San Andreas works as both a disaster movie and as a stirring appreciation of disaster movies of the past. Despite its obvious inferiorities, it reminded me a lot of 70s disaster like the 1974 epic The Towering Inferno. Here, the plot holes may be as big as the craters the earthquakes create but the special effects and the script’s knowing nods prevent the film from falling apart.
Dwayne Johnson (Furious 7)—plays Ray, a rescue-chopper pilot whose family is in crisis. His wife Emma (Carla Gugino) wants a divorce and her new boyfriend Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd) is about to spend some valuable bonding time with Ray and Emma’s daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario). From the film’s opening moments, it’s obvious that Ray and Emma belong together and that Daniel is an obvious...