Film Review: 'San Andreas'

'It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when," Paul Giamatti tells a roomful of students at the start of San Andreas, quite literally the blockbuster of the year. He's a brilliant Cal Tech seismologist, and he's talking about the chances that another Big One - like the 9.1 quake that devastated Anchorage in 1964 - might hit.

But he could be talking about Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's character, Los Angeles Fire Department rescue chief Ray Gaines. It's not a matter of if he's going to save his wife, Emma (Carla Gugino), and their college-bound daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario), when the titular fault line rips California asunder. It's a matter of when.

You can be sure, however, that a whole mess of collapsing skyscrapers, exploding gas lines, gushing plumbing, crushed cars, crumbling landmarks, and panicky cries of "Oh, my God!" are going to happen before Ray and Emma and Blake reconnect, emerging bloody and bruised, but stronger for their ordeal.

Despite nearly two hours of loss of life and property, catastrophe, calamity, and clichés, San Andreas is awesome fun. Director Brad Peyton and his army of visual effects and digital artists have created a temblor tableau of wreckage in motion - L.A. high-rises swaying as they're designed to when the ground starts to rumble and heave, but then disintegrating in horrific piles of concrete, steel, and glass as the stress gets too much.

Happily, stress doesn't seem to be an issue for Johnson's Ray. Emma has handed him divorce papers and decided to share her abode with a millionaire developer (Ioan Gruffudd), who offers to take Blake to college when Ray is called to join the search-and-rescue mission after a quake hits the Hoover Dam. More problems: Ray's helicopter is on the fritz. And the weight of a family death still hangs over him, like a cloud over the San Fernando Valley.

Johnson, with a distinguished CV of Fast & Furiouses, crime, sci-fi, and historic action pics, is proving to be quite the actor. Brooding brows and bulging biceps are flexed in meaningful synchronicity. And what's not to like about a guy who exudes strength and smarts and a skill set that includes piloting copters, single-engine planes, and speedboats? His parachuting is pretty good, too: jumping from the sky with Emma in his arms and pinpointing their landing somewhere near second base at San Francisco's AT&T Park.

The City by the Bay has never looked less tourist-friendly than it does in San Andreas. But it's a couple of visiting Brits - earnest young architect Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) and his kid brother Ollie (Art Parkinson) - who join Blake as they try to navigate the carnage and the tsunamis and make their way to safety.

Safety? Ha!

San Andreas is about nature at its most murderous. Is man to blame for all of this? Climate change? Environmental pollution? Or pollution of the soul and revenge from on high?

In this gravity-defying family-first disaster pic, the fault is not with us humans, or with the gods. The fault is down there at the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, running 800-some miles up and down the California spine.

Just ask Professor Giamatti.

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