San Andreas (4/10): A disaster movie that never delivers anything more than visuals.

"It's been a long time since I got you to second base!"

No matter how big of a fan of anyone from this cast you are, the entire screenplay is so full of cliches and the dialogue is almost entirely laughable that it makes it impossible for any one of them to save this film. Not even Dwayne Johnson (and he is an actor who usually delivers in action movies). This disaster movie is no different than The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, or Deep Impact. It is full of cliches and relies solely on CGI, but it doesn't have a soul. We've seen each one of these characters in dozens of movies before and I honestly didn't care for any of them in this film. It takes the familiar family dynamics from Taken, where a divorced father has to save his beautiful teenage daughter, while struggling with the fact that his ex-wife is moving in with a wealthy man, and it mixes it with the familiar elements of disaster movies like 2012. So in summary, it is basically a cross between 2012 and Taken. The effects didn't really blow me away either and the best scenes are already included in the trailers. I didn't hate San Andreas, but it doesn't deliver anything fresh or original. It's a disaster movie that lives up to being just that: a disaster.

The film introduces us to the hero right away as Ray (Dwayne Johnson), a rescue-chopper pilot is saving a teenage girl from a car accident as it has derailed off the road and is barely hanging in the air squeezed by some rocks along a mountainside. After the successful rescue mission, Ray gives his daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario) a call to invite her out for the night, but she and her mother Emma (Carla Gugino) have already made plans with Emma’s new boyfriend, Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd) a wealthy business magnate. Ray and Blake make plans to hang out together the next day, but a massive earthquake in Nevada   sends him on yet another rescue mission. In the meantime, Lawrence (Paul Giamatti), an expert in all things concerning earthquakes and tectonic plate movements develops a program that allows him to predict possible earthquakes in the future. He predicts that the Nevada quake is just the beginning of the disaster and that California will be hit the hardest. His prediction comes true as Los Angeles and San Francisco begin to shake. On his way back, Ray receives a call from Emma who is in a building in LA that is about to collapse. Emma happens to be in another building all the way in San Francisco with Daniel that is also falling apart. Ray makes it his mission to save both his ex-wife and his daughter before the quake completely destroys both cities. Meanwhile, Blake is saved by a pair of Brits, Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) and his young brother Ollie (Art Parkinson), but this is just the beginning and more massive earthquakes are expected to hit them soon. 

Having the hero of the film play a rescue-chopper is a great excuse for the director, Brad Peyton (who had previously worked with Johnson in Journey 2: The Mysterious Island), to include jaw dropping aerial shots of the destruction. There are dozens of buildings collapsing and thousands of lives lost as Ray is trying to save his family. The CGI effects are solid, although nothing we haven’t seen before. It delivers what audiences are expecting from a disaster movie, but the characters are never fully developed. The dialogue in this film is incredibly dull and its hard to care for the characters despite how much of a fan you are of the cast. There are some funny moments thanks to the chemistry between Johnstone and Daddario, but there is not much more here. You know exactly who is going to survive and who is not so there is no tension either. It’s a film you come to see for the visuals alone and nothing else.    

My Review: Sucker Punch (3/10)

¨ Who teaches us what`s real, and how to laugh at lies? Who decides why we live, and what we'll die to defend? Who trains us, and who holds the key to set us free? It's you. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight! ¨

Zach Snyder has adapted various graphic novels into films in the past and I enjoyed his movies very much; I was a big fan of 300 and Watchmen and I thought those movies were terrific. In Sucker Punch Snyder tries something new; he wrote the story instead of adapting another novel, but still tried to give it the same feel and look his other films had. The look of the film is also stylish, full of CGI, and the graphics make us think we are playing a videogame instead of watching a movie. This style worked for me in the past because Snyder`s stories were interesting. In Sucker Punch I just couldn’t get into the story, I didn’t like any of the characters, and thought the plot was just ridiculous. The approach was also very hypocritical because the movie tries to preach about female empowerment and girl power, but the entire time the movie is targeted towards a male audience; we have girls fighting in short skirts, and the male characters have little screen time. I can see how this movie might be enjoyed by a young male audience, but it just didn’t work for me. Comparing it to 300 and Watchmen this movie doesn’t even come close, but even before watching Sucker Punch I had lowered my expectations with the trailer. I understood the metaphor and ideas the story was trying to get across, but it was just meaningless with these characters since they weren’t even developed at all. There was not one interesting character, they were all one dimensional. The screenplay was adapted by Snyder himself and Steve Shibuya, but the entire movie relies only on the CGI.

Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is sent to a mental asylum by her stepfather (Gerard Plunkett) after her mother dies and she accidently kills her little sister while trying to protect her from her abusive stepfather. She was aiming at him, but she missed and her little sister suffered the consequences. Baby Doll is institutionalized and in five days the doctor will perform a lobotomy on her so that she forgets everything her stepfather has done. Blue (Oscar Isaac) receives an important amount of money from the stepdad to make sure the doctor signs the ok for the lobotomy. Dr. Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino who also starred in Watchmen with Snyder) never signs the petition because Blue falsifies the signature and so everything is set for within five days when the Doctor (Jon Hamm) comes back. Baby Doll isn’t alone in the asylum. She befriends four other female companions: Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) and her sister, Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung who was recently seen in The Hangover 2). Baby Doll decides to create an alternate reality in order to avoid her pain and guilt. In this fantastical world she becomes a sort of warrior and with the help of a Wise Man (Scott Glenn) she comes up with a plan to escape the mental facility. Along with her four friends they go on a mission to retrieve the five elements they will need in order to escape. In this fantastical world they have to face ninja robots, Nazi zombie`s and different kind of monsters. The lines between fantasy and reality begin to blur as they try to collect the items and break free from the asylum.

The characters are so poorly developed that I really didn’t care whether or not they escaped the institution. Even the fantasy clips in which all the main action and cool effects take place felt more like music videos due to the loud music and videogame style graphic. The movie is empty; simply eye candy and I couldn’t see anything philosophical or deep about it. I really was disappointed with this movie, but I know Zach Snyder will bounce back. He should stick to graphic novels. As for the performances there was nothing remarkable about any of them, but the cast isn’t to blame because the entire movie relied only on the special effects and not on trying to develop the characters. The effects are interesting at some times, but we`ve seen them all before and there is nothing new to Sucker Punch. This will definitely be on my list of worst films of the year; it was a huge disappointment for me. Everyone has the right to make a bad film; even Pixar came short with Cars 2 so I don’t think Zach Snyder should be worrying about how things turned out in Sucker Punch. Some young males might want to check this movie out, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

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