The Day After Tomorrow Review  

There's hail in Japan, snow in New Delhi, and, hey, a twister just ate the Hollywood sign! Now that's entertainment -- for about 20 minutes. The other hour and 40 feel like the most expensive PowerPoint presentation ever made.

"The Day After Tomorrow" takes us to the brink of a world that ends because the American government wouldn't listen to geeks and lobbyists warning against the ravages of global warming. Then it demonstrates what happens when the polar ice caps melt: homicidal climate change, including an epic deluge that drowns 75 percent of New York City, and an instant ice age.

Yet anyone showing up for this movie hoping to see mankind pay for all those years of aerosol deodorants and SUV joy rides is bound to leave miffed at the ABC Family movie that director Roland Emmerich serves up. For all its doomsaying, the movie fails to scare you into being a better citizen of the earth or even a riveted moviegoer.

The end of the world turns out to be pretty ho-hum after all, like a long, lethal snow day. This is Emmerich's latest adventure in urban catastrophe. In "Independence Day," aliens blew up the White House; in "Godzilla," a giant lizard ate Manhattan. The new one is as flat and underwhelming as his other pictures. But this is an inert blockbuster with a difference. It wants to take the world's leaders to task for the state of our environment.

Like Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" and Madonna's world tour, for starters, Emmerich's target appears to be the Bush administration. Nobody mentions it by name, but who are we supposed to think of when we see the movie's youthful and completely ineffectual commander in chief? And darn if the pudgy and pale vice president, with his big glasses, white hair, and cocky demeanor, doesn't have Dick Cheney's way with stubbornness. ("Who's going to pay the price of the Kyoto accord?" the VP barks at one meeting.)

Emmerich was inspired enough by a book called "The Coming Global Superstorm" to make a worst-case-scenario movie. The script, co-written with Jeffrey Nachmanoff, borrows a lot of the book's cataclysmic huzzah, but despite the glut of people with PhDs running around, the movie isn't really all that psyched about science. Instead, Emmerich seems more interested in Old Testament-style prophecies, which he hitches to a Hallmark card of a story.

That part comes courtesy of a musty plotline involving discord between a divorced parent and his child. It seems that while he was running from America to Antarctica studying weather patterns and warning politicians of impending danger, paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) ruined his marriage to Dr. Lucy Hall (Sela Ward) and alienated his mopey teenage son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal). The end of the world turns out to be a wonderful occasion for a father to prove his love to his boy.

As a member of his school's academic decathlon team, Sam heads from Washington, D.C., to New York, where, after the flood hits, he's trapped with Laura (Emmy Rossum), the plucky decathlete he secretly loves. They and a few opponents, strangers, and teammates hole up in the New York Public Library's main branch and burn books to keep warm as the ice age approaches.

In the thick of annihilation, Jack presents to the vice president a scenario to save half of American civilization. It involves drawing a big line across the country and telling those below it to run south and telling anyone north of it goodbye. And heading north is just what the professor intends to do: driving, then showshoeing his way from the nation's capital to the Big Apple to embrace his son. Funny, the weather report didn't say anything about torrential cheese.

Lest we become distracted from the film's watered-down environmental propaganda or its bravura special effects, Emmerich has opted against the casting of movie stars. Quaid is as earnest as the movie and as devoid of charisma. And I love Gyllenhaal just as much as the next girl, but his lethargic performance is the acting equivalent of a T-shirt that says, "I survived `Donnie Darko' and all I got for it was this lousy movie." At some point you also tire of the thespians (the Brits Ian Holm and Adrian Lester are here) and the faces of actors you can't quite place. The film leaves you longing for a Will Smith or even Bill Pullman to wink at you every once in a while.

Emmerich came up with the idea for this movie when he was directing Mel Gibson back in 2000's "The Patriot." And "The Day After Tomorrow" is as single-minded as "The Passion of the Christ." But what it lacks is, well, passion. Everybody's nice and friendly -- and bland. The movie's a lot more like a secular version of those apocalyptic Tim LaHaye-Jerry B. Jenkins "Left Behind" books, which are dogged and bellicose yet only vaguely judgmental: Everything will be fine; all you have to do is believe. In the final minutes, with its creepy-happy political reversals, "The Day After Tomorrow" says a similar thing: Kumbaya.

Emmerich does know his way around an action scene -- there's an exciting sequence in which Sam and his buddies run from wolves while looking for meds inside the huge ship that pulls up alongside the library. But he's a master of disaster with no people skills. The characters in "The Day After Tomorrow" are fantastically stupid. When scores of folks leave the library, some in a snit, after Sam warns them that they'll die of cold if they do, it's hard to have sympathy for them. Of course, if sticking around means reciting lines like "I'm using my body heat to warm you," I'd head out into the icebound city and catch my death, too.



Boston Globe