Movie Review: San Andreas

Before I start this review, I would like to say Thank-you to my Grandma Lybbert who is visiting this week and helped me edit this post. Grandma Lybbert, you rock.

The movie San Andreas starts out with a girl driving while drinking water and talking on her phone. But while on the phone, she drives off a cliff. Then a rescue helicopter comes with Ray (played by Dwayne Johnson), two other guys and a TV crew, which is filming them rescue her. They end up rescuing her after one of the rescue guys gets his arm stuck under the car (he gets out too)

Ray is an LA Fire Department helicopter-rescue pilot with an amazing track record for saves. He has a troubled life at home as his wife Emma (played by Carla Gugino) wants a divorce to live with some other guy named Daniel Reddick (played by Ioan Gruffudd) and his daughter Blake (played by Alexandra Daddario) is going off to school and wants to use Daniels private plane to get there.

We are also introduced to a scientist named Lawrence Hayes (played by Paul Giamatti) who is predicting earthquakes. They make some kind of breakthrough but it is apparently too late because this massive earthquake hits the Hoover Dam area they are at and continues from there.

There is a lot of action in this movie but almost too much action. They talk about the big one but what it was was a lot of smaller ones that turned into a big one?  It’s like being on a roller coaster that goes from loop to loop to drop to loop to water to loop… you get the point.  If you like disaster movies, this one gives you a lot of it.

I also find that the actors did the best they could with the script they were given but the characters are poorly developed. It is a typical cookie cutter plot in Hollywood for movies like this to have a plot where someone tries to save their family rather than everyone else and I would have liked to have seen them take a different approach.

The special effects were awesome to watch and they really maximized the use of 3D graphics. I also liked the camera work and angles to really bring the audience into the action.

Over all I rate this movie 8.2/10 for great casting of the Rock as the Hero and great effects, but poor story plot and lack of one major climax.