New This Week... San Andreas

What do you mean "This isn't actually the Grand Theft Auto movie"?

We're going to start by playing a game. I'm going to give you a brief plot set up, and you're going to tell me what movie I'm describing. Ready? Here we go: There is a brave, down to earth, family man with a certain expertise in geological calamities. He's having marital problems and would like nothing more than to patch things up with his estranged wife and child (who are about to move in with mum's new boyfriend). However, in the midst of all this, a natural disaster occurs unlike anything the world has ever seen! There is a scientific group who knew it was coming and tried to warn us, but nobody listened until it was just too late. Our hero, learning that his family is trapped somewhere in this chaos, realises that with his knowledge, he is the only person who can save them and put his family back together.

Have you got it? Well if you said, "That's basically Twister, Deep Impact, Dante's Peak, Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow or The Core", well you would be exactly right! However, if I added that the movie I'm talking about is basically a series of set pieces edited and spliced together from that list of better films, then you would say "Well that's easy, you're talking about 2012".

Then I would get frustrated, decide that this was a stupid game and tell you just to look at the bloody title of the post.

Disaster movies pose a problem for reviewers because they are, in essence, all identical. The most successful and well-known disaster flicks are the ones that took huge leaps away from the format (Armageddon: Why don't we have the experts actually be complete numbskulls?; The Day After Tomorrow: Why don't we have the stranded family actually know what they are doing?). So at the end of the day, the reason that San Andreas and most other disaster flicks are barely worth a sideways glance is because they fit a paint-by-numbers formula which you can predict a mile away. Extra points of you can tell me the punchline to the following set-ups:

• The scientist says that "The biggest earthquake ever measured was a 9.5. That would be hard to top."
• The asshole step-dad says that he "never had kids because his buildings are his babies. Especially this one in the heart of San Francisco"
• The junior scientist says to the senior scientist: "We're reading a bunch of small quakes near the Hoover Dam. We should get the equipment up there, because, as they are only small, they won't cause too much damage."

So...job done right? Review can end here, you've seen this film a thousand times before and done better at that, so what else needs to be said?

Clocking off early from a job no-one pays you for is still a victory...right?

Well, the fact that San Andreas is derivative is enough to make it missable. What bears discussion, however, is that the movie descends from missable, into bad, into truly awful in a way that would be impressive, if it were not so painful - even for a disaster flick.

The stereotypical characters that appear in almost every disaster film are made laughably ridiculous in this movie. Dwayne Johnson as Ray, the overly-capable dad is, here, made so multi-talented that it is enough to believe that he could solve all the problems of this major natural disaster with one hand, while curing cancer with the other and doing a sudoku with his toes. He has complete mastery of every vehicle known to man (an individual set piece is given to him each behind the wheel of a car, helicopter, aeroplane and a speedboat), he has a strategic knowledge of the city of San Francisco even when flooded, despite being from L.A., and he has an apparent psychic connection with his family which allows him to know exactly where they are and how to get to them. Seriously, add a cape to this guy and you're looking at a full blown superher...WAITAMINUTE!

This is just another goddamn origin story, isn't it!?

The asshole step-dad/new boyfriend who is predictably killed off halfway through the movie is a full-on psychopath in this film. Played by Ioan Gruffudd, who is clearly there simply for the paycheck, rich architect Daniel Riddick not only does the standard cowardly boyfriend act of running away from everything from an earthquake to a heart murmur, but he also leaves his daughter-in-law for dead, trapped in a car (have fun explaining that one to mum), and actively pushes a complete stranger into the path of an oncoming tidal wave for literally no reason whatsoever. I suppose that it's supposed to build up to some kind of a catharsis when he is eventually killed off, but by the time he is dispatched, we haven't seen him for over an hour and is death is so quick and unceremonious that you can't help but think that the scriptwriters had simply forgotten he existed until the final few pages.

Finally, the "I saw this all coming" scientist, played by Paul Giamatti is A. not connected to the main plot of the film in any way except as "the guy who saw it all coming" and B. literally does not have a single line of dialogue which is not scientific exposition (with one exception: in the final few scenes of the film, he does take a moment to congratulate himself on a job well done for knowing what was going to happen, while surrounded by TV screens filled with the tens of millions of people who died because it happened anyway). I understand that you need to unload and explain phrases like "Seismology", "aftershock" and "tectonic plates" at some point, but there are more subtle ways of doing that than having a CalTech geology student put their hand up in a lecture to all but ask what an earthquake is.

These are particularly horrid offenders in the film, but are to say nothing of the delightfully British love interest who has very little to do except be delightfully British, his little brother who is there to be vulnerable (also, for any Game of Thrones fans wondering what Rickon Stark has been doing in his absence from the show - he's been hitting puberty with a crowbar and taking precisely zero acting lessons), and Carla Gugino as "Mom", who is there to wonder how on earth she could ever think to leave Dwayne Johnson.

On the subject of Dwayne Johnson, let's address the elephantine Samoan in the room. As the first ex-wrestler to ever make a real impact in the world of Hollywood, Dwayne Johnson has been trying throughout his career to be taken seriously as an actor. Unfortunately, his imposing physique and his, dare I say, cabaret background, have left him filling less respectable roles than he might of hoped.

In fairness, this came out alongside The Hurt Locker, so it only missed the Oscar by that much.

I, however, have always been a staunch defender of Johnson's acting chops and I think with more recent examples, such as Pain and Gain, he has shown that he really has come into his own as an actor. And while San Andreas will not be going on his showreel any time soon, his terrible outing in this film is less to do with him as an actor, and considerably more due to one of the worst scripts I have heard in a long, long time.

The dialogue doesn't bear much analysis. This film clearly cares much less about the writing than the action set pieces, so it is almost unsurprising to get vomit worthy lines such as: "We checked the data. Then we double checked it. Then we reset the equipment and triple checked it.", and "Things are getting really bad out there, aren't they./ Yes. Let's go." The dialogue is actually so bad in parts that as I sat in theatre, I could actually feel my command of the English language going not good to where I can't even do words now.

"But, Jamie!", I hear you cry, "If I want dialogue, I'll watch The Godfather, if I want original characters, I'll watch Fight Club. All I want is to see some landmarks get destroyed by a natural disaster!" Well, tragically, the film falls short on this as well. The one thing that a disaster flick must do well is the action set pieces, and San Andreas has none which are particularly noteworthy. Granted, an earthquake is not the most interesting of spectator events anyway - you can only watch so many skyscrapers melt into the Earth before it gets boring - but even then, I had a hard time connecting emotionally to anything that was going on in this film. One of the things that is generally quite effective in disaster films is that there is so much carnage going on that it is nothing short of a miracle that our heroes are surviving it all. What you then get, in the later scene when a side-character does die, is a sense that everyone is susceptible to the machinations of fate. If Chad Floodknower had been the last one to climb out of the car then he, not Ernest Bitpart, would have been the one to get swept away by the tidal wave.

We'll never forget you, Ernest Bitpart...

But this is completely nullified in San Andreas, as our heroes face numerous catastrophes that are blatantly unsurvivable. I'm not talking outrunning a tsunami here, I'm talking about driving up the side of tsunami in a speedboat. Once every lead character has arisen unscathed from a scene in which the audience thinks "Well, there's no way you wouldn't be dead now", there is simply no weight to the scenes where the audience is supposed to think "Ooh, I don't know if they can survive this one!" Not to mention, that it only makes more pointless the aforementioned millions of dead who were killed off in exactly the same situations that the heroes survived, simply because they weren't blessed with first names.

On top of this, the CGI is fairly lackluster. I'll admit that seeing the film in 3D didn't help, as every actor-on-greenscreen becomes actor-six-feet-in-front-of-greenscreen, but there's just no rush, no threat, no excitement.

I was, until the final moment of the film, bored. And that is really what kills this film: it is predictable, it is silly, it is boring. And for these sins alone, you should skip it. However, I wasn't bored when I left the theatre - I was angry. And I wanted to finish the review by explaining to you why. The film ends with our heroes looking out over the smoking wreckage of the Golden Gate Bridge, safe at last. Gugino turns to Johnson and asks "What now?" and Johnson responds "We rebuild". This uninspired and brainless line is representative of the film at large, but then we cut to something hanging from the wreckage of the bridge. It slowly unfurls itself and begins blowing in the breeze. It's an American flag. Fade to black. Credits. That's right people, for the last dying gasp of desperation of a rubbish film, they pull the patriotism card. Because, not satisfied with standing defiant in the face of foreign dictators and intangible concepts, America is now declaring war on Mother Nature herself. And I got angry. I got angry because it is wrong of the studios to think that they can bombard us with plagiarised stories, bad CG effects, unsympathetic characters, awful dialogue and uninteresting action scenes, and then believe that we'll be so mystified by the pride of 'Murica that we'll forget that what we've just watched was crap. Not all of us live there. Not all of us care. Most importantly, not all of us are as stupid as you seem to think we are.

"Of course you aren't! Hey, thanks for your money, by the way."

So if you do go and see this movie, and you do inevitably hate it, I want you to remember: It's not your fault. It's not my fault. It's not even Dwayne Johnson's fault. It's the San Andreas fault.

That's a wrap.