by Joseph Rossi
Been there, done that…again.
It happens every summer. Either it’s a meteor, a giant lizard, evil robots or earthquakes. Disaster films. God help me, I love them. I loved the original, if bloated by 1970’s standards, Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. I thought Twister was dumb fun and the second half of Titanic to be perfection.
But summer’s latest, San Andreas, is just a rehash of a rehash of a rehash. It just copies films that have come before. It has the hero, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who is estranged from his wife (just like the film Independence Day), and is a father trying to rescue his child ( like The Day After Tomorrow) from a massive incident of nature that was predicted by a scientist ( just like 2012), who at first no one believes. This movie was written by the guys behind television shows like Lost and The Bates Motel on what was probably a drunken night out.
Director Brad Peyton does a swell job of blowing things up and toppling buildings over but we’ve seen all that. The Rock is in fine form but he can play this in his sleep. He’s the new torch bearer of the action genre that once belonged to Stallone and Arnold is fine to taking up the task but he needs to do more then just flex a bicep and say a silly catchphrase here and there. That era of the bronze cinematic herculean is gone. He has to evolve. And why I saw this in 3D is beyond me. There is no reason for it. Watch it in the regular format. Or better still, don’t watch it at all.
