Dumb and cheesy, but it's entertaining and has great FX - hay, just like "Independence Day"! (***)

Rating: 7/10 (8 June 2004)

A couple weeks ago I wrote that "Van Helsing" was one of the dumbest movies I'd ever seen, and not in a good way. Now here's "The Day After Tomorrow", which is also monumentally dumb, but in a very good way. Though both are pretty stupid in concept, "The Day After Tomorrow" is ambitious and entertaining, while "Van Helsing" was dreary, dull and unimaginative.

Harkening back to the sci-fi disaster flicks of decades past with the word "Day" in the title ("The Day The Earth Stood Still", "The Day The Earth Caught Fire", "The Day After"), "The Day After Tomorrow" is a movie about mass-scale destruction with a point to make. It's about the devastation that could be caused to the Earth in the future because of global warming. But mostly, like director Roland Emmerich's "Independence Day", it's about letting those special effects fly and showing us some crazy stuff.

Global warming causes the melting of the ice caps which triggers a huge and devastating climate change on Earth, causing, among other things, cantaloupe-sized hail in Tokyo, tornadoes that tear L.A. apart, and in the film's scariest sequence, a gigantic tidal wave that covers most of New York City. The L.A. and New York scenes feature some truly amazing special effects.
Also like "Independence Day", it features a large cast, with the characters grouped in different places, enduring different hardships. The only group of characters I found interesting were a teenager named Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal, looking a bit lost in his first big-budget, mainstream film but doing a good job), some of his friends, and some other people trapped in the upper floors of the New York public library.
Along with tremendous special effects, "The Day After Tomorrow" features great cinematography and a well-done sense of dread in its first half. To see thousands of birds flying south all at once because of something they know and the characters don't is an eerie sight.
But oh boy, is it dumb. The dialogue is terrible, and there are many scenes where characters say something and then glare at each other while intense music plays and you half expect the actors to crack up. This is also a movie in which it's possible to outrun cold air (which actually makes for an exciting scene), and where even after New York City has been flooded by a tidal wave, there is still someone behind the information desk in the library to helpfully point out where the nearest phone is.

However, the dumbness of "The Day After Tomorrow" didn't detract from my enjoyment of it, and in some cases even added to it. Besides, you don't go to a movie like this for character development or dialogue. You go to see some awesome sights, get a few thrills, and you're lucky if just 2 or 3 of the characters are halfway interesting, and on those counts it delivers.

This is a big, bold, cheesy theme-park ride of a movie, and if that's all you expect, you won't be disappointed.