If the phrase “hook echo” gives you a boner, The Day After Tomorrow is a movie tailor-made for you. For the rest of us, it’s just Independence Day with worse weather and better actors. As some sort of weather researcher, Dennis Quaid implores the world governments to do something about the current global warming situation that is melting the polar caps, certain to send the earth into a new ice age. The governments ignore his ominous threats, yet all over the world, strange phenomena of precipitation start to occur.
Although Asia initially gets some killer hail, the good ol’ USA bears the brunt of it, first with L.A. being decimated by multiple simultaneous tornadoes, and then flooding in New York City, followed by a huge temperature drop — thanks, hurricane! — that turns most of the eastern United States into an ice skating rink.
This is a great setup for a tragic disaster flick, but unfortunately, writer/director Roland Emmerich (2012), the 21st-century Irwin Allen, chooses to instead focus on Quaid’s attempts to rescue his son (Jake Gyllenhaal, Source Code) from the frozen confines of the New York Public Library. A perfectly excisable subplot has Quaid’s doctor wife Sela Ward (The Fugitive) act worried while tending to a hairless cancer-patient kid whose hands appear permanently glued to a Peter Pan hardback.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the loving father-son bond; it’s just that I don’t buy the circumstances the play out onscreen — namely, Quaid getting all his co-workers to tag along, risking their lives to walk across several state lines in sub-Arctic temperatures to retrieve someone who isn’t their own flesh and blood. I’d be like, “No thanks, boss, but you’re welcome to borrow my gloves. They’re Thinsulate!”
Some terrific effects occasionally enlighten this otherwise downbeat, underwritten and occasionally manipulative sci-fi reali-tale recommended mostly to Weather Channel geeks. —Rod Lott