THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
½ (two and one half stars)
Apocalypse wow.
Running time: 124 minutes. Rated PG-13 (intense situations of peril). At the AMC Empire, the Ziegfeld, the Kips Bay, others.
THE forecast: A few sticky patches but generally pretty cool.
Like the tidal wave that swallows New York in the second act, the jaw-dropping special effects in the weather-gone-wild doomsday film “The Day After Tomorrow” sweep all else away – including quibbles about bland characterization and dead-in-the-water dialogue.
And, despite the perfect storm of political controversy that’s swirled around the movie’s central conceit of a global warming-induced Ice Age, environmental sermonizing also takes a back seat to the fantastical science and computer-generated havoc.
German-born director Roland Emmerich gets in some partisan digs – the villain of the piece is a U.S. vice president who bears more than a passing resemblance to Dick Cheney, and the silver-haired president is a blank-eyed dolt.
But Emmerich’s forte is big-bang escapism (“Independence Day,” “Godzilla”), and here, too, he is bent on wreaking mayhem and destruction in the most spectacular way.
This is mindless popcorn fun for moviegoers who get a vicarious thrill from seeing stuff get wrecked – and have a high pain threshold for tin-eared dialogue.
Two generations of hotties provide the film’s emotional core, such as it is.
Dennis Quaid plays Jack Hall, a science whiz who sets off an early warning about polar ice caps melting, ocean currents being altered and temperatures plummeting.
His doomsday theory is backed up by Professor Rapson (Ian Holm), a fellow climatologist stationed in Scotland, but these two men seem to be the only ones on the planet talking sense.
Hall tries to warn global leaders but is given the brushoff; the U.S. veep (Kenneth Welsh) is particularly dismissive: “Our economy is every bit as fragile as the environment,” he barks.
In no time at all, however, the skeptics are eating their words, as snow starts falling on New Delhi, grapefruit-size hail decimates Tokyo, tornadoes lash Los Angeles, and a wall of water surges across Manhattan, drowning the Statue of Liberty in an oblique nod to the iconic image from the original “Planet of the Apes.”
These scenes of grand-scale annihilation are where Emmerich really razzle-dazzles, milking current computer wizardry for all it’s worth.
From the Russian supertanker floating up Fifth Avenue, to the brittle flash-freezing of New York’s skyscrapers, to the thundering beauty of the gathering storm clouds, these are wow-worthy visuals on a grand scale.
(The effects budget seems to have run out about two-thirds of the way through the movie – a roaming pack of CGI wolves look like they leaped out of a video game.)
With most of the nation’s population fleeing south – cue some funny scenes of U.S. “refugees” illegally crossing the Rio Grande after Mexico closes its borders – Hall slaps on some snowshoes and heads north to assuage his absentee-father guilt.
His son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), is trapped in the New York Public Library, where he’s been taking part in something called a “scholastic decathlon” and flirting shyly with a dewy, limpid-eyed classmate (Emmy Rossum).
Emmerich has long been criticized for peopling his movies with cardboard cutout figures, and the clichéd characters in “Day” are no exception.
But indie it boy Gyllenhaal sensibly offsets the big-budget hoopla with a low-key performance, his deadpan half-smirk giving his character a nice comic edge, and the talented Quaid manages to lend a sense of gravitas to his everyday-hero role.
Neither, however, can surmount the film’s central absurdity – Hall’s death-defying trek from Washington to New York to somehow “rescue” his son, implausibly outpacing the encroaching cold, while Sam fends off a minus-150-degree deep freeze by making a little fire.
The cost to life of this cataclysmic climate shift is incalculable, of course, but Emmerich steers clear of scenes of mass carnage; there are only a handful of on-screen deaths, and moments of levity punctuate the destruction.
Disaster movies, from “The Poseidon Adventure” to “Towering Inferno,” are impossible to take seriously and “Day” is no exception – it’s simply a fast-moving pageant of end-of-the-world eye candy.