Why did they have to cancel MST3K?

Rating: 4/10 (29 May 2004)

I can't think of any movie made in the past 5 years more deserving of the full treatment by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 gang than this one. Cheesy dialogue, ludicrous plot holes, cardboard characters, overused disaster movie clichés, bad acting; you name it, this movie has it.
The bad science appears in almost the first frame. And it gets much, much worse. But we can count on Hollywood getting the science wrong, because (it is claimed, probably correctly) most movie goers are so scientifically illiterate that it just doesn't matter. Besides, expecting Hollywood to respect the laws of physics is about as reasonable as expecting George W. Bush to respect the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights; it just Ain't Gonna Happen. So I won't belabor the point.
But what about the things that movie audiences are supposed to care about? Stuff like character development, plot and dialogue? Well, this movie doesn't seem to think they're terribly important either. In this regard, this movie is just the latest in a long line of cheesy, big-budget disaster movies such as the Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Earthquake!, Airport 1975, Armageddon and so on.
The major subplot of Day After Tomorrow centers on the efforts of an ultra-smart scientist in Washington DC to reach his teenage son, holed up in the New York Public Library with a bunch of fellow nerds as they ride out a cataclysmic snowstorm. How do we know he's ultra-smart? He speaks at UN conferences and personally advises the Vice President and the President. (We're already starting to suspect that maybe he's not so smart.) And what does our ultra-smart hero do? Disregarding his own emphatic advice to the President that people should either flee south or (if they're too far north) ride out the storm indoors, he sets out for New York to find his son. What exactly does he plan to do once he gets there, especially since it quickly becomes clear that his son is a lot smarter and better able to take care of himself than his dad? This is never explained.
Naturally, such subplots has to have a happy ending, so there is no suspense at all in this particular story line. That leaves a lot of admittedly fun special effects, such as Los Angeles being destroyed by tornadoes, a Russian freighter cruising past the New York Public Library, and a shot of the Statue of Liberty half-buried in the ice. (When I saw this, I just had to say "They blew it up! Damn them all, they blew it up!", much to my wife's annoyance.)
The directors throw in a few obvious jokes and comic reversals, such as the discovery of the US Tax Code as a particularly suitable source of fuel for a fireplace, but the unintentional hilarities were far more numerous.
Don't waste your money seeing this one in a theater unless you're a special effects junkie. Rent the DVD when it comes out, gather a bunch of friends, and do your best to imitate Joel and the 'bots on MST3K.