San Andreas is a b-movie that desperately wants to be taken seriously.
The film is at its best when it engages with its corniness. The characters make terrible baseball-related puns as the world falls to pieces. Our protagonist has a clever idea inspired by a passer-by’s choice of headware. Paul Giamatti sells his seismological terror. A desperate mother decides to plough a boat through a window into the room where her daughter is already close to death. The disaster relief efforts are interrupted so that the news reporters can thank the team of hard-working seismologists who predicted the disaster whole minutes before it happened.
Pilot error?
However, the film has no real sense of tone or mood. The script longs for a deeper resonance, and so aims a lot higher than it can actually hit. The main characters spend most of the disaster working through the death of a child several years earlier, with cliché flashbacks striving for heart-breaking but landing on groan-inducing. Plot points are dutifully and awkwardly set up, with characters spending most of the first act spewing obvious foreshadowing more than meaningful dialogue.
The result is a mismatched and uneven piece of work, a disaster movie in more than the way that the production team intended.
“Um, I found a plot hole…”
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: disaster movie, Dwayne Johnson, film, Movie, non-review review, review, san andreas, san andreas fault, the rock | 4 Comments »
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