My son and daughter have impeccable taste in films, so the other night, I bowed to their wishes and watched Captain America: Civil War, which was streaming on Netflix.  I do not want to put the recommendation squarely on their shoulders.  A colleague who has his own movie podcast and my nephew, who are much more attuned to this genre than me, also dug the movie.  It rates a 90% on rottentomatoes.com.

What am I missing?

Some background.  Of Captain America, I wrote, “All characters are boring and stock, particularly Evans, who has the face and demeanor of soft butter. A lot of stuff happens after his transformation, but full disclosure – we turned it off after an hour.”

Of Marvel’s The Avengers, “The picture is dizzying, occasionally funny, well-paced but really, really long and immediately forgettable.”

Of Avengers: Age of Ultron, “Best part. A friend of Captain America asking if he’s found a place to live in Brooklyn yet, and Captain America responding that he doesn’t think he can afford it.  Because what’s missing from these films is the Avengers at a cocktail party.  Full disclosure: turned off at the halfway point.”

This flick did not represent a reversal in the trend.  You have scads of super heroes running around either intoning gravely over the issue of the day (should they or should they not place themselves under the command and oversight of . . . the U.N.?) and when they are not doing that, they are cracking wise.  They line up against each other and meet on an airport tarmac where they have a CGI rumble, a scrum made so  dull by their invincibility (after all, kill Ant Man and that’s like burning $650 million)  I was reminded of a time when the aforesaid nephew was playing a first person shooter video game (Doom?) and he was just tearing it up, knife through butter.  I was impressed by his prowess until I noticed that he wasn’t even getting nicked, despite being shot repeatedly.  It was then he informed me that he had a cheat, or a code, that allowed him to traipse through the game, unhurt.

For him, it was the journey, a pleasing way to pass time and explore the world of the game makers.  I was all like, “Kill or die!”

And I imagine that is a generational difference that explains my view of the film.

Now get the hell off my lawn.

(Reporting from the blizzard of ’16)

Oof. The first scene demonstrates everything wrong about the movie. Forced patter straight out of How I Met Your Mother, nauseating CGI, dozens of violent acts but no deaths, and not for a minute do you sense that any of the Avengers, outnumbered as they are, are in the slightest bit of danger. Good for kids; good for a parent or adult with a kid who needs a nap; soul-rotting juvenilia for anyone else.

Best part. A friend of Captain America asking if he’s found a place to live in Brooklyn yet and Captain America responding that he doesn’t think he can afford it.  Because what’s missing from these films is the Avengers at a cocktail party.

Full disclosure: turned off at the halfway point.

I have an affinity for “the world is ending” movies. None of them are very good and they follow the same model, be it Earthquake, The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, Armageddon, 2012, Godzilla and now, San Andreas.  Disaster strikes, the warnings of smart, nebbishes notwithstanding. Heroes arise, but family comes first, so Charlton Heston, Dennis Quaid, Randy Quaid, Bruce Willis, John Cusack, Aaron Taylor, and The Rock brave the catastrophe to find and/or save their loved ones. It is in these ordeals that frayed relationships are cemented, so much so that often, new and old spouses have to be dispatched. The children are always saved and mankind perseveres. But their surroundings are ravaged. And as they witness the destruction, they say “oh my God” (twice in San Andreas).  Just like Leslie Neilsen in The Poseidon Adventure. Well, not exactly. No one says “oh my God” like Neilsen playing it straight.

It’s the ravaging I love most. The cyclones of The Day After Tomorrow thrillingly rip Los Angeles apart, the same city where those moony hippies with their “we love you, aliens” signs get satisfyingly incinerated and Genevieve Bujold’s house on stilts slides into the canyon below. Godzilla quickly stomped Honolulu and Vegas and nearly took down the Golden Gate Bridge, which – in one of the few cool moments – does not survive San Andreas. Armageddon disappoints for any number of reasons, but foremost is the fact that Willis, Affleck and company save the day. That’s no fun and its best moment is when the pre-meteors obliterate Paris.

Same story, same devastation here, but somehow, San Andreas is worse than the others. It’s as if The Rock decided to use this film as his first true test playing sorrow, and boy is that uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that Carla Gugino, playing his wife, appears to be averting her eyes. While The Rock, recalling the pain of losing their daughter white water rafting, tries to squirt a few out, Gugino plays it rather lightly, as if to say, “hey, The Rock, this is just filler until the next shot of a building collapsing. Don’t be so glum.”

And here we are in San Francisco, but for the most part, the stuff we know is left alone. Instead, most of what gets shredded are office buildings, one of which is not even a real building. Give me Coit Tower! Give me some careening cable cars! Give me Alcatraz or at least the Transamerica Pyramid! Nope. Just nondescript skyscrapers falling listlessly into each other.

Finally, the movie has no sense of humor. None. Not an aside, or an inside joke, or even the thrill of watching something cool, like Paris obliterated. It’s dead straight, serious as a heart attack, except when The Rock and Gugino sky dive into second base at AT&T Field and he says, “it’s been a long time since I got to second base with you.” And then you appreciate the film’s dull seriousness.

A final note. The daughter who The Rock and Gugino cover hill and dale to save (Alexandra Daddario, who played Woody Harrelson’s impossibly beautiful mistress in the first season of True Detective) is so buxom and model-like that it feels exploitative. Yes, parents have daughters that grow up to be busty bombshells, but the first time we meet her, she’s splayed out on a chaisse lounge by the pool, Kardashian-like, and you kind of want her to die. Of course, she doesn’t.