Trite Hollywood cliché fest

Rating: 1/10 (31 May 2004)

Who can I sue to get back the two hours wasted watching this dog????
This movie's got it all: bad acting, a script so hackneyed it could have come direct from the script writing machines at the Ministry of Truth, so-so special effects (I mean, how many more times can we stand to see New York get flattened in movies before it becomes passe? (i.e., Armageddon, Godzilla, Independence Day, etc, ad nauseaum), and really really bad science.
Just about every trope that the far left holds dear was trotted out for this flick. There's a Veep who looks just like Cheney and he runs everything, including the saavy environmental policy that ends up trashing most of the CONUS, but of course, nobody but a maverick working for NOAA (and 50 million people who've watched the Discovery Channel) could ever have imagined that the Atlantic current would be flooded by fresh water, resulting in a new ice age. Guess he was too busy worrying about that supervolcano in Yellowstone that's gonna blow soon and cover the USofA in 3 meters of ash (followed by the inevitable ice age)!
And the Prez (who looks a lot like Dubya) never actually does anything, whenever there's a decision to be made, he looks right at the VP.
The cause of the crisis? Why, we didn't sign the Kyoto treaty! Forget that no 1st world country has signed it (and Russia's either just un-signed it or will soon). Jeez, if it wasn't for all the fossil fuel emissions and CO2 in the air, we'd *already* be in an ice age!! Thank global warming for the fact we're not hip deep in snow 9 months of the year.
Hail the size of oranges hits Japan--guess the script writers never heard of gravity. Hail *can't* get that big!
Our intrepid heroes are struggling to get to NY, they walk on the glassed roof of a mall and one of them falls through. Now, this roof is made of girders covered in glass, so of course when the weight of the guy who's fallen through starts making the glass crack, the other guys grab onto the girder and save him, right? right??! No, even though one of the guys on the roof *has his hand on a girder* it never occurs to him to belay his friend to it. Shades of contrived scene from "Vertical Limit".
When the heroes finally reach NY and are looking for people stranded in a library, there's a real Hollywood moment where you don't know if they're still alive in the library. Except that when they find them, they're in a room with a roaring fire. Hello, anyone ever seen a smokeless chimney??? Sheesh! The smoke from that fire should have been visible for miles.
Don't waste your money or brain cells, go see something more intelligent and realistic, like Shrek 2.