San Andreas

There are plenty of faults with San Andreas, and only a fraction of them concern seismic shifts in the earth’s crust.

The latest big-budget natural-disaster epic doesn’t have any sharks or tornadoes but rather chronicles the systematic demise of California from the largest earthquake anywhere, ever, in the history of mankind. And as you might expect, it’s basically a showcase for visual effects — many of them in 3D, of course — with human actors and their emotions getting shoved to the periphery.

The temblors begin at Hoover Dam near Las Vegas, and set off a chain reaction within the San Andreas Fault, which runs the length of California. Ray (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) is a helicopter rescue pilot with a unique view of the action forced to personalize his mission for the sake of reuniting his family.

It doesn’t take long to reveal the roster of mostly young and beautiful people who are targeted for rescue from being crushed, burned, drowned or impaled. They include Ray’s estranged wife (Carla Gugino) along with their braless daughter (Alexandra Daddario), who heads to San Francisco on a business trip with mom’s boyfriend (Ioan Gruffudd), a smug developer who is constructing the tallest building on the Bay Area skyline and needs a good comeuppance.

As Ray scrambles to find them via air, ground and water, the film tries to explain the earth-shattering onslaught by incorporating the plight of a Cal Tech seismologist (Paul Giamatti) perfecting a tool to predict earthquakes, then freaking out to anybody who will listen about the resulting forecast.

As a technical achievement, San Andreas is impressive in the way it realistically shows various Los Angeles and San Francisco landmarks crumbling to the ground amid all the urban destruction.

What prevents that scenario from having more resonance is a screenplay that takes itself way too seriously while using cheesy domestic strife and romantic interludes to bridge the action set pieces. The film squanders Johnson’s action-hero charisma to focus almost exclusively on a single family, perhaps in an effort to stray from formula, while leaving the broader impact of such a disaster relatively unexplored.

Credit director Brad Peyton (Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) for keeping the action moving at a fast pace. Yet it’s clear from the get-go that the filmmakers have more commercial than creative motives here, and their plot has the cracks to prove it.

Rated PG-13, 114 minutes.