Here is a fantastically silly spectacular about San Francisco collapsing into the juddering and shuddering San Andreas fault. It brought back happy memories of 1974’s Earthquake, with Charlton Heston – in cinema-shaking Sensurround! (Nowadays it’s the thrumming bass notes in that state-of-the-art Dolby sound system that buzz you in your seat.) Back in the glory days of 1970s disaster films, an all-star cast would supply a solemn sense of epic and a continuous firework display of cameo recognition. Now, that’s an unnecessary expense. There’s no need for more than one star and CGI does the real work. Beefy Dwayne Johnson plays Ray, a helicopter rescue pilot who has to save his super-hot twentysomething daughter when she’s stranded in the horrific quake chaos – and winds up joining forces on the job with his ex-wife Emma (Carla Gugino), who naturally realises the guy she’s with now is just a wealthy asshole. This is Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd), whose pampered private jet, of course, looks very different to the manly dependability and courage of Ray’s ’copter. Paul Giamatti plays the concerned earthquake scientist who is on the ball, although the film is notably without the traditional bad-guy politician or authority figure who has refused to heed warnings. The movie is premised on the idea that it all could happen, and yet its enjoyment is naturally premised on the unconscious conviction that it couldn’t happen really. There’s a nice shot of a rooftop pool starting to froth up like a Jacuzzi as the building beneath shivers.
