Pros: Nice FX, Gyllenhaal & Quaid, suspense, a few touching subplots.
Cons: Dare I say, kinda boring?
The Bottom Line: The Day After Tomorrow is the apocalypse de jour. But then it's over and we just go home. If you recognize the song my title references, my condolences.
Nothing pacifies a misanthropic audience (of which inevitably, I am a part) like good old mass destruction. Who needs weapons when we have Nature, cores, asteroids and aliens?
Well, The Day After Tomorrow gets the unenviable honor of being the first film of this type (and this magnitude) to reveal itself in summer of '04. And much like its previous counterparts, it delivers exactly what it promises. In this case, that's tons of effects, lots of death and destruction, all manner of New York City hooptie holler, and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Of course you can't go wrong with Jake. Some might say he sold out by electing to participate in such banal pop fare, but I say if even one person out there is taken in by his performance here and ends up seeing Donnie Darko because of it, that can't be a bad thing. Based on Jake's performance here, I wouldn't be surprised if that happens. Not necessarily saying that the material itself is spellbinding, but in the hands of Jake, you know it's coming to you about damn near as well as it can be done.
Dennis Quaid is another superb actor who has stepped on a mine here. Once again, he does very well in the fatherly side of his role, Jack Hall (much like in Frequency) but as a person, he is relegated to the status of individual scientist who can't get a word in edgewise with the Powers That Be. Then of course, he ends up being right. Righter than even he himself knows.
A week later, I remember nary a one of the other characters. Emmy Rossum plays a mostly tepid love interest, Laura. Only reason you care about her is because Jake does. Which I guess is the whole idea. Austin Nichols plays a decent competition for Jake's character, but it's always easy to love the characters you're supposed to hate.
The plot, on the other hand, is easy. Sam (Gyllenhaal) is going to some big school tournament, where he kicks asss and impresses a girl. Some other guy at the school hosting the event is smitten with her. A clumsy love triangle comes to pass, but it is of little consequence when that storm arrives.
Boy, does it arrive quickly, too. Foreshadowing is normally subtle, or so I've been told. But in The Day After Tomorrow foreshadowing is dropping hail the size of soda cans onto a foreign country. Oh, and then having some reporter in the background saying "Oh my God! There is some golf-ball sized hail coming down here!"
Things go from bad to worse, Jack goes from anxious to more anxious, and the kids (along with the rest of NYC) handle this flood as though it's a weekly routine. Then the big wave comes. But even the water itself is kind enough to stroll the streets and take every corner, one at a time, rather than toppling the buildings over. Not that I personally want to see that, you know...
The film does tend to get specific about temperatures and other conditions, so they seem to have done the research. But they also never pass up an opportunity to remind us that we're "bringing this upon ourselves". Even if it means getting a Senator or somebody to talk straight to the camera like it's the emergency broadcast system. Nonetheless, I'm sure nobody who drove to the theater actually abandoned the car and walked home as a result.
The film is not entirely without a few redeeming qualities. The special effects are actually quite good. Jake and Dennis, well, no explanation needed there. Some of the situations get pretty suspenseful, especially one in which Jake talks to his Dad on a pay phone inside an arch-shaped niche as the water is rising all around him. The reconciliation between Jack Hall and his ex-wife Lucy (Sela Ward) is kind of touching. And I thought it was funny how the President of the United States looked exactly like Bill Clinton.
But in the long run, you're probably better off waiting out the DVD. As purty as those special effects are, it's mostly one color at a point. Nothing that wouldn't look just as dazzling on a 50-inch HDTV. If you catch my draft.
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