What makes the film particularly absurd is that the flood
has next to nothing to do with anything else in the picture. None of
the characters woke up that day expecting or planning for a flood,
and the themes or ideas of the picture (such as they are) are not
flood-related.
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The flood is simply a thing that happens, not an act of God
so much as an act of Hollywood, a forced marriage between an old plot
and a comparatively unexploited category of disaster. That the film
is watchable (there’s your blurb: “Watchable!” — Mick LaSalle, San
Francisco Chronicle) is
because the filmmakers seem to have no illusions about the movie
they’re making. They know they’re not fooling us, and we know that
they know, and they know that we know that they know, on up to
infinity.
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CHASE MOVIE ON BOATS
So how high’s the water, Mama? It’s about four feet high and
risin’ at the start of the picture, when a couple of armored car
drivers, Edward Asner and Christian Slater, get their truck stuck in
the water. As luck would have it, bandit Morgan Freeman shows up,
leading a posse of criminals. He wants the drivers to show him the
money, and they refuse. Next thing, Slater is running (and swimming
and puddle-jumping) with $3 million, and Asner has chalked up one of
his shortest film appearances in years.
From that point on, “Hard Rain” is a chase movie on boats,
all kinds of boats. Speedboats, rowboats. As a small Indiana town is
transformed into Venice, Italy, the boats come out, and so do the
guns.
To its credit, the visual side is well-han-
dled. The film creates a convincing illusion of a submerged
town. There is also one first-class sequence. Slater, falsely impris-
oned for looting, is lying on his cot, when he idly glances off and
sees that the water is at cot-level. It’s a tense scramble to
escape that
locked cage before the water hits the ceil-
ing.
In keeping with the movie’s spirit, Minnie Driver, who has,
till now, not made a false step, adopts an American accent that
sounds more like a wicked parody (along
the lines of Tracey Ullman) than an attempt at something real. She
plays a young woman who restores churches. She restores them, and the
Lord taketh them away.
QUAID’S SHERIFF COMEDIC
Randy Quaid provides some yucks as the town sheriff, who is
so irritated at having lost a recent re-election bid that he just
might do anything. Director Mikael Salomon has fun with the sheriff
character, zooming in on Quaid’s dripping, scowling face each time
he’s about to say something ominous or unpleasant.
It would be giving “Hard Rain” too much credit to say that
it’s an action-film satire, just as it wouldn’t be true to say that
it’s unintentionally funny. It’s really just a good-
natured mess, shifting tones from scene to scene, piling on the
deaths, the silly jokes, and — when all else fails — the water,
just to keep things going. Anything to keep you entertained, anything
to keep you ever-so-
mildly interested.
