Hard Rain (1998) * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp
"Hard Rain" has some of the most exhausting-looking stuntwork and mechanical effects I've ever seen in a movie. They are used to prop up one of the thinnest and most inept stories I've ever seen in a movie. Times like this, I fear the "Making Of" featurette is more absorbing than the flick itself.
Hell, the story's almost an afterthought. An armored truck gets stuck in the middle of a town that's being evacuated due to severe flooding. A thief (Morgan Freeman, who manages to be interesting even when given nothing of substance to do) wants the $3 million in cash inside the truck. There's a shootout, one of the drivers is killed, and the other (Christian Slater) escapes and stows the cash in a drowned mausoleum.
Up until this point the movie isn't bad, but then it quickly becomes an exercise in -- dare I say it? -- soggy futility. Freeman's character is flanked by several inept (and wretchedly played) sidekicks, who tear through the town on waterskis and shoot everything that blows bubbles. Slater gets mixed up with the local cops, who think he's a looter and slam him in a holding cell. (This actually leads to one of the better scenes in the movie, where Slater has to figure out how to break out of the cell while the entire building is slowly being flooded -- although the filmmakers cheat on the outcome.)
I mentioned stunts and mechanical effects. The whole film takes place within the town -- a masterpiece of engineering, which just gets more and more treacherous as the movie unspools. I didn't doubt for a moment that I wasn't looking at a drowning landscape. What I did doubt was whether one atom of the plot made any sense.
The film's confused in more ways that one. I guess after Freeman came on board, the script was rewritten to make the thief less of a monster and more of a philosophical sort. This, unfortunately, only makes us wonder why a sensible fellow like him doesn't simply give up and head for dry land.
The monster role gets taken by the town sheriff (Randy Quaid), who behaves in ways that say he is less greedy than stupid. You might say that greed often causes people to behave stupidly. I imagine the screenwriters who dreamed this nonsense up would have something to say about that.
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