Brad Peyton

In San Andreas (2015), Brad Peyton takes 114 minutes to break California in half, and for most of them he is good at the breaking. Los Angeles and San Francisco come apart, and the buildings come down convincingly. There is a rooftop pool in that film we have not forgotten. What never comes down convincingly is the marriage the script has placed in front of the earthquake, a divorce to be mended between tremors.

He did not begin with skylines. His first notice came from a short, Evelyn: The Cutest Evil Dead Girl (2002), a gothic comedy, followed by a claymation television series he created, What It's Like Being Alone (2006). Both are odder and darker than anything he has made since. The features began with Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (2010), and the turn came two years later with Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012), the first of three films with Johnson. San Andreas was the second and Rampage (2018) the third, with Incarnate (2016) between them. Since then he has co-created and directed a television series, Daybreak (2019), and directed and produced Atlas (2024), a science fiction action film.

He has said, "I put theme and the emotion first," and we think he means it. The trouble is that the emotion is always the same one, a family or a friendship under strain, and it is built more cheaply than the destruction around it. In San Andreas, Carlton Cuse's screenplay narrows a record earthquake to one household, and Johnson and Giamatti hold the film up while the writing keeps letting go. We admired the demolition and felt nothing for the divorce, and we are fairly sure that is the wrong way round. Most critics found the same shape in Rampage: thin plotting in the service of escalating set-pieces, forgiven as deliberate B-picture fun. We have not reviewed it, so we will leave that there.

He keeps a crew. Andrew Lockington has scored four of his films, Bob Ducsay has cut two, Beau Flynn has produced three and Johnson has fronted three, which makes Peyton a reliable company director who delivers what the poster promises. He names the Spielberg and Cameron films of the 1980s and 1990s as his models, and the comparison is useful because those films made us care about the people before anything fell on them. Peyton drops the building first and hopes the caring follows. If someone ever hands him a script with a marriage as well engineered as its skyline, we would like to see what he does with it. Until then, watch him for the falling buildings, and find something to do with your hands during the talking.