San Andreas is truly a disaster of monumental proportions.
The main character, Ray (Dwayne Johnson), is a divorced Search and Rescue helicopter pilot who is still in love with his estranged wife. Not only can he fly helicopters, he can also fly light aircraft and drive speedboats at the drop of a hat. In fact, he can do anything and if the scriptwriters (and I use that term loosely) hadn't been able to provide a vehicle for him they would probably have given him the power of unaided flight.
His estranged wife is about to move in with a mega-rich architect, who you are pretty sure will turn into a cowardly arsehole and meet a predictably sticky end.
His daughter has no personality knows everything about survival, something which, I assume, she has gained from her father by means of osmosis.
His daughter's love interest (Hugo Johnstone-Burt), a young British man (and by British I mean someone who is not British but is putting on an obviously fake British accent) who, despite being an engineer, is fairly stupid and follows her like a homeless dog would follow a tramp with bacon in his pocket. He also has an annoying kid brother.
The love interest's kid brother (Art Parkinson), is so annoying that you desperately want to see him die in horrific and (preferably) painful circumstances at the earliest opportunity, but unfortunately he doesn't.
The main characters are all rich, WASPish and thoroughly dislikeable, and bear no resemblance to anyone you would want to care about. Or meet. Ever.
There is no plot to speak of, just a series of unbelievable escapes that takes suspension of disbelief to a whole new level.
In one scene Ray's estranged wife is having lunch in a restaurant on the top floor of a skyscraper (where else?)when an earthquake hits. She phones Ray, who is about a hundred miles away and who tells her to head to the roof and wait for him.Ray flies to her rescue, ignoring all the other people requiring his assistance and when he gets there the building is starting to collapse. As she runs toward the helicopter the roof caves in and she falls about six storeys down, but amazingly she survives enough to run up the rubble and jump on to the helicopter.
Now, all this would have been fine if her character had for years been hiding her secret identity of Supergirl from her husband, but unfortunately she isn't the Man of Steel's unnecessary cousin. This is a woman who has just come from living the high life of the idle rich, and let's be honest here, if you were a Search and Rescue pilot whose wife had (presumably) been shagging this mega-rich arsehole for months and was about to move into his grand house with him, a house, by the way, that you could never afford in a million years on your measly Search and Rescue pilot salary, would you go out of your way to rescue her? I know I wouldn't. I'd be hovering over her rooftop rescue point in my helicopter shouting, "Burn bitch! You had it coming!"
The scene on the rooftop with Ray and his estranged wife takes place within the first thirty minutes of this CGI-heavy film, and as it plods inexorably and excruciatingly on the situations get progressively ridiculous and unbelievable. It's all spectacle and no substance, and the spectacle's nothing to write home about because the special effects are nothing you haven't seen before in other superior disaster movies. When are the people who produce these insults to intelligence going to realise that CGI effects are not a replacement for a solid screenplay and good acting.
But what about the dialogue? Well, I know this is difficult to believe, but it's even worse.
When Ray is whinging on about how he couldn't save his daughter from drowning (that's the first one than drowned), his wife says to him, "If you couldn't save her, Ray, no-one could."
Really? I bet they could have. An Olympic swimmer probably could have. Or a dolphin. Besides, throughout the film Ray proves that he's a pretty useless Search and Rescue pilot, choosing only to save members of his immediate family and annoying numpties with fake British accents. I wanted to include all the bad dialogue in the film in this review, but that would have meant printing out the entire screenplay, and I didn't have time for that.
The worst chunk of dialogue comes right at the end of the film. Ray's estranged wife looks at him with dreamy eyes (that's right, she's fallen in love with him again because he's so MANLY) and asks, "What now?" And, as the Stars and Stripes unfurls before him, he replies, "Now we rebuild."
Yeah, woo-hoo! Let's take the dumbest film of the year and add a bit of patriotism into the mix to make it doubly dumb.
I wish the San Andreas Fault had split open and swallowed up every extant copy of San Andreas. Preferably about a week ago, so I wouldn't have had the misfortune of watching it.
The main character, Ray (Dwayne Johnson), is a divorced Search and Rescue helicopter pilot who is still in love with his estranged wife. Not only can he fly helicopters, he can also fly light aircraft and drive speedboats at the drop of a hat. In fact, he can do anything and if the scriptwriters (and I use that term loosely) hadn't been able to provide a vehicle for him they would probably have given him the power of unaided flight.
His estranged wife is about to move in with a mega-rich architect, who you are pretty sure will turn into a cowardly arsehole and meet a predictably sticky end.
His daughter has no personality knows everything about survival, something which, I assume, she has gained from her father by means of osmosis.
His daughter's love interest (Hugo Johnstone-Burt), a young British man (and by British I mean someone who is not British but is putting on an obviously fake British accent) who, despite being an engineer, is fairly stupid and follows her like a homeless dog would follow a tramp with bacon in his pocket. He also has an annoying kid brother.
The love interest's kid brother (Art Parkinson), is so annoying that you desperately want to see him die in horrific and (preferably) painful circumstances at the earliest opportunity, but unfortunately he doesn't.
The main characters are all rich, WASPish and thoroughly dislikeable, and bear no resemblance to anyone you would want to care about. Or meet. Ever.
There is no plot to speak of, just a series of unbelievable escapes that takes suspension of disbelief to a whole new level.
In one scene Ray's estranged wife is having lunch in a restaurant on the top floor of a skyscraper (where else?)when an earthquake hits. She phones Ray, who is about a hundred miles away and who tells her to head to the roof and wait for him.Ray flies to her rescue, ignoring all the other people requiring his assistance and when he gets there the building is starting to collapse. As she runs toward the helicopter the roof caves in and she falls about six storeys down, but amazingly she survives enough to run up the rubble and jump on to the helicopter.
Now, all this would have been fine if her character had for years been hiding her secret identity of Supergirl from her husband, but unfortunately she isn't the Man of Steel's unnecessary cousin. This is a woman who has just come from living the high life of the idle rich, and let's be honest here, if you were a Search and Rescue pilot whose wife had (presumably) been shagging this mega-rich arsehole for months and was about to move into his grand house with him, a house, by the way, that you could never afford in a million years on your measly Search and Rescue pilot salary, would you go out of your way to rescue her? I know I wouldn't. I'd be hovering over her rooftop rescue point in my helicopter shouting, "Burn bitch! You had it coming!"
The scene on the rooftop with Ray and his estranged wife takes place within the first thirty minutes of this CGI-heavy film, and as it plods inexorably and excruciatingly on the situations get progressively ridiculous and unbelievable. It's all spectacle and no substance, and the spectacle's nothing to write home about because the special effects are nothing you haven't seen before in other superior disaster movies. When are the people who produce these insults to intelligence going to realise that CGI effects are not a replacement for a solid screenplay and good acting.
But what about the dialogue? Well, I know this is difficult to believe, but it's even worse.
When Ray is whinging on about how he couldn't save his daughter from drowning (that's the first one than drowned), his wife says to him, "If you couldn't save her, Ray, no-one could."
Really? I bet they could have. An Olympic swimmer probably could have. Or a dolphin. Besides, throughout the film Ray proves that he's a pretty useless Search and Rescue pilot, choosing only to save members of his immediate family and annoying numpties with fake British accents. I wanted to include all the bad dialogue in the film in this review, but that would have meant printing out the entire screenplay, and I didn't have time for that.
The worst chunk of dialogue comes right at the end of the film. Ray's estranged wife looks at him with dreamy eyes (that's right, she's fallen in love with him again because he's so MANLY) and asks, "What now?" And, as the Stars and Stripes unfurls before him, he replies, "Now we rebuild."
Yeah, woo-hoo! Let's take the dumbest film of the year and add a bit of patriotism into the mix to make it doubly dumb.
I wish the San Andreas Fault had split open and swallowed up every extant copy of San Andreas. Preferably about a week ago, so I wouldn't have had the misfortune of watching it.