Ever Increasing Disappointment

2015 has quite frankly not been the best of years for blockbuster movies, and yes I know it's all ooinion based but this is my blog and I'm not above sharing my thoughts on the wonderful world of movies.

Now I could wax lyrical about each movie in the order that they hit movie screens but the overall state of this years cinematic output is a topic for a future World of Stu podcast. What I can say however is that San Andreas is the last of big event movies that I gotten around to watching and I went into it hoping against hope that it would prove to be the one film to save my summer. So of course the question is was it? The answer.......well read on to find out.

San Andreas is directed by Brad Peyton who has had a fairly uneventful career prior to this film, the highlights being the poor sequel to the entertaining Cats and Dogs and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. It does however star Paul Giamatti (who can be hit and miss but is generally a high quality actor), Carla Gugino who I know best from Sin City and The Rock (yeah yeah I know he does by Dwayne Johnson these days but he'll always be the Great One to me) who has proven over the years to be a surprisingly good hand bearing in mind the history of wrestlers who try their hand at acting (Mr Nanny anyone??).

The film opens with a young woman driving along minding her own business until her car is hit by a rock slide and is sent over a cliff in a manner that is highly unlikely to garner a survivor. She is of course alive but now in mortal peril which is nice as it gives us the opportunity to cue The Rock who is playing Ray, a pilot of a rescue helicopter who's team have worked together for sometime including a stint in a war zone. For all you eagle eyed superhero fans out there watch out for Colton Haynes as Joby who you may recognise as Roy from the tv show Arrow, don't get too attached though as after the opening drama he vanishes without a trace.

They of course save the girl, thanks pretty much to the single handed efforts of Rocky who we next see making a phone call to his daughter Blake who he has promised to drive to San Francisco. Whilst on the phone we see that he has received a letter including divorce papers as his wife is planning to make a home with Ioan Gruffudds Daniel (the last time I saw Gruffuud he was battling Galactus in Rise of the Silver Surfer). Daniel is an architect and therefore must be minted which is of course attractive and he seems like a genuine kind of guy so Rocky can't have many complaints about the life his little girl is getting to live.

Elsewhere however Lawrence (Giamatti), who is a professor at Caltech, and his team are happy to discover that they have created a system that can predict when and where earthquakes are going to hit which seems like a handy tool to have. Whilst at the Hoover Dam however a large quake hits and destroys the dam, killing Lawrences friend at the same time. It should be noted that he only dies after having to stop his own escape to save a child that has been left behind, this is just another disaster movie cliche in a movie that is so full of them that it almost becomes a self parody though unintentionally of course).

Due to the disaster Rocky can no longer drive Blake so she flies to San Francisco with her soon to be stepdad David. Lawrence meanwhile realises that the Hoover quake is related to a previously unknown fault line and that it is going to move along the San Andreas fault causing some major problems for anyone unfortunate enough to be in the area.

Los Angeles is then hit by a 9.1 quake which pretty much levels the city. This is a touch unlucky for Emma (Rockys ex-wife) who happens to be in a high rise restaurant with her potential sister in law (played by a wtf Kylie Minogue). It all kicks off and we get lots of fairly stunning but typical visuals whcih claim the lifes of everyone in the building except of course for Emma who miraculously makes it to the roof. Rocky shows up in his trusty chopper which he switches to auto hover (I will admit that when I saw this I scoffed so had to look up whether it actually existed or not, apprently it does though not in the way Rocky uses it here) and manages to save his soon to be ex.

Back in San Francisco a quake hits which leaves David and Blake trapped in a car park. David gets out and goes for help but changes his mind and just legs it. looking out for number one. Don't worry about Blake though as two brothers (Ben and Ollie) who Blake had literally met about half an hour earlier choose to go and look for her rather than look out for each other and head for the exit. They of course find her and get her out in the nick of time. The three of them then find a landline (mobile networks are down) and get in touch with Rocky and Emma who are enroute to save their daughter. You see they apparently used to have two daughters but one drowned whilst kayaking with Rocky and I guess thats what brought about the end of their blissful marriage.

As for the rest of the film well theres a record breaking quake measuring 9.6 which completely annihalates San Francisco but fear not as the three children have a plan to get to a location that Blake and Rocky agree on and when that route is cut off they always have Blakes plan B (which Rocky is not aware of). Plan B goes tits up though and they decide to head for a tall building that just so happens to belong to David. Oh speaking of David, we see him a couple of times being an arse but he gets crushed by a storage container in the end so screw him and his evil self centeredness.

Rocky and Emma journey includes crashing the chopper, almost driving into a whopping great hole in the road and then having to parachute out of a plane which The Rock put on autopilot (he is seriously the laziest pilot of all time). After San Francisco goes pop Rocky still holds the faith that Blake is nails whilst Emma is not so sure but the only way round is to use a boat which they then have to drive over the top of a ginormous Tsunami wave......thats right I said over the top in one of the dumbest scenes this side of 2012 and its Arks.

Speaking of the wave well that washes through the city and as it rises the kids have to go higher and higher in Davids building to try and avoid the water, this is of course alot more dramatic than I'm making it sound I'm sure.

Eventually Rocky shows up but Blake drowns which is a bummer before Emma drives the boat through a sinking building to take the gang clear of the falling debris. Rocky flexs his muscles and brings Blake back to life which is nice and the five of them end the movie on top of a hill looking over the destruction as Rocky tells us that the next thing to do is rebuild, most of which will probably be done by him because he's the bloody Rock.

As stated at the beginning of this review I really hoped that this would be the one film that would be a pleasant surprise after the sheer scale of unimpressiveness that was AOU, Jurassic World, Mad Max and the like but alas it was not to be.

Now I realise that this type of movie has to have a certain element of suspension of disbelief about it but when the sheer ridiculousness of the situation defies logic and common sense its hard to look past the films short-comings and just 'go with it'. When a movie can be summarised by saying, young woman runs around between moments of staring pensively into space, another woman who happens to be her mum survives situations that a Terminator would struggle to get through and her dad The Rock tries to emote whilst being all actiony in a world created on a computer, you know that the end result is not going to be particularly good.

Yes the film took $470 million against a budget of $110 million which is certainly a lot better than say Fantastic Four but when even your biggest star who happens to be one of the biggest box office draws of the current age can't pull in higher numbers than that then you have problems. It also seems ridiculous to say that box office figures like that are a failiure but that is the world we now live in where anything less than half a billion dollars is seen as bad news. Hell Ant Man is one of the films of the summer and even that is not considered a success finacially when it took less than three times its production budget at the global box office.

With all of this in mind I guess that makes it time to score this film. Yes it is visually impressive but is it the best movie of this genre? I would have to say no and despite having a soft spot for The Rock I would have to say there are more things wrong with this film than right and with that said I can only give this film 5 out of 10.