Starting with a literal cliffhanger, as you might have guessed, San Andreas is a good old-fashioned disaster movie: dopey soapy family melodrama, awful dialogue, massive casual carnage and a cringe-worthy patriotic tub-thump at the end. Where this film scores over similar recent efforts such as 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow is the sheer insane scale and detail of the special effects that are brought up close and personal, instead of relying on cartoony wide shots, and the relentless devastation caused by actual earthquakes rather than aftershocks. Dwayne Johnson is so reliably sincere in a role that suits him perfectly, and the rest of the cast is acceptable, even down to an unexpected pop princess acting cameo. The orchestral score is thunderously over-the-top. Some moments are undone by being pure disaster-movie cliché (such as the daughter trapped in a crunched car in an underground car park), some are quite distressing (the parallels with real-world tsunamis and 9/11 dust-clouds provide added punch), but there is a real effort here to provide huge, terrible spectacle. Surprisingly, 3D does not add much most of the time, but occasionally it works very well with the sheer sense of scale on offer, such as the remarkable boat-vs-giant-wave sequence that echoes The Perfect Storm but takes off into an entirely unexpected peril. San Andreas is a big dumb disaster movie with all the accompanying faults that entails, but with more bravado (visually and emotionally) than most in the genre.
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