San Andreas (2015)

Spoilers Ahead:

You will pray for the Big One after about a half hour of this brain dead special that makes Irwin Allen's bad Earthquake look like The Godfather. Sometimes it simplifies things, as a movie reviewer, to simply relay a typical scene that conveys the true stinking power of the narrative. The Rock, laying the smack down on the Bay's candy ass, is ascending a tsunami filled with debris with a supertanker looming above his head. The angle of ascension is near the side of Everest, as the containers begin falling all about him, he slightly swerves his motorboat with that incredibly powerful outboard engine. You know, they are putting it on the Orion Spacecraft; what power it has! Yes, the water is so filled with debris you could walk across it back to the city. Later, the Rock, revives his daughter about ten minutes after cardiac arrest due to drowning; hey, now we know who wrote the screenplay! Yes, young people, Earthquake was bad, I admit it. But see, other than the requisite gear validation scene at AT and T Park, where the Rock shows us not only can he steal other peoples' vehicles, fly over thousands of helpless people who might need his freaking help; he has a psychic ability to detect earthquakes. I don't know, maybe he is constipated and his bowels are sending messages to his tiny brain?

The rest of the entire film the giant city of San Francisco seems to be uninhabited as The Rock's daughter takes those poor English people all around to safety. Where would they be, you know, the people whose Empire ruled the world for hundreds of years? They just need some guidance, poor things. As in a series of movies too long for listing, the great power of gender superiority guides her, intuitively, to the moment where she almost perishes for the rest of the dumb asses who lack her genius. Besides the ghost town, what you will notice is the absence of all the injured, groaning, dying people like in Earthquake. The director was forced to do this because we might get peevish towards our putative hero if we noticed him blithely flying over suffering people with that empty helicopter of his, that, earlier in this classic, can fly perpendicularly. Of course it can! This is the Rock; the laws of physics should 'know their role and shut their hole.' One way narcissists deal with others' suffering is simply to erase it from their consciousnesses. Here, the streets are vacant like the theaters where this movie was playing at. We do not find the bleeding, impaled and shrapnel filled victims; come on, that is such a downer!

The Rock is almost laconic the entire movie which is a good thing, trust me. Look, I love Arnie's movies but the directors of the best (The Terminator) had the wisdom to limit his dialog. After the usual saintly husband enduring his philandering wife moment, whilst suffering in pure goodness, we get to that irrelevancy: you know, the giant earthquake? The bulk of the movie is the Rock and his wife flying above all the chaos with an empty helicopter looking for their offspring. On the ground, their daughter is still taking those poor dumb ass Brits to safety; sometimes, they start to speak up, she shows them how incredibly naughty that is. Please, just 'know your role', her knowledge of geography is equaled only by that of electronics. Want to know how bad this is? Earthquake has now metamorphosed into a masterpiece after watching this piece of crap. The CGI is so over the top and paired with empty streets, devoid of casualties, it intensifies the absurdity to Monty Python levels. See, I may not be a geologist, but if entire people filled office buildings fall to the ground, I think this might hurt quite a few people, just my guess here. I am only a philosopher, my bad.

With the exception of the people at the Baseball park, The Rock seems neither to really notice nor care about those other poor slobs who might need his help. Hello? Hey, you up there with the freaking helicopter could you possibly help us we are bleeding down here? See, the city is empty because existentially you are looking through the eyes of puerile narcissists for whom others' suffering and lives simply do not exist. I found this far more frightening than the movie, believe me. The characterizations are skin deep, the Rock seems in a coma for most of the movie. The effects are phony looking and the aftereffects utterly lacking in a scintilla of verisimilitude. One Simply Awful Movie. Q.E.D.