Are you saying you think the whole San Andreas fault may go off?

San Andreas

(2015)

Carlton Cuse penned the screenplay for San Andreas, presumably the Carlton Cuse of Nash Bridges and The Strain, rather than the one who shepherded Lost and The Adventures of Brisco County Jr to TV screens. The movie’s major claim to fame, and why it did a belter at the box office, is that it was shot in 3D. As such, it’s an unapologetic deluge of spectacle at the expense of any kind of logic, depth of characterisation or self-awareness.

The latter is San Andreas’ key failing, really. Helmed by someone other than Brad Peyton, it might easily have teetered on the brink of Airplane!-type bemusement with its own absurdity and idiocy. This is a movie, as others have pointed out, where our hero Ray, (Dwayne Johnson – The Rock to you and me) who has notched up 600 documented cases of rescues to his name in Afghanistan (he’s a goddam veteran!) and with the LA Fire Department Air Rescue, sods off when he has more important matters cooking; he heads off in his chopper to rescue his wife (Carla Gugino) and daughter. I guess the sheer force of bravery, goodwill and Rock-like decency he has hitherto built up are unassailable, justifying his dereliction of duty; you can derelicte his balls!

Like Bruce in Die Hard, Ray’s wife’s looking to divorce him, having hooked up with loathsome stinker Ioan Gruffudd; if you didn’t know he was a loathsome stinker for being British, the message is signed, sealed and ribboned when he leaves Ray’s daughter (Alexandra Daddario, of True Detective fame) to die in a parking garage. But wait, all English people aren’t awful; impossibly posh Hugo Johnstone-Burt and his impossibly irritating little brother Art Parkinson are on hand to save her.

Joining the dots here, with the towering ineptitude of a swarm of Irwin Allen epics, is Paul Giamatti’s Cassandra figure (“Professor, it looks like the whole San Andreas fault line is being activated, and its headed for San Francisco!” – just as Professor Paul predicted!) Early on he witnesses the Hoover Dam being swept away like it’s 2012 all over again, except not nearly as much goofy fun. We never find out what set off this carnage – terrorists, HAARP, aliens – although I think it’s safe to say it can’t have been a purely natural phenomenon. With disaster porn like this, however, who has time for reasons?

Or consequences; Peyton and Cuse don’t care about anyone who isn’t within two degrees of Ray, so this is guilt-free destruction; whole cities are flattened as earthquakes quake and tsunamis torrent (how many nuclear power stations went down, I wonder?), and if a few Kylie Minogues or Gruffudds are taken out along the way, well they deserved it for being mean to Ray or Mrs Ray or their daughter. The score runs the gamut from Inception-esque BWAAAs to Lord of the Rings ethereal choirs with little in-between, entirely in keeping with the unmitigated bombast. It doesn’t bear close analysis why Ray must jump out of a plane (“It’s been a while since I got you to second base”, he quips to Carla as they land on a baseball field), or ride a tsunami; just be content in the knowledge that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

San Andreas has earned a sequel, of course, which appears to be taking the Die Harder route of bringing back the entire cast and sending them to another place of impossible peril (The Ring of Fire). Hopefully it will have a bit more fun with its ludicrousness.

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I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

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Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

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Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

You ruined every suck-my-silky-ass thing!

The Matrix Resurrections (2021) (SPOILERS) Warner Bros has been here before. Déjà vu? What happens when you let a filmmaker do whatever they want? And I don’t mean in the manner of Netflix. No, in the sequel sense. You get a Gremlins 2: The New Batch (a classic, obviously, but not one that financially furthered a franchise). And conversely, when you simply cash in on a brand, consequences be damned? Exorcist II: The Heretic speaks for itself. So in the case of The Matrix Resurrections – not far from as meta as The New Batch , but much less irreverent – when Thomas “Tom” Anderson, designer of globally successful gaming trilogy The Matrix , is told “ Our beloved company, Warner Bros, has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy ” and it’s going ahead “with or without us”, you can be fairly sure this is the gospel. That Lana, now going it alone, decided it was better to “make the best of it” than let her baby be sullied. Of course, quite what that amounts to in the case of a movie(s) tha

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

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Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

It’s always possible to find a good moral reason for killing anybody.

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This guy’s armed with a hairdryer.

An Innocent Man (1989) (SPOILERS) Was it a chicken-and-egg thing with Tom Selleck and movies? Did he consistently end up in ropey pictures because other, bigger big-screen stars had first dibs on the good stuff? Or was it because he was a resolutely small-screen guy with limited range and zero good taste? Selleck had about half-a-dozen cinema outings during the 1980s, one of which, the very TV, very Touchstone Three Men and a Baby was a hit, but couldn’t be put wholly down to him. The final one was An Innocent Man , where he attempted to show some grit and mettle, as nice-guy Tom is framed and has to get tough to survive. Unfortunately, it’s another big-screen TV movie.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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