Hard Rain (1998)

Directed by Mikael Salomon. Starring Christian Slater, Morgan Freeman, Randy Quaid, Minnie Driver, Peter Murnik, Michael Goorjian, Mark Rolston, Ricky Harris, Dann Florek, Ed Asner, Wayne Duvall, Betty White, Richard Dysart. [R]

Bob Dylan warned of hearing “the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world” and seeing “a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,” but no warning at all about a soaked-to-the-bone action-heist programmer set during a torrential rainstorm. Amid the chaos of a flood evacuation in a small Midwestern town, armed robber Freeman and his gang aim to steal a few million dollars from an armored truck—manned by just two officers, one of whom is past retirement age, so that’s gaping-lapse-in-logic number…thirty-four?—but they get rebuffed by the one who doesn’t have one foot in the grave (played by Slater in a performance that never once convinced me he’d bother putting up such a fight). Graham Yost’s script is too stupid to believe, but that almost comes with the territory with these kinds of enterprises; all that matters is does it provide requisite levels of tension and excitement? Unfortunately, it falls short on that count, too. Set at nighttime in waist-level-or-higher water, the movie is just so relentlessly dreary looking that it’s hard to appreciate a small handful of moments/set pieces that offer fleeting entertainment or novelty value, like a jet-ski chase through the flooded corridors of a high school. Lots of shouting and shooting, but it’s all too easy to get distracted wondering how miserable the cast and crew must’ve been making this thing day after day after day, and just wishing the skies would clear already (or for the credits to roll). Fans of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” be warned: Ed Asner and Betty White don’t ever share the screen together, so don’t get your hopes up.

39/100