7 Ups And 9 Downs From San Andreas

7. The Family Plot Is Basically A Terrible Soap Opera

It's been obvious from the trailers that San Andreas was going to take the typical disaster movie route of trying to inject a family survival plot into all the carnage, what with Johnson's Ray desperately trying to save his wife, and then his daughter. As such there's a ton of drama leading up to his successful rescue of his family, including Ray's implied estrangement from his daughter, the breakdown of his marriage, and as is later revealed, the fact that they lost their first daughter, Mallory, in a rafting accident which Ray took her on. All these hilariously unconvincing scenes do is distend the running time out by another 15-20 minutes: it's tough to imagine that anyone wrote it honestly thinking that they would make audiences care about these "people", who are pretty much just shells and nothing more. When so little effort is made to develop the humans, why even bother at all? It's more efficient to just let the carnage kick off with the most minimal of introductions. It's not like anyone watching this really cared about the human stakes anyway.