San Andreas

The Dwayne Johnson starrer San Andreas is a collection of Hollywood clichés if you have seen all those world ending movies that released in the recent past. A very intimidating scenario visualized without giving much significance to the alarming nature of the situation, the movie is just a repetition of colossal damage soaked in a very lame story.

Ray Gaines is a rescue helicopter pilot. His married life is in the verge of divorce. The movie begins with a day in his on duty life and gradually progresses to that day where a massive earthquake strikes that area resulting in the complete demolition of a dam. It was just the beginning and the massiveness of the coming earthquakes was more terrifying. How Ray manages to save his family in the midst of all this is what the movie telling us.

It is sad to see an industry like Hollywood struggling to get a good story. Rolland Emmerich’s 2012 was also a story that followed the same pattern that had a man saving his family and he was also on the verge of divorce (or already divorced). And somewhere in this Dwayne Johnson episode, you can sense a bit of Liam Neeson of Taken (Supercop Dad and a smart daughter). The only place director Brad Peyton has managed to do something is in imagining the situation from a news paper perspective. We have seen a lot of movies in the past that had the similar scenario, but in San Andreas you won’t feel that the main characters had struggled a lot to get things done.

Dwayne Johnson is okay in his usual muscle showing avatar. Alexandra Daddario was good in her character. Carla Gugino was also kind of okay in her character. Nothing much to be said about the rest of the cast as none got any good roles worth mentioning.

Brad Peyton’s making is much focused on the visual effects. There is no real freshness in the story part of the movie. Screenplay focuses more on giving a reason to this mess rather than narrating it through the characters and situations. The imaginations are a bit crazy and the visual effects aren’t completely overwhelming. Most of the visual effects sequences in the beginning of the movie (the ones you have seen in trailers) somewhere lacks that final polishing. The dialogues are dull.

On the whole San Andreas is just a good product for the demo reel of its visual effects company. The rating is 2/5 for this underwhelming disaster management thriller. At the end Johnson says “We will rebuild”, and we will be like “Yeah! So that Michael Bay can destroy it again.”