Movie Review: San Andreas


Movies like San Andreas are hard to rate because I automatically want to give it a higher rating solely based on the quality of the special effects (which were fantastic in this film, as you might imagine). However, one still has to take into account the actual plot and storyline, as well.

Ray (Dwayne Johnson) works for the L.A. Fire Department as a chopper pilot and emergency rescuer. He visits his soon-to-be ex-wife, Emma (Carla Gugino), to see his daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario), whom he will be driving back to college the next day, but an earthquake in Nevada soon derails his plans. Lawrence (Paul Giamatti), a seismologist who works for Cal Tech, is in the middle of the quake when it happened, and soon he sees a pattern emerging: the quake was within the San Andreas fault line area, and soon massive earthquakes will pummel the entire California coastline. Ray must then find and save Emma, as well as Blake, in downtown San Francisco, while California is being pummeled with quakes, as well as a tsunami as a result of the quake.

This was a pretty scary movie, and I'd recommend seeing it in 3D, because the 3D was fantastic. There's two separate but interlinked storylines going on: that of Ray and his family, and that of Giamatti's character at Cal Tech, whose life work has been trying to predict earthquakes. Although the action scenes in this movie are great, some of the plot lines are a little far-fetched, and there were a few cheesy moments as well at which the audience groaned/laughed.

Yes, see this movie, and see it in 3D if you can. I'll pretty much see anything that "The Rock" (Dwayne Johnson) is in, and he gave a great performance here. Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, and Paul Giamatti also turn in good performances here, despite the (sometimes) ridiculous script, and Ioan Gruffudd also has a small part here, as Gugino's character's rich engineer boyfriend. I'm headed to L.A. for a blogging conference soon, but I'm very glad that's not until September, as San Andreas paints a very scary picture of what could happen if the entire fault line decided to "go off" at the same time; an unlikely turn of events, for sure, but still one that is nonetheless frightening to watch on-screen.

San Andreas is in theaters today, May 29th, and is rated PG-13 with a runtime of 114 minutes. 3.5 stars out of 5.

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