In a sentenceDwayne Johnson commandeers a helicopter, a plane and a boat to find one daughter while several million Californians fend for themselves
Ray Gaines (Dwayne Johnson) flies a rescue helicopter for the Los Angeles fire department. His wife Emma (Carla Gugino) has filed for divorce and is moving in with Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffudd), a San Francisco property developer; their daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) is about to leave for university. Ray plans to drive her north himself, but a tremor at the Hoover Dam, where seismologist Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) is testing a method of predicting earthquakes, calls him away, and Daniel flies Blake to San Francisco instead. There she meets Ben Taylor (Hugo Johnstone-Burt), an Englishman in town for a job interview, and his young brother Ollie (Art Parkinson). Then the San Andreas fault gives way along its whole length, and Ray and Emma set off north to find their daughter.
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Brad Peyton flattens Los Angeles and San Francisco with real skill and a rooftop pool we will not forget, then asks us to care about one family’s divorce. Johnson and Giamatti hold it up; the script keeps letting go.
Brad Peyton’s San Andreas takes 114 minutes to break California in half, and for most of them it is good at the breaking. The idea, from a story by Jeremy Passmore and Andre Fabrizio, is the old one: a record earthquake hits the West Coast, and we follow a handful of people through it. Carlton Cuse’s screenplay narrows that handful to one family with a divorce to mend. The buildings come down convincingly. The marriage does not.
Ray Gaines (Dwayne Johnson) flies a rescue helicopter for the Los Angeles fire department, and the film opens with him winching a woman out of a car hanging over a canyon edge, which is what he will be doing for the next two hours. His wife Emma (Carla Gugino) has served him divorce papers and is moving in with a property developer, Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffudd). Their daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) is off to university in San Francisco. Johnson plays all of this quietly, as a big man who has decided to be hurt in private, and he is better at it than the script requires.
Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti), a seismologist, has built a model that can predict earthquakes and tests it at the Hoover Dam at the wrong moment. Giamatti is the other reason to stay. He plays Hayes as a tired man who has been right for years and is sorry about it, and the film has the sense to stand him before a screen and let him say frightening things slowly. His scenes with Will Yun Lee as Dr Kim Park and Archie Panjabi as the reporter Serena Johnson are the only ones where anybody appears to be thinking.
The destruction is the film, and it is handled with care. Barry Chusid’s production design gives Los Angeles glass towers to fold and San Francisco a waterfront to lose, and Steve Yedlin keeps the camera at street level or inside the helicopter, so the scale comes from looking up or down. When Ray flies to a rooftop to pull Emma off a collapsing tower, and the pool froths and tips its water over the edge, we sat forward and stopped hearing the dialogue. It is the best image in the film, and Bob Ducsay holds it long enough. Andrew Lockington’s score pounds under all of it, mostly at the right moments.
What does not work is the dialogue, and the shape the film gives the catastrophe. Cuse’s lines mean precisely what they say and the actors deliver them as if they know it. Worse, the film has decided that of the millions in two cities, four matter, and arranges the disaster around their reunion. Buildings fall on strangers so that Ray and Emma can discuss their marriage in a helicopter. By the second hour we were bored, then irritated at being bored while a city sank, because the film kept cutting away to check whether the Gaineses had made up yet.
Daddario carries the San Francisco half with Hugo Johnstone-Burt as Ben Taylor and Art Parkinson as his younger brother Ollie. Theirs is the lightest strand and the most watchable, because Blake is allowed to be competent rather than carried and Parkinson gets the few jokes Cuse wrote. Gruffudd is handed a coward and plays him. Kylie Minogue appears as his sister Susan for one scene and is then forgotten. Wendy Chuck’s costumes stay sensibly torn and dusty throughout.
Against the disaster films it copies, the 1974 Earthquake above all, it is better built and less interested in people. Those films were crowded, and the crowd was the point: you watched a dozen strangers and waited to see which of them the building would take. This one has a family and a seismologist, and once you notice how carefully it looks after them the suspense drains out, with an hour still to run.
See it for the pool, for Giamatti, and for what the sea does to the Golden Gate Bridge, which we will leave you to discover. See it at home, where you can talk over the dialogue without missing anything. The 12A is right: a great deal falls down and almost none of it bleeds.
Most critics agree on what San Andreas does well and what it does badly; they differ only on which matters more. The effects draw praise almost everywhere, with the collapsing skyscrapers and the tsunami at the Golden Gate Bridge named most often. Dwayne Johnson is the other point of agreement: even reviews that dislike the film credit his steadiness, and a few find him surprisingly gentle. Paul Giamatti picks up mentions as the best thing in it.
The reservations cluster on the script and the family drama, which most find thin and an awkward fit for the destruction around them. From there the spread is wide. A minority enjoy the silliness in the spirit of 1970s disaster films; a larger group find it numbing, with Little White Lies calling it dull and Deadline unintentionally funny. Slant goes further, calling the film cynical for using mass death as a backdrop to reuniting a family, and Empire and Eye for Film object to its women being reduced to victims awaiting rescue.
Sexton finds it a thrilling, satisfying disaster movie, though its dialogue is unremarkable. He particularly praises Dwayne Johnson’s understated, gentle performance.
Read the full review →The review finds the film a predictable, overstuffed disaster movie that is entertaining largely because of Dwayne Johnson. It praises the jaw-dropping CGI and Johnson’s screen presence, while noting the screenplay can cause audience fatigue.
Read the full review →Bradshaw finds the film spectacularly silly and entertaining, recalling the pleasures of 1970s disaster movies. He singles out the rooftop pool frothing like a Jacuzzi as a memorable visual moment.
Read the full review →The accessible page identifies this as a review, but provides no verdict. Its specific praise or complaint is unavailable because the article is paywalled.
Read the full review →The accessible page does not reveal the critic’s verdict. Its headline describes Johnson rushing to rescue a collapsing world, but provides no evaluative detail.
Read the full review →The page could not be accessed, so the critic’s verdict and specific praise or complaint are unavailable. The URL identifies this as a RogerEbert.com review of the 2015 film.
Read the full review →
The Towering InfernoThe crowded model this film copied, with a dozen strangers and a lift shaft.
The Wave · not reviewed yetA Norwegian fjord, one small town, and a disaster film that counts its dead.
Aftershock · not reviewed yetFeng Xiaogang’s Tangshan earthquake drama, where the quake ends early and the grief does not.
The ImpossibleThe 2004 tsunami through one family, with Naomi Watts in a hospital bed.
TwisterWeather as monster, a divorce to mend, and far better jokes.
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