Just back from seeing it. Leicester Square packed with gawpers in bedraggled witch-hats standing slack-jawed at the barricades for the third Harry Potter film - and the Day After Tomorrow cinema almost empty.
It was a pretty bog-standard disaster movie, with all the pros and cons of your bog-standard disaster movie: unheeded, doom-saying science-hero; mildly dysfunctional father-sibling relationship (nothing corrects the effects of a Dad-deprived childhood than a humanity-threatening disaster); dewy-eyed women who function as love interest, ballast or one-dimensional nurturers (Won't Somebody Please Think Of The Bald, Terminally-Ill Children?); heroic white guys with nearly-as-heroic black sidekicks and seconds-in-command; an utterly bland US President; a phalanx of tweedy Brits, their upper lips already frozen stiff, who simply don't possess sufficient American Get-Up-And-Go to do anything other than quietly die of hypothermia.
Oh yeah, and the effects. Those were good - apart from the aforementioned crap-wolves (which, despite having had their food zoo-delivered daily for however many years, retained sufficient pack instinct to ignore all the freshly-dead human and animal corpses littering the place and instead go after the most obviously alive, dangerous prey they could find) and the wave of water, which seemed to be inching its towering way gradually down a street full of cars, taking its own sweet time to flood the Library.
Having said all that, what I found least plausible was the likelihood of wealthy white Caucasions having problems hailing a taxi in Delhi.
Tosh, predictable, formulaic tosh. Likeable actors, though (I had quite a crush on the ginger bloke when he played Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet, and he looked slashtastically good huddled up in a tent with Dennis Quaid) and pleasant enough, I guess.
You could tell the President wasn't Bush, though, by the fact that he wasn't a) on the first 'plane for Texas, b) already in Texas, or c) immediately trying to pin it all on Saddam Hussein. |
