Allow me to declare myself as a disaster movie aficionado, which, as you can likely surmise, means I know my way around a Roland Emmerich feature. It’s neat to see a new entry added to this subegenre, courtesy of Brad Peyton, whose experience with disaster movies mainly extends to his 2010 film Cats & Dogs: Revenge of Kitty Galore, which was certainly a box office disaster. Now, he’s unleashing an earthquake on San Francisco, one which offers untold opportunities for cataclysmic mayhem.
At the center of all this chaos is Ray (Dwayne Johnson), a dad whose grappling with family issues, namely his ex-wife, Emma (Carla Gugino), moving on with her life, and also, wouldn’t ya know it, he’s also got a daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario) he wants to be a good father. In the pantheon of “well-meaning-but-struggling-disaster-movie-dad”, which includes Dennis Quaid in The Day After Tomorrow and John Cusack in 2012, Ray comes out on top mainly because Dwayne Johnson gives the character a level of personality the script doesn’t always provide.
Johnson gives Ray his real life charm in scenes where he’s just trying to be a good dad to Blake, or when he’s trying to calm down a civilian caught in a perilous avalanche scenario. The latter situation stems from Ray being a helicopter pilot who rescues people in natural disasters. His level of expertise during these sort of ordeals adds a nice layer to a family tragedy that Ray was heavily involved in, and Johnson deserves legitimate kudos for playing moments where his character wrestles with that aforementioned tragedy in a carefully nuanced manner.
The rest of the cast is filled with archetypes, most of which are presented in the most traditional approach possible, Emma primarily getting very little development throughout the course of the plot despite easily getting the most amount of screentime for someone that’s not The Rock. Ioan Grufford plays another disaster movie standby, “the-douchey-boyfriend”, a personality whose prone to randomly murdering people in the midst of an Earthquake. At least Blake gets the neat trait of utilizing all the various knowledge of surviving natural disasters that her dad has taught her over the years during this entire ordeal.
Blake becomes a Macguffin of sorts within the plot, as the main story revolves around Ray and Emma try to find their daughter amongst all sorts of earthquake related shenanigans. It’s a simple plot, one bolstered by a number of obstacles (a tsunami, faulty planes, etc.) that occasionally leave the film feeling episodic and contrived. But the simpler plot structure at least allows for more focus on Rays family drama and CGI driven spectacle. Neither element really works perfectly (especially the former), but it’s a smart storytelling choice that ensures for a lack of extraneous material in the movie.
To put it simply, and to utilize my wealth of disaster movie knowledge, allow me to note how San Andreas is no Independence Day or Armageddon, but more along the lines of the breezy 2012. However you react to that sentence should give you a good picture of whether or not you’ll be shaken up by San Andreas.