Into the Storm

No matter how dumb you think this bloated Weather Channel special being passed off as a movie is, I assure you it’s even dumber than that. It is also incredibly forgetable. Indeed, I feel a certain urgency in writing this before it completely vanishes from my mind. (Not that this eventuality will be a bad thing.) I suppose I could blame part of my reaction on the fact that I saw Into the Storm immediately after a press screening of Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight, but the truth is Into the Storm is perfectly capable of being lousy all by itself. It needs no better film to make it look bad. Into the Storm has been categorized as immoral in feeding off real disasters and real tragedies for entertainment purposes — something that could be said about too many movies to count — and villified as “disaster porn.” “Disaster corn” would be nearer the mark. The idea that this thing is sufficiently conscious to actually have an idea or an agenda is laughable. But then, so is the movie.

Everything about Into the Storm — with the exception of some of the CGI devastation — is stupefying in its incompetence. The “story” is supposedly presented in a kind of found-footage documentary fashion — except when it isn’t, meaning that the film just bounces back and forth between its faux-reality hooey and being a regular old narrative movie. To add to the audacity of its mendacity, the film turns around at the end and presents itself as a documentary that will serve as a monument to those of the low-rent cast and the nameless (and largely CGI) extras who didn’t make it to the end of the movie. That there is no monument to viewers who sat through the whole thing is one of life’s great injustices.

The story — if it can be called that — seems to have taken its chief inspiration from the Spielberg War of the Worlds (2005). Like Mr. Spielberg’s take on an alien invasion, the bulk of Into the Storm suggests that all this death (mostly implied to keep things PG-13) and destruction is really at the service of healing a fractured family. Here it’s a widowed father (Richard Armitage) and his sons, Donnie (Max Deacon) and Trey (Nathan Kress). Moreover, it will bring Donnie and the girl of his dreams, Kaitlyn (Alycia Debnam Carey), together. (Of course in reality, three weeks later Kaitlyn would come to her senses and realize that this was all a mere rippling of the loins over a shared traumatic experience, and that Donnie is just this dorky kid who’s been mooning — and goodness knows what else — over her yearbook photo.)

The rest of the story — which will eventually dovetail with the familial drama — focuses on the business of a hardcore, self-centered storm chaser (Matt Walsh) and his hapless crew. Like everyone else in the film, these aren’t so much characters as types. In addition, we’re given comedy relief (which isn’t nearly as funny as the unintended laughs) involving a pair of barely sentient rednecks named Reevis (Jon Reep) and Donk (Kyle Davis), who spend all their time making videos of themselves performing sub-Jackass daredeviltry in hopes of YouTube stardom.

Of course, all this hoo-ha is merely there to provide an excuse for the orgy of apparently climate-change-spawned (never so named) meteorological mayhem. This all works on the premise that if one tornado is exciting, four or five tornadoes (including what can only be called a firenado that looks positively Old Testament) are thrilling — and that one superhumongous tornado is absolutely heart-stopping. (That I found it more mind-numbing is perhaps a personal thing.) It all depends on your fondness for — or tolerance of — endless CGI simulations of destruction. I guess it’s OK on that score, though a lot of it looks cartoonish to me, and it all goes on too long. That none of the characters are worth caring about makes it all seem like a pointless exercise in state-of-the-art effects work. Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense destruction and peril, and language including some sexual references.