San Andreas (2015)

* ½ out of ****

I am no fan of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I think he is a terrible actor, bereft of charm and virtually without any screen charisma whatsoever. It doesn't help that the characters he plays onscreen have roughly the same intellect as a bag of wet hair. Yet for some reason Hollywood has decided to make him into the next Arnie – a big muscleman that, by all rights shouldn't be a movie star, but is. Unfortunately, The Rock couldn't carry Arnie's jockstrap.

“San Andreas” isn't an utterly awful film , it's just another run-of-the-mill bad movie. Johnson is “Ray Gaines”, an ex-military pilot now heading a helicopter rescue crew in LA. He is almost divorced from wife Emma (Carla Gugino), and is emotionally shut down since the loss of his daughter who drowned on a rafting trip. He has one other daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario) who he would do anything for, and when a series of massive earthquakes rocks California, Ray and the ex take off for San Francisco to rescue her.

I have read that some were impressed by the CGI in “San Andreas” - I wonder what they could be thinking. It is TERRIBLE. Rather than using CGI to augment scenes, many sequences are fully CGI, leaving them seeming fully animated. There is a scene right at the start of the film of a car tumbling down a mountainside that is so poorly done it's almost a cartoon. There is some good CGI in the film, but the bad CGI is so bad you can't get past it.

Paul Giametti is the movie's sole beacon of light as a Cal Tech professor who is trying to warn people to evacuate before the big one comes, but his role is far too small and insignificant. Johnson tries to carry the action as he pushes farther into the rubble looking for Blake, but he has too little to work with and not enough personality to do it. There are some interesting scenes, but by-and-large we've seen it all before. This movie is so reminiscent of older disaster films that I can't even think of exactly what it reminds me of. “Earthquake”, “The Posieden Adventure”, “Daylight” and countless others all seem to have greatly influenced the tone of the story and some of the actual scenes.

I won't rip this movie fully – if you have nothing better to do “San Andreas” will pass the time. But it isn't very good and if you have something better to do, you won't be missing anything you'll later regret by not bothering with this film.