Now we know why Dwayne Johnson has that furrowed brow: he’s having trouble with a nasty fissure. The crack that runs through California splits wide open in a disaster movie so old-school you can’t believe it doesn’t contain Ernest Borgnine. Johnson plays a helicopter pilot who’s called on to rescue his teenage daughter (Alexandra Daddario, whose eyes seem to have been drawn on by anime artists) and win back his ex (Carla Gugino). First the Hoover dam, then all of San Francisco are destroyed with painstaking realism, and a full-scale tsunami is laid on to ensure value for money. San Andreas is pretty spectacular if you fancy gawping mindlessly at some bells-and-whistles CGI, but it illustrates once again the movie law that the bigger the apocalypse, the less it means. They missed a trick on the soundtrack, though: they should have had Johnson sing that blues classic Nobody’s Fault But Mine.
