The day after is just like it sounds for bread

Rating: 2/10 (4 December 2004)

The Day After Tomorrow takes the most extreme timetables for global tragedy and ratchets them forward by a factor of 100. That's permissible for a big-budget Hollywood spectacle. The problem is that in the course of the compound cataclysms amassed by this movie, there's never a sense of how profoundly and permanently lives are impacted. And though hundreds of millions of people surely perish, there is--astonishingly--no sense of that incalculable loss. Instead, we're stuck with turgid melodrama interrupted by far too little of the dazzling f/x promised in the trailers. An Antarctic ice shelf cracks; Los Angeles is destroyed by a horde of supersized tornadoes on steroids; Tokyo is pelted with hail that is bigger than a breadbox. The worst horrors are reserved for New York City, soaked in torrential rains, then subjected to a storm surge which washes away anyone at street level. Soon the cold descends, a nasty chill which lowers temperatures at 10 degrees per second and dips down below minus 150. Hey, is that Fahrenheit or Centigrade? Guess it doesn't much matter.