As someone who works from home and is constantly in search of something decent to put on television during the day, HBO’s decision to run the movie San Andreas roughly 20 times a week this summer has been a godsend. San Andreas might be the perfect leave-on-in-the-background-while-you-do-other-things action movie. It’s got everything: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson commandeering planes and boats, an exasperated Paul Giamatti doing science things, a tsunami. I can’t for the life of me think of why anyone would need more from an action movie than that. But upon multiple, multiple viewings, I’ve realized that none of that is the best part of the movie. The best part is Kylie Minogue’s brief appearance as an awful woman who falls out of a skyscraper.
First, San Andreas, in short: A massive earthquake hits California and The Rock rushes to save his family. This is interesting because The Rock’s character is some sort of rescue helicopter pilot, presumably with a salary and equipment provided by the government for the benefit of all its endangered citizens, but The Rock immediately abandons his duties and zooms past thousands of dying Californians in the government-issue chopper to save his ex-wife and daughter (Carla Gugino and Alexandra Daddario, respectively), and it is never addressed even for a second. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Hey, this is starting to sound like the kind of action movie where the main character says the title of the movie out loud in the movie, followed by intense music and a big sweeping crane or helicopter shot,” well…
San Andreas is exactly that kind of movie.
But back to the thing about The Rock saving Carla Gugino. When the earthquake hits, she is having lunch in a fancy restaurant at the top of a very tall building. The lunch isn’t all pleasure, though. She’s there to meet her new billionaire fiancé’s sister and to get grilled about her dead daughter, apparently.
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Enter Kylie Minogue.
A quick rundown of things Kylie Minogue does in this scene:
– Rudely dismisses the waitress, Larissa, for the crime of wanting to tell them the specials.
– Begins interrogating Carla Gugino about her past, presumably to find out if she’s after her new fiancé’s money.
– Opens up with “I understand you’ve been married before” and promptly — very promptly — dives into the dead daughter business, saying “Your other one… drowned in an accident,” which a) she says with a suspicious, almost incredulous tone, the way a parent might say, “And the car just… rolled itself into the front yard?,” and b) even if we give her the benefit of the doubt, is a hell of a line of questioning to start at lunch before Larissa even gets to tell them the soups.
– Replies, “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that” when Carla Gugino gets offended, as though there’s another way to interpret flippantly questioning someone’s intentions about marrying your rich brother by bringing up the daughter she lost in a traumatic drowning accident.
I love her. She’s like the real-life version of one of the snooty country club ladies in the episode of The Simpsons about Marge finding a designer dress at a thrift shop, but worse and she sang the song “Locomotion” in 1987. And we would continue talking about what a truly horrible person she is, but whoops, there’s an earthquake, and double whoops, she just ran out an open door and fell to her death.
It’s really quite perfect. All of it. In just two and a half minutes of screen time we learn everything we need to know about her and then get the cathartic joy of watching her fall 50 stories to her death. Actually, no. It’s even better than that. We don’t see her fall. She’s a monster for 90 seconds and then she panics and dies off-screen in a plunge from a skyscraper. That’s so efficient. It would be like if Act I of 101 Dalmatians ended with someone getting a phone call and saying, “Right. Yes. I understand,” then hanging up and announcing that Cruella de Vil just died in a car accident.
But it’s even more than that. It’s also the thing where this character — who, again, had about eight lines of dialogue, total — was played by Kylie Minogue. Kylie Minogue! Like, of all the actresses in the world… hell, of all the people in the world, they cast Australian pop music sensation Kylie Minogue. That’s so incredibly random. Like, I remember watching it the first time and thinking, “Wow, that actress who just died offscreen after a two minute scene sure did look a whole lot like co-star of Bio-Dome Kylie Minogue,” and then I Googled it, and yup, Kylie Minogue. Incredible. She had to do an American accent! Think about that!
And the best part of it all is that there’s really no point to the scene. They didn’t need to show that Carla Gugino’s new fiancé’s family is terrible, because he does a fine job of that himself. (And then he had the decency to die on-screen by getting smushed by a shipping container.) They just needed an excuse to get Carla Gugino up to the top floor of a tall building so The Rock could save her, and the excuse they came up with involved Kylie Minogue being mean to a waitress and then falling out of a skyscraper.
My point here is that San Andreas is a good movie.
