Barely managed to sit through this mess of special effects and general lack of anything else

Rating: 5/10 (14 July 2004)

After just barely sitting through this film, I can say with almost 100% certainty that I will never even glimpse at one minute of this film, if I can avoid it. The film has a fair amount of explosions and what I imagine is expensive special effects, but generally lacks anything else. The film has little to no character development, which pretty much puts the main characters in two major groups: those who will survive, and those who won't(mind you, none of these will we care about, no matter if they die or not). The little character development there actually is, consists of cliches and various badly recycled formulas for character development scenes. What's worse(well, almost, anyway) is that the characters themselves are cardboard cutouts, cliches, and stereotypes of the worst possible kind; believe me, you'll cringe, you'll feel bad for the actors, hell, you might even laugh, but probably not at the right times. Which brings me to my next point; the humor all feels so forced, and most of the actors share zero on-screen chemistry, which just makes it look awkward and unfunny. The film also has far too much of what is supposed to be humor, which just feels extremely misplaced in what was supposed to be an action/disaster flick(I guess, but it's so messed up that it's very hard to tell). One of the things that really baffles me, is the way the characters are introduced; from the very moment Bruce Willis appeared on screen, I hated his character(you'll find out why when you see it yourself). The same goes for Ben Affleck, and pretty much the rest of the cast. Even Steve Buscemi was someone I had hostile feelings against, even though he did do a fairly good job, and did have some funny lines, scattered about in this film. Liv Tyler offered a few extenuating qualities, mostly by being darn attractive(if you don't mind me saying so) and fairly talented in her performance. The plot is close to being completely incoherent, and lacks any real structure or pace. The acting is good enough, I guess, but is ruined beyond repair by the cliche characters. The humor is mostly unbearably stupid and juvenile, but Buscemi had a few moments and good lines. The special effects are decent enough, but mainly consist of stuff blowing up, which seems fairly unimaginative. The first hour or so of this film is almost bearable, but then the film tries to be serious(it pretty much only starts trying to be serious at this point) and then the quality of the film drastically declines until the point where the film almost becomes completely unbearable to watch, mostly due to the characters cliche-like qualities, which the film suddenly ignores, obviously in an attempt to flesh out these characters, which it fails horribly in, since they are, in fact, cliches, and absolutely nothing more. The film is overly long and pointless. I can(obviously) not really say anything positive about it, since I really didn't find anything about it to meet even my very lowest expectations. If you ever find yourself watching this, do yourself a favor, and either turn it off, or fast-forward to the next interesting scene(which could take quite a while). Nothing unmissable in this feature, sorry. I recommend this only to huge fans of one or more of the following: disaster flicks, Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi, Ben Affleck or Liv Tyler. Otherwise I wouldn't recommend this film to anyone, as it is really *that* bad. I reluctantly gave this film a 5/10, mainly for actually having one or two scenes that are decent, and for having decent enough effects. Also, Liv Tyler is a bit easy on the eyes, which I guess played a more or less small part in my rating, too.