San Andreas – Sorry Dwayne!

I have to start by saying that I do tend to watch anything that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is in.  For someone primarily known as an action star (and former wrestler to boot!) he does tend to offer *slightly* more range in the acting stakes than some of his contemporaries.  Here, in ‘San Andreas,’ he doesn’t have to utilise an awful lot of acting ability to portray a tough-as-nails helicopter pilot who must utilise his aerial skills to save his family when a freak earthquake hits the city.  Yes, that’s about the size of the plot.  Anyway, I knew what I was getting.  I’ve seen enough disaster movies to know the score – the actors normally come secondary to the special effects.  And this film was no different.

I began by actually quite enjoying the film.  It doesn’t take long before buildings start crumbling on a large scale and, when this happens, the special effects are indeed well done enough to at least make the devastation appear believable.  Plus you have the ever-great Dwayne Johnson at the helm, who, as I’ve said, is always fun.  However, it was about there that the fun started to come to an end.

There’s little even Johnson and the special effects department could do to prevent not only the city of San Andreas, but also the entire film, from slipping into oblivion.  It was about a quarter into the film when I started asking the question: Is this film trying to be serious, or not?  You see… these kind of disaster movies do follow patterns, or to put it a little harsher, have their own clichés.  And ‘San Andreas’ starts to conform to so many of these that I was left wondering if they were checking every box on purpose in some sort of ‘self knowing’ kind of way.  Sadly, by the end of the film I can confirm that they never had their tongue anywhere near their cheek.

Once the disaster is underway, we’re also treated to the couple who have split up getting back together, their subsequent inability to die while all around them drop like flies and the search for the child in danger.  Now, I could almost forgive all of those if it wasn’t for the fact that some actors appeared to be doing possibly the worst British actors since Dick Van Dyke!  (Feel free to correct me and look them up online and inform me that they really WERE true Brits – but I’d be shocked!)

So, a film that could have been really good fun was only reasonably due to Johnson and the effects.  It’s a shame that they couldn’t have at least tried to make the sub-plots a little more original, as it makes the film pretty forgettable if you’ve seen as many disaster movies as I have.  Plus Paul Giamatti was wasted and only there to try and give the film more of an air of gravitas.

6/10 Should probably keep you awake if Freddy Krueger was haunting your nights