SAN ANDREAS (2015) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

SAN ANDREAS (2015) moviE

Genre             |  Action Thriller

Classification   |   M

Running time   |   114 minutes

Released         |   28 May 2015

cast

Dwayne Johnson ... Raymond Gaines
Carla Gugino ... Emma Gaines
Alexandra Daddario ... Blake Gaines
Ioan Gruffudd ... Daniel Riddick
Archie Panjabi ... Serena Johnson
Paul Giamatti ... Dr. Lawrence Hayes
Hugo Johnstone-Burt ... Ben Taylor
Art Parkinson ... Ollie Taylor
Will Yun Lee ... Dr. Kim Park
​Kylie Minogue ... Susan Riddick

director

Brad Peyton

writer

​Carlton Cuse ... (screenplay)
 
Andre Fabrizio ... (story) &
Jeremy Passmore ... (story)
 
Carlton Cuse
Andre Fabrizio

cinematographer

​Steve Yedlin

music

​Andrew Lockington

film editor

​Bob Ducsay

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box office result

Worldwide             $​​​​473,990,832  

Australia                 $​​​​​6,734,388 ​

North America       $​​​​155,190,832

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the best dialogue

Lawrence Hayes: It will be so big, that even though it's happening here in California, you will feel it on the East Coast.
Lawrence Hayes: [looking directly into the zooming camera] Now I cannot emphasize this enough to the people of San Francisco: You need to get out. And I mean now. And if you can't, you need to find any means possible to drop, cover, and hold on. Because your life is gonna depend on it. God be with you.

Raymond Gaines: This is not a normal day.

Margie: I told you we should've gone the other way.
Herb: Because you knew this was gonna happen?

SAN ANDREAS (2015) MOVIE IMAGES

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Posters

SAN ANDREAS (2015) STORY SYNOPSIS

​A seemingly ideal day turns disastrous when California's notorious San Andreas fault triggers a devastating, magnitude 9 earthquake, the largest in recorded history. As the Earth cracks open and buildings start to crumble, Ray Gaines (Dwayne Johnson), an LAFD search-and-rescue helicopter pilot, must navigate the destruction from Los Angeles to San Francisco to bring his estranged wife (Carla Gugino) and their only daughter (Alexandra Daddario) to safety.

SAN ANDREAS (2015) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 28 May 2015
​Pop Movee Rating ⭐⭐⭐

Director Brad Peyton delivers Disaster with a capital 'D' in San Andreas, his new action film that stars Dwayne Johnson and sees America's West Coast laid to waste by Mother Nature herself! Once upon a time, audiences knew exactly what they were getting into when they went to a movie starring Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson. If you're a fan of his films, you'll be glad to know that San Andreas follows a well-established formula, including a keen focus on his bulging biceps and near superhuman feats of physical prowess. For those not turned on so much by the big guy's machismo, San Andreas provides the kind of mindless entertainment that allows viewers to check their brains at the cinema kiosk!

Johnson plays Ray Gaines, a Middle East war veteran who has returned home to become a successful helicopter rescue pilot with the Los Angeles Fire Department. Events degenerate pretty quickly, as Carlton Cuses's script uses Paul Giamatti's Earthquake boffin to reel off the necessary exposition to leave the audience in no doubt that the "Big One" is on its way. To reinforce this, the story gives the audience a prelude of things to come with the destruction of the Hoover Dam after a series of small earth tremors suddenly become one massive quake. At this point, San Andreas is off and racing! (Or, is that tremoring… shuddering… It’s hard to say…)

Carla Gugino, playing Johnson’s estranged wife, and Alexandra Daddario, as his daughter, become the focus of rescue efforts, first in Los Angeles and then in San Francisco. Both characters exist to justify Johnson’s efforts in the face of unrelenting mass destruction wrought by the two mega Earthquakes featured in the story. Besides these two actresses doing part of the dramatic lifting, there’s not much else on show. Ioan Gruffudd plays a spineless building developer who is connected to Gugino’s character early in the film. There’s also a bizarre cameo from Kylie Minogue, who literally takes a wrong turn at an inopportune time in the film. Hugo Jonstone-Burt and Art Parkinson are a couple of brothers who join Daddario’s character in the San Francisco section of the story and add absolutely zero value to proceedings. The Good Wife’s Archie Panjabi brings a little bit of respectability to Giamatti’s performance, as she manages to tease some comprehension out of his erratic, mumbling antics. Not to disappoint, but there’s not Academy Awards in sight here.

As expected with a film about a cataclysmic natural disaster, the volume of destruction manifest in San Andreas is at over-load levels and the audience is incapable of taking in every-last piece of what the visual effects technicians have put up on the screen. Like so many Northern Hemisphere Summer blockbusters that appear between the start of May and the end of August each year, San Andreas is comfortably comfortable to forsake hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of anonymous souls for the sake of its leading cast members. As long as these good folk make it out alive, then everything else has been worth the sacrifice. Director Brad Peyton makes a special point of this toward the end of the film, with a patriotic reminder that (no matter what the threat) the citizens of the United States will never yield to adversity! (Except for everyone who died.)

With all of this in mind, San Andreas still rates as a guilty pleasure that is not that hard to like despite all of its short-comings. Living up to his alter-ego of ‘The Rock’, Johnson anchors the film and even stretches his acting range to help the more accomplished Gugino have some emotional pay-off in her scenes. The unrelenting destruction aside, San Andreas doesn’t take itself too seriously.  Peyton has constructed a two-hour popcorn-munching disaster soapie that would bring a tear to Irwin Allen’s eye. It’s premise is almost beyond ridiculous, its characters are largely one-dimensional and it really doesn’t have a point, BUT (and it’s a big BUT…) San Andreas has a fair amount of heart and, for the most part, keeps the viewer engaged even at its corniest. (Believe me, you’ll know that moment when it arrives…) It’s definitely worth taking in on the Big Screen!

SAN ANDREAS (2015) USEFUL LINKS

​San Andreas (film) - Wikipedia
​San Andreas (2015) - IMDb
​San Andreas (2015) - Rotten Tomatoes

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