Hard Rain

You can tell a movie sucks when they keep changing how they're advertising it before the movie comes out. (A movie is successful if they have it long enough to make substantive changes to how they're advertising it after it's out, i.e., "Men in Black.") I first saw a preview of this back on Chinese New Year of last year, when it actually had a different name ("Flood") and only featured scenes of water breaking stuff. To give you some perspective on how long ago that was, there were previews for "Face/Off" before the same movie. "Face/Off" is now on video. The preview looked torturously stupid, as stupid as anything without actors can look (which is prodigiously stupid, as it already featured scenes of the church going down, setting off my Heavy-Handed Symbolism Alert even though I was there to see "The Relic"), and one person I was with expressed the opinion that there was nothing cool about a flood, it being simply a destructive event. I decided to wait and see who got killed. The previews steadily added more human characters, but got less and less interesting. Finally the night before it came out the advertisers went to one of the two Last Resorts, in this case the "Dies irae" from Verdi's Requiem. (The other is "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana by Carl Orff.) These pieces are both so compelling that you would want to see, like, a pine furniture documentary if it used either of these pieces as a soundtrack.

As crappy as the advertising was, the movie was still a letdown. The only bright spot was Morgan Freeman, who should be legislated into a good movie for once. I mean really, "Seven," "Kiss the Girls" and now this POS? This is a crime against…well, something. If putting a picture of your wife in a bikini on your desk isn't legal anymore then this certainly isn't. Minnie Driver can normally act, but then she is normally given characters to play instead of this human-shaped carbon blob with the intermittent gift of language. Everyone else is terrible. I can't express in words how much I hate Randy Quaid. He brings down the level of every movie he has ever been in, even when bringing down the level would be something of an achievement, since a normal person couldn't see how it could go any lower ("National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation").

So then you would normally move to the action per se, looking for something good, like with "Starship Troopers." No dice. The big scenes are alternately confusing, pointless, or just stupid; in all cases they are poorly directed, with incredibly badly applied Woo-esque touches at climactic moments. And of course the climactic moment hinges on the girl being unable to fire a gun correctly. I have a problem with water fighting anyway, ever since I acquired Virtua Fighter 2 and found that I can beat the whole roster of human characters easily, but then during the bonus scene I have to play underwater, where everything is reeeeealllllly slooooooow, against this robot guy named Dural who has every move in the game. Since I play Sarah Bryant (Lindemann always goes for affirmative action with females in fighting games), whose game is predicated on quickness, it is impossible to get off any good moves on the thing and he always beats me. So real fighting in water is impossible.

This movie realizes this and makes do with slow-moving jet-ski chase scenes instead of slow-moving hand to hand fighting and, after those get much more time than they need or deserve, well-nigh endless gunplay where no one gets shot from a distance of more than 4 feet after the first 30 minutes (when they kill off Ed Asner). I swear these people are collectively the worst shots in the Western Hemisphere. I have fired a .22 like, twice, but I know that if I used as much ammo as the unaccountably employed Randy Quaid does I would at least hit someone. Maybe not kill, but at least hit. But you can't tell where anyone is shooting from half the time, so who cares? And the scene in the church, as far as I can tell, is just so all the evil people can shoot up a church and show how evil they are (Quaid shoots a stained-glass window of Jesus in the eye. Oooh! He's Evil! But he doesn't get much of anything off on anything that's not a religious icon).

So then you would look desperately for ancillary pleasures, like music (hopelessly overmelodramatic. While you may think it is impossible for action movie music to be too melodramatic, you have not seen this movie. It seems like if Slater was to open his lunchbag there would be a jarring brass chord as he pulled out his sandwich with a little mold on the bread), or visuals (when I started concentrating on the visuals I started having to go to the bathroom - this was much less of a problem in Titanic for some reason), or making rude comments (too many people in my immediate vicinity to let ‘em fly). It's movies like this that convince me I can sell someone a screenplay someday, because while I may be no Jeb Stuart, I can certainly write circles around whoever this screenwriter is with my hands behind my back holding my pen in my teeth and holding the paper on the table with my foot.

Believability: Here are the accents used in this movie, ostensibly set in Huntington, Indiana: Slater uses an L.A. accent. Quaid and the rest of the police force are unaccountably Texarkanan. Freeman is straight urban, possibly Chicago (which I guess is sorta plausible). One of Freeman's henchmen is a transplanted Bronxian. And Driver, in the most egregious error of all, adopts a thick Wisconsin accent for one sentence and then just talks normally.

Also, while Quaid has to change clips so that he can have a dramatic dialogue with the young cop, Freeman and Slater apparently have prop men swimming up next to them to reload their weapons while they are offscreen.

And Bea Arthur as a violent grandma is good only for shock value. She just cannot bring off the act to any audience that has seen her in "Golden Girls." By far the most satisfying moment of the movie was not when Quaid got his, but when Arthur's wife tells her to "shut the fuck up."

Tension: Let's put it this way: I was more concerned for most of the movie about the fact that I couldn't tell what was stuck in my boot than what was happening. I couldn't tell whether it was leaves or mud; it felt kind of grainy like mud but sort of dry and resilient at the same time. Meanwhile people were chasing each other around with guns. (It was dead grass.)

Action: Incomprehensible alternating with dorkily overblown, noted above.

Attractive Man Count: Freeman gets a 1, Slater I guess is supposed to get a 1 but I can't see giving him more than 3/4.

Attractive Woman Count: Driver gets a 1. She is the only female character outside of Bea Arthur in this movie. If you want to give Bea Arthur points I have nothing more to say to you.

Overall Grade: F. There is a reason they make failing grades. It's for pieces of crap in any walk of life. Like this movie.

This was probably more fun to write than it is to read, but man was it fun to write.

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