This may sound tasteless but this is the rare film that finds a way to make Earthquakes boring.
What Works: The Rock does what he can, and Carla Gugino isn’t half-bad as the female lead, and the few scenes with Paul Giamatti and Archie Panjabi are solid enough (even though he’s mostly reduced to the Richard Dreyfuss, no-fun scientist role)…
What Doesn’t: …but the rest of the cast is lackluster especially the random British actors that show up halfway through, and Alexandra Daddario makes more or less the same face when she’s terrified as people do when they’re staring at an overhead sign. [Her vacant expressions inspire more laughter than horror.] And even though you know this movie will be dumb and exploitative, you can’t prepare for the braindead sight of seeing The Rock drive a small boat up a skyscraper-high vertical wall of water or the shameless nature of a film about massive Earthquakes that pays no mention to the third-world megacities actually rocked by Earthquakes and the rise of fracking leading to a greater frequency of Earthquakes.
“But why would a big CGI movie take a time out to remind us of the real world when we’re really just watching for the effects?” Some might say, but even aside from the ghoulish aspect of using earthquakes as entertainment, the real scandal is that the effects aren’t even that good. Honestly, this is one of the rare movies where the effects actually play better in the TV ads than on the big screen, where you can see some of the sloppy pixelization and green screen inconsistencies. The movie wasn’t made cheap, but it is cheap looking.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Can you still make a diaster movie that’s both entertaining and politically conscious? We’ll never know, because San Andreas doesn’t succeed at the former and has no interest in the latter.