Into The Storm

Into the Storm (2014)

22% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 148 reviews)

Runtime: 89 minutes

Directed by: Steven Quale

Starring: Richard Armitage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Matt Walsh, Max Deacon, Alycia Debnam-Carey

From: Warner Brothers/New Line Cinema/Village Roadshow

In hindsight, I perhaps never should have desired to see this movie. I explain it all below: 

It's a long story I won't get into but at the time this came into cinemas, I was going to watch it there then another film immediately afterwards... things happened and it was not until last night that I finally checked this out, and it was only because starting last week Amazon had an HD rental of this for only a dollar. Turns out, it wasn't really worth the time but at least I finally got to see something I mentioned elsewhere at the time I was gonna see.

It's a partially found footage movie where we have to follow a bunch of arguing and bickering A-holes as they have to deal with “the most destructive tornado in history” as it tears through a small Oklahoma city... this includes a Vice-Principal father and his two teenaged sons and of course they don't get along. There's also hillbilly rednecks who love posting videos on YouTube, and professional storm chasers, who are led by a tremendous tool, a money-grubbing buffoon who was the worst stereotype among a sea of stereotypes.

While this was not a movie I struggled to finish, I am sure it's leagues better than the tornado movies you see on the SyFy Channel (and I am not even talking about the obvious franchise from The Asylum), some of the action was entertaining and there is standard pathos which is not bad, overall this is not good. The characters and story are what make the chances of this being good entertainment fly away like a cow in a tornado. I did not enjoy all the needless conflict; all the griping got pretty old pretty quick. Then there's this movie being stump-dumb. A cornucopia of examples I could catalog here, but I'll instead mention a few:

Whether it's one of the sources for the found footage or the regular movie, it all looks and sounds the same. The cameras that people use are also pretty resilient against rain and water. There's a random 30 second scene at the end where we suddenly shift to a major airport, where the storm does damage... why the hell is there a major airport right next to a small Oklahoma city? Then there's a character who suddenly gets scared due to how dangerous those tornadoes are, but after a rousing pep talk he... willingly stands 5 feet next to the fire tornado so he can get a close-up of it?

There's a vehicle that looks like the Landmaster from Damnation Alley and the effects usually look fine. That is not enough for me to ever recommend this. I don't love this movie but Twister is better.