Into The Storm (Cinema Screening)

(Spoilers)

So what can I say, I do really enjoy a disaster movie. The Day After Tomorrow, Poseidon and 2012 are among some of the titles I have enjoyed over the years, even with their accompanying poor reviews. As a result of this I imagined that the similarly poor reviews for Into The Storm would not be representative of my enjoyment.

Fairly soon into the film I could tell that there was a lot of truth in these reviews. The film starts with the forced establishment of several broken relationships which of course will naturally improve after the traumatic event of the storm. I understand that this is necessary to bring some emotion into the storm sequences however Into The Storm made these broken relationships so obvious that it was not good to watch. On top of this poor start comes a ridiculous amount of awful dialogue which also wasn’t delivered so well. Several moments of dialogue made me laugh when I definitely wasn’t meant to. The casts skill in terms of acting was patchy at best, what Into The Storm needed was a real A-Lister actor to bring some class to the proceedings. However saying that Sarah Wayne Callies was the casts saving grace as her performance was probably one of the only believable ones. One of the major flaws for Into The Storm which is such a common flaw in cinema today was the fact that I didn’t like any of the characters enough to care if they were sucked into a super tornado or not! The character development before the storm was focused on the wrong things and resulted in little emotion being drawn out.

However the was a turning point in the movie, it was the scene which saw Gary (Richard Armitage) and Trey (Nathan Kress) rescue their son and brother from drowning. This scene worked and it managed to bring out a level of emotion that before this had not been achieved. This was not helped however by Alycia Debnam Carey’s performance as Kaitlyn who stumbled through her parts of the script and provided more comedy than emotion. Apart from Carey the rest of the cast stepped it up for this scene and managed to grab my attention and after this I started to view Into The Storm as a decent disaster movie. From this point on things were no longer awful, the final sequence was good however there wasn’t much tension as it was fairly obvious who was going to survive and who wasn’t. Saying that for a disaster movie there was only really 2 deaths of main characters which is bit of a change. The contrast that the end of the film had to the start with the time capsule messages was a nice touch that added something to the film however all this work was undone by the scene right at the end which tried to inject comedy into the film but failed. This was obviously the role for the characters in this scene throughout the movie but unfortunately the intended comedy was never as funny as the unintended laughs.

Anyway fans of disaster movies may find somethings to enjoy, however saying that there is no doubt that this is a very average movie. Once you sift through the mountain of uninteresting characters and poor dialogue there are some decent scenes to be found however the fact that you have to sift through a lot of rubbish to find them says it all.

BIGGEST FLAW – Poor cast

BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT – The rescue scene I have mentioned above

Rating – 5/10