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Friday, May 29, 2015

MOVIE REVIEW San Andreas
 When The Rock Star Is Not One Earthquake But Two

Visual effects are the biggest star of "San Andreas".  Warner Brothers
       
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Friday, May 29, 2015

If nothing else, "San Andreas" is a disaster film of spectacular proportions.  Its pervasive visual effects are extremely potent and the sole linchpin upon which Brad Peyton’s drama stands.  “San Andreas” stands very uneasily - literally and figuratively - on its foundations as a father-daughter story that utilizes the infamous fault line as mass catastrophe to split California and unite a fractured family. 

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is the immovable object amidst millions of crumbling rocks of concrete — an irresistible avalanche of relentless force of devastating and incomprehensible destruction.  He is the metaphorical American flag that waves boldly and unceasingly, the cool head that doesn’t break a sweat as everyone else loses their proverbial lunch across Los Angeles and San Francisco as the world’s biggest earthquake hits.  Caltech earthquake scientist (Paul Giamatti) offers professorial play-by-play, but he like all else here is the redundant note borrowed from any number of epic earth-shattering flicks ("2012" among others.)

Carlton Cuse’s wafer-thin screenplay — its dialogue, poor and obvious throughout — crumbles under the weight of a story permeated by American exceptionalism - in this context the notion that one of its citizens, and only one, is equipped to save California from disintegrating into the Pacific Ocean.  Curiously Mr. Johnson’s biceps don’t even quiver during all of this cartoonish earthshaking.  (Plenty of cleavage from the film's women however, does.)  As Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter rescuer Chief Ray Gaines he is the epitome of manly cool.  His character’s very names suggest he's a ray of light in gaining a postponement of an impending divorce and redeeming himself for a tragic failure in his past.

Filmed entirely in Australia with a few exceptions, the simplistic “San Andreas” is an awesome spectacle of destruction but its human drama is forgettable because Mr. Cuse’s script disposes of its characters.  He does display the selfishness of human beings, many of whom in panic rush past men on fire or in distress.  Everything on display is too convenient, easy and lazy.  We know that Emma (Carla Gugino), who has been asked to move in with a rich coward (Ioan Gruffudd), will nonetheless hold on to her ex-husband for dear life as the world churns.  We know the family Gaines will be one again, even if California isn’t — destroyed by not one but two humongous earthquakes. 

Rocks fall from the start in gripping fashion.  Yet there’s a falseness and formulaic sway to this story and no less so because “San Andreas” is also oddly sanitized.  The onscreen media reports speak nothing about the mass casualties sure to result from all this shaking and quaking.  We see people literally flattened like Wile E. Coyote.  Yet not a word about casualties, even from Mr. Giamatti’s Remus-like scientist.  It’s a very strange juxtaposition. 

The American flag drapes from an unrecognizable Golden Gate Bridge in a corny, disingenuous and hollow manner.  This seismic theater is a curious and misleading equivalency — a subconscious West Coast retort and perhaps not-so-fictional supersizing of the Earth’s wrath — to the atrocities of September 11, 2001 on the East Coast.  It's so bizarre, gripping, tense and utterly empty.  A moment of product placement overload looms large early on as the Apple logos on Caltech students' laptops glow in unison in a scary way.  (And this review was typed on an Apple laptop as well.)

More troublesome is the vacuous racial imbalance that Hollywood’s new millennium has cast its lot with.  Ray’s daughters resemble neither Emma nor Ray — with ne'ery a hint they may be Black or biracial.  This whitewashing of a racially-diverse American family in “San Andreas” is retrograde in a 21st century where families are diverse, colorful and typical of what America — particularly families in California and elsewhere — look like.  It’s a Hollywood oddity that keeps Mr. Johnson, a Black man of biracial background, isolated in this film. 

The politics of this colorless camaraderie are glossed.  Neither Los Angeles nor San Francisco appear to have any Black residents whatsoever — save the one person (is she a tourist?) that Ray rescues just outside AT&T Park, the destruction of which for a San Francisco Giants fan like me is distressing.  The crumbling of what Giants radio broadcaster Jon Miller proudly hails as “the home of champions” feels like a cruel in-joke played by Angelenos, whose Chavez Ravine is not shown as an unsteady fortress.  That pesky, inevitable Los Angeles bias is confirmed with an early wobbling of the Hollywood sign -- which elicits a baleful expression from Ray in his helicopter flyover.  All this from a charismatic actor born just 30 miles from San Francisco.  Ah, the irony. 

Also with: Alexandra Daddario, Archie Panjabi.

"San Andreas" is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for intense disaster action and mayhem throughout, and brief strong language.  Its running time is one hour and 54 minutes.
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