Rating: (Contains slight spoilers, but you genuinely won't care) Normally, accurately reviewing unapologetic rubble-porn like San Andreas is difficult to get right. There will be the school of people who rightfully disregard it as trite CGI trash, with everything made out of computers apart from the people, who are compromised of ham and cheese respectively. There will be the fans who rightfully lap it up as loud, compelling, colourful escapism with a few choice moments of artfully crafted property damage. And there's the people who think The Rock is great and like looking at The Rock, thank you very much. They are also correct. Usually, that makes a useful review of such a film impossible, but in the case of San Andreas, it's actually very simple. If you liked Roland Emmerich's 2012, you will enjoy San Andreas. The similarities are distractingly omnipresent. A prolonged natural disaster splits the ground, knocks over skyscrapers, causes sweeping tsunamis, all as an earnest man tries to save his estranged wife and child (rich stepfather thrown in for good measure), in California, against a deafening wall of unconvincing CG as a slightly uptight scientist watches monitors and says things "but that means..." and "God help us all." This isn't to say that the computer effects are necessarily bad, just ineffectual. The carnage is so total, with buildings crumbling to ruins every ten minutes, thousands of lives smudged from existence with every wide shot, that it all become numbing. It's the old maxim: when the stakes are so high as to be incomprehensible, there are no stakes. California is beautifully torn apart, but the buildings may as well be empty for all you'll care. Empathy or involvement is lacking throughout San Andreas as a whole. The film has a very small central cast, almost the entire running time following the mishaps of one family struggling to reunite through countless hardships. Scenes of The Rock and his ex-wife (Carla Gugino) dodging disasters while searching for their daughter (Alexandra Daddario) intercut with scenes of her dodging disasters with a foppish British 'hunk' and his insufferable British wiseacre little brother. This serves to make the story lean, but unfortunately the family drama is so cliched and anaemic (The Rock won't open up about a tragedy in his past), tacked on and meaningless (the stepdad turns evil on a freakin' dime) or hilariously blunt (Carla Gugino literally asks out of nowhere "what do you think our lives would be like if our other daughter hadn't drowned"), it makes the film feel insubstantial, emotionally hollow and unintentionally funny when it tries to be sincere. However, for a disaster movie, being so bad that it's funny might work in the film's favour. It stays on the right side of knowing, never drifting too far to be become po-faced, unlike 2012. The film improves over Emmerich's in three other areas as well. First, the chaos is all limited to one general area, which keeps the focus tight, and the running time mercifully under 2 hours. Second, the female characters are actually made out to be capable. Sure, the main onus is on The Rock to save the day, but both wife and daughter stock characters get a handful of good lines and moments of take-charge dominance. And thirdly, it's got The Rock in it. Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson is an action star in a very traditional sense. He has such presence, such physical power and such easy charisma that he makes everything sillier, and therefore much more palatable, by his very presence. His first line in the movie, "Just doing my job, ma'am" elicits warm laughter from an audience who know they're in safe hands. He doesn't need a character, he doesn't need a backstory, he's The Rock, and he flexes a car door off its hinges before driving a boat up the cresting wave of a tsunami. This doesn't crush the audience's suspension of disbelief, because like Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Statham before him, he is one of the acceptable supermen. The supporting cast fare less well. Paul Giamatti does his best to add puppy-eyed gravitas to his scenes, but he's short-changed by being forced to spend the majority of the film locked in a room being shocked and saddened by things he works out on a laptop. Ioan Gruffudd adds only unintended comedy as the cowardly stepdad. The two British characters are gratingly over-sincere, especially the tiny one, who suffers from a terminal case of Know-It-All Syndrome. Bafflingly, Kylie Minogue turns up for one tiny scene then disappears completely. There are a lot of missed opportunities and all add to the film's lack of weight. This is ultimately the best way to describe San Andreas: weightless. For a movie concerned entirely with destruction on a massive scale, it feels lightweight, empty, not a full meal, much like the popcorn that will be consumed in droves by the fans ready to consume Just Another One Of Those Movies. It may be slightly better than 2012, but for its knowing charm, constant action, and also having The Rock in it, San Andreas is Just Another One Of Those Movies, and you already know if you're going to like it. San Andreas is released worldwide on 28th May.
