There's a certain irony to Dwayne Johnson starring in "San Andreas"; in a sense, it's The Rock vs. the rocks.
If you find that pun bad, wait'll you get a load of The Rock's latest movie, in which he plays a search-and-rescue chopper pilot who abandons his post and steals a helicopter to embark on twin suicide missions to save his (soon to be ex-)wife (Carla Gugino) and daughter (Alexandra Daddario) rather than, I don't know, doing his job.
If that sounds cynical, I'm sorry. Wait, I take that back. I'm not sorry because that's the kind of movie this is — one that doesn't ask you to check your brain at the door so much as it sucks it out without your permission.
This is the kind of movie that won't think twice about obliterating the Golden Gate Bridge, packed to the gills with human life, and turn it into a cheer-worthy moment because someone we aren't supposed to like gets flattened along the way. It's one of the most manipulatively disgusting moments I remember in a movie since we were asked to cheer Chris Brown ambushing and murdering a police officer in "Takers" a few years back.
And before you dismiss me as a cynic, let me say first that I'm a longtime fan of Dwayne Johnson. I watched with glee week after week on televised WWF and WWE broadcasts, enrapt when he was on the screen, since he debuted there in 1996, and I've been an unabashed fan of many of his movies (OK, not so much "The Tooth Fairy").
And indeed he sits confidently in the driver's seat of this vehicle created for him by director Brad Peyton (who previously oversaw Johnson's "Journey 2"), asking us to believe in each action sequence, each one increasingly more ludicrous than the last and peaking when Johnson and Gugino drive a police speedboat over a tsunami wave, then use the same boat to drive through a building, as Johnson's "Fast and Furious" co-stars have done.
It may not top "2012" in terms of the size of the extinction-level event, but it manages to obliterate that film's record for idiotic resolutions to impossible situations.
There are subplots taken out of Chapter One of the screenwriter's playbook (you know that chapter, titled "Clichés You Should Avoid at All Costs"). Johnson and Gugino are estranged, and she has taken up with a new man (Ioan Gruffudd) who is way richer than Johnson.
Oh, and they are grieving the loss of a daughter who drowned in front of Johnson's character (I realize at this point I haven't referred to him by his character's name, Ray, but does it really matter?), and his surviving daughter is impossibly babe-alicious (and good God, is she; Daddario is absolutely stunning) and about to start college, only work gets in the way.
She's equal parts damsel and modern action heroine, a girl who knows just what to do in case of an earthquake that literally cuts California in half but who still, when the chips are down, needs her daddy. Let's say the two cancel themselves out.
I wanted to enjoy "San Andreas" on the same level as movies like "Independence Day," a pure, dumb-fun spectacle that in a sense follows the '90s " 'Die Hard'-on-a-..." model. Unfortunately, I just can't get past a movie that tells us that, oh yeah, millions of men, women and children die horrible, awful and painful deaths, but hey, if one guy can work out his marital problems, that's a good day.