The medical moments and derring-do can feel far-fetched. The first death has meaning and pathos, as does the last one. The script and director Brad Peyton ("Journey 2: The Mysterious Island") never escape the time-honored formula for disaster movies - the warnings, unheeded, the short-sighted builder (Ioan Gruffudd), the disaster-imposed love interest (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) thrown together with the hot co-ed.īut here's what he and this production get exactly right. Johnson believes what he's seeing - buildings tumbling like dominoes, fires erupting, his chopper crashing, the sea fleeing San Francisco Bay - and we do, too. Dwayne Johnson is the ex-Army chopper pilot, now with Los Angeles Fire Department's air rescue unit, a man uniquely set up to save his soon-to-be-ex-wife (Gugino, his "Race to Witch Mountain" co-star) and college co-ed daughter (Daddario, of TV's first season of "True Detective").
Paul Giamatti, as a Cal Tech seismologist who has just this minute uncovered a way to predict earthquakes, wears the horror of what he sees and what he knows is to come, in his eyes, wide with terror.Ĭarla Gugino and Alexandra Daddario let panic, grief and relief when the shaking ends wash over them in what feels like real time.Īnd the actor nicknamed for a geological feature earns that nickname all over again by being that sturdy force of nature the whole movie is anchored on.
In "San Andreas," you will believe the ground is rippling under Los Angeles, the cracking collapse of the Hoover Dam and that a tidal wave is submerging San Francisco.īut what sells this formulaic corker of Apocalypse Porn is the cast. Disaster movies, which predate the zeitgeist's fascination with a world falling apart around us, are always great measures of the state of the Hollywood art of special effects.