Then, it gets boring. After a good hour of prepping you for the storm, the storm starts. In that hour, you find characters that are Hollywood cookie cut, right down to the CAT construction baseball cap, the scruffy beard, the broken families, and the run down mom and pop bar next to the fishing pier. When the Coast Guard and Air Force go out on a rescue mission to save a family in a sail boat on the edge of the storm, you are begging for an explosion, or perhaps a theatre power failure. Neither, it seemed, happened during our screening.
Some waves go by, and lightning flickers.
The family survives, and the audience is completely stunned when a large wave comes, and some rain falls. In what the director almost certainly thought was a tense scene of passionate cinema, a rescue chopper attempts to link up with a refueling plane with disastrous results. I was bowled over by the shocking appearance of several large waves, and booming thunder. Unlike even the worst hurricanes, this movie never has an eye to it. There's no central underlying redeeming quality that somehow makes the whole debacle magical in some small way.