A rocky ride with the Rock & co

Film reviews

San Andreas
English, U/A, Director: Brad Peyton
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Paul Giamatti, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Ioan Gruffud, Hugo Johnstone-Burt, Art Parkinson and Archie Panjabi

His first two films were both sequels—to “Cats & Dogs” and “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”—but director Brad Peyton shows with “San Andreas” that he has what it takes to be in the big league, with the Michael Bays and Roland Emmerichs. However, the climb is steep, as was amply evident from this disaster film that packs a punch, but not enough heart.

Cal-Tech geologist Lawrence (the wonderfully raspy-voiced Giamatti) loses a colleague while trying to validate a quake-predicting model at Hoover dam in Nevada. He comes back to college, and decides to talk to a TV reporter (Panjabi) about his findings, and how the entire San Andreas fault could be sitting on a fuse-lit seismic powder keg.

Meanwhile, war-veteran-turned-fire-department-pilot Raymond “Ray” Gaines (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) learns that his wife Emma is moving in with her boyfriend Daniel Riddick (Gruffud), who also offers to take the now-separated couple's daughter Blake (Daddario) to San Francisco because Ray is called to help in the post-quake rescue ops.

However, our Lawrence predicts more quakes at Los Angeles that will shake up San Francisco real bad. They do, and when a dazed Daniel abandons a trapped Blake, brothers Ben (Johnstone-Burt) and Ollie (a delightfully precocious Parkinson) rescue her.

Whether Ray reaches his daughter, whether all of them make out alive, and whether the professor can save lives by predicting quakes forms the crux of the film.

“San Andreas” is a 3D treat, with quite a smattering of emotional scenes, but they never crystallise into something substantial. The disasters strike like tidal waves, including one that actually *is* a tidal wave, but the edge-of-the-seat moments lack that little extra to make the audience cheer or despair.

Some of the screenplay and dialogues seems contrived, and some scenes seem just too implausible.

 How are multiple characters still aware of their surroundings and mobile after several realistic skull-shattering bangs? And some of the buildings were clearly constructed by Michael Bay himself!

This film is watchable mostly for its impressive visuals, and for giving the audience a sense of what it could have felt like at the epicentre of the Nepal earthquake this April.