugo Jonston-Burt, and spectacle that most movies dream of having. San Andreas is a movie that is incredibly ridiculous, but the movie knows this, and subverts this in (mostly) interesting ways to keep the film humming along nicely. So long as the ground is shaking and our hero and his estranged wife are heading to rescue their daughter the movie takes other opportunities to shine.
But it is worth noting, that amidst all of the awesome that this movie is not perfect. The opening scene manages to set up some interesting stakes surrounding Ray’s job, but to do so it trades in suspension of disbelief for straight disbelief with a car crash so brutal that no one should survive and yet they do. The movie then proceeds to introduce you to a team of people like Ray who help with rescue, only to immediately have something go wrong putting a teammate played by Colton Haynes in peril. This would be fine if the movie was invested in those characters, but immediately the shackles of the team are shed from Ray. With the exception of Gugino’s character he is a single man possesed to find his daughter. What was the point of the team then? San Andreas missed a huge opportunity here to show how those guys earned all that respect they gained in Afghanistan. Furthermore, though the movie manages to deal with the disaster movie cliches, its obstacle to getting man and wife back together, as played by Ioan Gruffold, is as flat and uninteresting as you’d expect. It was annoying to see how that character was used.
However, these issues are steamrolled by a kind of kinetic energy and sheer enjoyable force that most films crave. As a Bay Area native and current LA resident I spent much of the movie SKRESSED (yes, skressed) and howling in laughter because the movie takes both perverse delight in its destruction and balances them with major doses of humanity. The jokes land as well as the set pieces, and the film’s technical merits craft a visceral experience. (Seriously, FYC this movie’s sound design)
Much is made of the summer blockbuster going the way of dark and gritty, but with movies like San Andreas, the cinema is still a place for fun, even if all your faves are faced with 9.6 earthquakes.
P.S. As a Giants fan I was so happy to see AT&T park used so memorably in the movie. Dodger stadium could NEVER