When it comes to disaster movies – especially as they’ve only gotten bigger and after 9/11 harrowingly seared all too real destructive imagery into the collective conscious – there always seems to be an uneasy agreement between the film and the audience. It provides a suitable amount of mindlessly entertaining effects-driven spectacle and mayhem, and the audience doesn’t think too hard about the fact that we’re using the mass deaths of people who committed the grievous sin of not being the main characters as amusement and escapism.

Well, "San Andreas," you have broken that arrangement.

The new Dwayne Johnson-led, Roland Emmerich-esque destruction porn rip – whose apocalyptic natural calamity of choice is, as the title implies, a giant earthquake – lands right in that awkward no man’s land between being serious and being simply entertainment. There just ends up not being enough genuine thrills and chills to help viewers put up with the many problems crumbling and cracking away at the film’s foundation. And considering that, you’re probably better off staying clear.

The movie opens with a playfully intense sequence dedicated to the most squirm-inducing, nightmarish threat to humanity’s survival: crappy teen drivers. A young girl is driving on a mountain pass – tempting fate by distractedly reaching for a water bottle far in her backseat, reading text messages and rocking out to T. Swift – when nature’s finally had enough and launches her off a cliff with a rockslide. Luckily, the girl’s got the physics-defying survival skills of Dom Toretto, because despite her dinky car rolling down a comedically brutal cliff, she survives with just a few scrapes – albeit also dangling from yet another cliff.

Thankfully, the cavalry arrives with a rescue helicopter led by The Rock himself, playing long-time rescue expert Ray Gaines. And despite some tricky techniques and tense moments, he and his team manage to save the distracted, text-happy teen driver from certain death. The Rock: one; natural selection: zilch. Try again next time, Darwin.

As it turns out, nature’s not done terrorizing humanity, as it launches a gigantic, literally earth-shattering quake that rattles all the way from the Hoover Dam to San Francisco. Skyscrapers wobble and crash to earth. Fires break out. People plummet to their death. It’s a complete and utter disaster, and stuck far apart from one another in the chaos are both Ray’s estranged wife (Carla Gugino) and his lovely daughter (Alexandra Daddario, "True Detective"), who at least has two affably dorky Brits (Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson) to keep her company after her douche-lord step-dad (Ioan Gruffudd, Reed Richards in the last two "Fantastic Four" films) bails in a tight spot. It’s up to Ray, who takes to the sky, the land and the water to save his family from nature’s wrath.

Now, I’ve never been shy about professing my love for The Rock. He’s basically our new Arnold Schwarzenegger, with just as strong action chops and natural charisma but with better genuine acting talent. But while Arnold had movies like "The Terminator" and "Total Recall" play to his strengths and weaknesses, Dwayne Johnson’s never quite had that big hit movie that perfectly utilized his action star abilities (maybe "Fast Five" or "Pain and Gain"?).

"San Andreas" at least gets him off to a good start, introducing Ray with The Rock’s massive shiny grin to the camera and eventually getting him to rip the door off a car with his bare hands. Later on, he punches a gun-toting looter in the face as well, probably knocking the scummy guy’s soul out of his body in the process, so things would seem to be boding well for the entertainment factor. Plus, the cast around him – from Gugino to Daddario to the fittingly odious Gruffudd to the British duo to Paul Giamatti as a perpetually panicked Cal Tech earthquake specialist – is surprisingly strong or at least enjoyable.

So where does the movie go wrong? As it turns out, the fault, dear reader, is not in its stars, but in pretty much everything else.

Part of the problem begins with The Rock’s character. The script – credited to Carlton Cuse with story credits for Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore – establishes him early on as a dedicated rescue legend, yet when the greatest natural disaster possibly ever breaks out, he takes to the sky … and completely ignores his duties and uses his resources to almost solely save his family.

It’s a weirdly kind of selfish and unsavory character trait that the movie never seems to pick up on and a distracting one at that. It’s an odd and uneasy sensation to watch a protagonist, dressed up in a rescue uniform flying a rescue helicopter, surrounded by a city literally crumbling to pieces … and doing nothing, just flying away. Not only must coming into work the next day been awkward, but it only emphasizes how many innocent people are dying off to the side in this work of summer entertainment whose only sins were not being related to The Rock’s character. It’s an easy fix too; why not just have him be off-duty?

That’s far, however, from the movie’s biggest issue, which is its formulaic plot. Cuse’s script hits on all of the disaster movie clichés, from the catastrophe serving as a martial counselor, bringing a broken couple and family back together to the rich new boyfriend who ends up being a selfish jerk (and who nature eventually smites) to Giamatti as the cautionary expert who issues pensive warnings like, "Who should we warn … everybody!"

It’s not that these overdone tropes can’t be fun and entertaining; it’s just Cuse and director Brad Peyton (reteaming with Johnson after the passable "Journey 2: The Mysterious Island") do very little to bring much life to them or make them feel any less predictable or trite. Take for instance the Giamatti sequences, which after a while feel utterly irrelevant to the actual story other than saying, "Meanwhile, Paul Giamatti’s nervous and doing some stuff." Considering they never seem to be all that dangerous – he explicitly says it’s the safest place to be – these scenes add little to the movie in terms of useful information or tense excitement. Each step the story takes feels like a disaster movie you’ve seen before – albeit one better made and more entertaining.

In the end, even with all of the lovingly rendered CG death and destruction (which is admittedly impressive at first), the movie’s just kind of a big shaky bore, tonally landing once again right in that sad middle ground between a serious movie and some dopey, campy entertainment. This is a movie that vanquishes its baddie in satisfyingly goofy fashion … but then cuts to hundreds of thousands of people getting wiped out at the same time. One where The Rock goes from tearfully discussing his dead daughter to making just the worst "got you to second base" pun. And speaking of which, why cast The Rock to play a sad, mopey guy lamenting his broken marriage? I’m all for stretching acting ranges, but this isn’t making the best use of your star.

For those simply wanting some CG spectacle, "San Andreas" has some of that. An early quake at Hoover Dam is a thrilling sequence, and watching the early shocks rattle and rumble their way through the West Coast, wobbling giant buildings down to the ground and destroying an interchange, has its thrills. There’s also a race up the tsunami sequence that hits close to the right notes, especially near the climax where it reaches "Gravity" levels of "Oh Jesus, what could possibly go wrong next!?" crazed amusement.

For too much of "San Andreas," however, it’s hard to escape the feeling that a movie pitched as The Rock versus The Third Rock From The Sun should be more entertaining than this.