New San Andreas Movie Received Mixed Reviews From Major Critics
New Line Cinema (Warner Bros) and Village Roadshow Pictures released their new action/thriller flick, “San Andreas,” into theaters today, May 29th and all the reviews are in from the top,major movie critics. It turns out that it got a mixed response with an overall 42 score out of a possible 100 across 38 reviews at the Metacritic.com site.
The movie stars: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Alexandra Daddario, Paul Giamatti, Carla Gugino, Kylie Minogue, Ioan Gruffudd, Archie Panjabi, Hugo Johnstone-Burt, and Art Parkinson. We’ve added blurbs from a few of the critics, below.
Mick LsSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle, gave it a decent 75 grade, stating: “By turns frightening, exciting and ridiculous, San Andreas is, in the end, more impressive than anything else.”
Glenn Kenny from RogerEbert.com, gave it a 75 score. He said: “There are really no surprises here. But the action is bracing, Johnson’s performance is solid and, within its extremely narrow parameters, entirely convincing, and Gugino and Daddario are both gritty and attractive. The result is a pretty exemplary popcorn movie.”
Alonso Duralde from TheWrap, gave it a 68 grade, saying: ” There are big, loud entertainments like “Mad Max: Fury Road” that I find myself enjoying even with my critical-thinking cap on, and then there are movies like San Andreas that somehow go straight to my lizard brain; this movie’s dumb, and its portrayal of urban devastation borders on the pornographic, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t entertained.”
Chris Nashawaty from Entertainment Weekly, gave it a 67 score. He said: “San Andreas shows that sometimes the fake stuff can get the job done beautifully. I don’t want to make any claims that San Andreas is a great film. It’s not. But as mindless sensory barrages go, its fakery taps into something real: It shows us just how impotent we all are to control our planet. Unless, of course, you happen to be The Rock.”
Michael Phillips from the Chicago Tribune, gave it a 63 grade. He said: “I enjoyed large chunks of San Andreas, largely because the actors give it a full load of sincerity, and there’s some bizarrely effective comic relief thanks to Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson as Brits who picked the wrong week to visit the Bay Area.”
Brian Truitt from USA Today, gave it a 50 grade. He said: “The cringeworthy dialogue and unmoving earnestness are the biggest disasters in this mostly forgettable action flick.”
Michael O’Sullivan over at the Washington Post, gave it a 50 score, stating: “The dialogue in San Andreas is lame, its plot both predictable and implausible, and the character development beside the point. Even Dwayne Johnson, that force of cinematic nature and rock-ribbed charisma, doesn’t have enough charm to dig this mess of a movie out of the rubble of cliche it’s buried in.”
Justin Lowe from The Hollywood Reporter, gave it a 50 score,saying: “The movie is at its strongest when it integrates family dynamics into the plot rather than indulging in extreme couples therapy.”
Kenneth Turan from the Los Angeles Times, gave it a 40 grade. He said: “Even by the non-Olympian standards of the disaster genre, San Andreas is chock-full of cliché characters, staggering coincidences and wild improbabilities.”
Andrew Barker over at Variety, gave it a 40 score. He stated: “After providing some blissfully stupid B-movie thrills for its first hour, the film suffers from spectacle overkill.”
Peter Travers from Rolling Stone, gave it a 38 grade, claiming: ” There’s nothing to keep the pulse alive after the first quake. Peyton throws in a second quake and a tsunami, but after a while buildings tumbling into the ocean are just a bunch of pixels turning everything into visual mush and leaving audiences in a digital stupor.”
Lou Lumenick from the New York Post, gave it a 38 grade, saying: “Oblivious to both narrative logic and the laws of physics, the cliché-filled San Andreas doesn’t nearly have the star power of earlier, better disaster movies it borrows from like “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno.”
Joe Morgenstern from the Wall Street Journal, gave it a 30 grade. He stated: “San Andreas changes all too quickly from satisfyingly foolish to dismayingly dumb to genuinely stupid.”
A.O. Scott from the The New York Times, gave it a 30 score. He said: “The most disturbing thing about this may be how dull and routine it seems. Computer-generated imagery can produce remarkably detailed vistas of disaster — bridges and buildings collapsing; giant ships flung onto urban streets; beloved landmarks pulverized — but the technology also has a way of stripping such spectacles of impact and interest.”
Lastly, Joe Neumaier at the New York Daily News, gave it an awful 20 grade, claiming: ” San Andreas is a disaster — literally. That’s not to take a piece out of Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson. His charm and family-man-style fearlessness as the movie’s star is the only saving grace in this thuddingly repetitive, badly written crash-a-thon.” Stay tuned. Also, get your favorite Movie stuff, and more by Clicking Here.
