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'San Andreas':An earthquake movie with a few faults

THE PITCH meeting for "San Andreas" probably comprised three words: "Taken" plus earthquakes.

THE PITCH meeting for "San Andreas" probably comprised three words: "Taken" plus earthquakes.

They probably wanted to call it "Shaken."

Or "Quakin'."

Next summer: Larry the Cable Guy as an organic pig farmer and maker of artisinal cured meats who saves his daughter from an E. coli outbreak in "Bacon."

Here, Dwayne Johnson plays the heroic dad, Ray, a rescue worker about to lose his divorce-minded wife (Carla Gugino) and daughter (Alexandra Daddario) to a wealthy developer (Ioan Gruffudd) who builds "earthquake-proof" buildings. We'll see about that.

Meanwhile . . . Paul Giamatti is at the Hoover Dam testing his new earthquake-predictor app. The good news: It works. The bad news: The dam starts to crack and fall apart, at which point Giamatti, a professor of seismology with a doctorate in Stating the Obvious, starts telling people to get off the dam.

Later, when the quake shakes his office at Cal Tech, he draws upon his extensive expertise to tell co-workers to "get under the desk."

Finally, addressing a national audience, he says "duck and cover," and, "God be with you."

Words never to be enshrined in the Nerve-Calming Hall of Fame.

"San Andreas" is like that - ridiculous, but often in that guilty-pleasure, disaster-movie sort of way, wherein we all laugh at the portentous cliches. When somebody asks professor Paul whom they should notify about the coming disaster, the camera zooms in for his grave reply:

"Everybody."

Too late for Los Angeles. We see the Hollywood sign shake and fall, a shock wave spread across downtown, where Ray choppers in to snatch his wife from the roof of a collapsing building.

The 3-D effects are fine (and PG-13, for family-friendly mass death), and director Brad Peyton doesn't gawk over them, and so keeps his movie taut and tolerable at two hours.

Half of which takes place farther north in San Francisco, where the earthquake "swarm" has spread and where Ray's daughter is dodging debris with a handsome Brit (Hugo Johnstone-Burt). Daddario apparently was cast for her resemblance to the young lady in "Taken," but she does well on her own account here - her character resourcefully uses all the survival tricks she's learned from Ray.

Poor Frisco, though: First the ape takeover, then Godzilla, now this. Tremors knock down buildings, a tidal wave swamps the city. Ray shows up in a powerboat looking for his stranded daughter, guided by the forces of paternal love.

Like we said, "Taken."

Only with creepier moral math. Ray's an L.A. county rescue worker who abandons SoCal immediately. Desperate Los Angelenos look up and see his chopper overhead, flying away from them, on its way to help 49ers and Giants fans.

And talk about flyover country. Heading upstate, Ray looks down on the smoldering rubble of the central valley.

"What's that?" he's asked.

"Bakersfield," says Ray.

And in Frisco, when he takes his boat at high speed through the swamped corridors of the city, bobbing Google employees will simply have to move.

In the end, the family is OK, but Frisco is not.

"What do we do now?" someone asks, as a flag unfurls from the tattered remains of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Says Ray: "We rebuild."

Nice idea, but good luck getting an infrastructure bill past the Senate.