Critic’s Rating : 3.5 Star.

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Paul Giamatti, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Hugo Johnstone-Burt.

Direction: Brad Peyton.

Producer: Beau Flynn, Hiram Garcia, Tripp Vinson.

Written: Andre Fabrizio, Jeremy Passmore.

Genre: Action.

Duration: 114 Minutes.

Here is a disaster movie which may have its plot on shaky grounds but stands solid on the basis of sheer edge-of-the-set action. Dwayne Johnson is not the man for cerebral outings. This means that his scowl, tattooed biceps and alpha-male persona are at home in the crumbling Californian cityscape.

As if his badassery is not a brand among the audiences yet, a character establishing moment where his Chief Raymond Geines rescues a car crash survivor does the trick. It is quite an opening, from the beginning of the horrific crash till the close shave at the eleventh hour. The action is filmed by a TV reporter crew which serves to be the connecting arc between Raymond and Caltech’s Professor Lawrence Heynes’ (Paul Giamatti) track.

If the former is frantically searching for his family when calamity strikes, the latter is predicting nature’s patterns and is giving bleak doomsday pronouncements regarding The Big One. The professor explains that San Andreas is the demarcation between two tectonic plates and is the spine of California. “Get out,” he addresses his TV audience. “Now. If you can’t, find something to get under or hold on to. Your life will depend on it. (beat) May God be with you.”

 

This and other seismology points are given, since exposition is the price the makers pay to avoid making a completely mindless entertainer. San Andreas succeeds in being one anyway and that in no way is a mark against it. There is family drama, formulaic contrivances and an obligatory romance. It may be convenient writing but what is a popcorn film without its timely deus ex machinas?

San Andreas is like a morbid Murphy’s Law. Anything that can happen does happen on a fantastical scale that surpasses the predictions of real life seismologists. The Geines family manages to be simultaneously lucky and unlucky in one day. (A fine time for secondary hero Ben Taylor (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) to have a job interview.) San Andreas is a big screen film with an abundant display of buildings collapsing like dominoes and going up in flames as protagonists fly through an opening in a helicopter.

 

Such madness. Much fun. Ignoring the “AMURRICA” patriotism the final shot invokes, the film is an engrossing, loose cannon romp which makes for a recommended weekend watch.