The Flood (Genius DVD)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: D     Feature: D

 

 

The disaster film has never been a breeding ground for great cinema. Case in point: being chased by cold in The Day After Tomorrow.  But even so, you can at least take comfort in the fact that as bad as the movie is, the disaster that plays out on screen is worse.  The Flood teaches us that this is not always the case.  I firmly believe that this film has the potential to inflict more harm to mankind as a whole than if London were actually covered in water.  There are around a dozen characters in the story and it should only take about a half hour of the movie to realize that you don’t care about a single one of them.  Another half hour and you begin to hope they die off soon so that the movie can end.

 

This movie wants desperately to be primetime network TV and it is shot accordingly. The style and tone are taken from shows like 24 and CSI but without the writing or acting talent.  And yet, inexplicably, the production quality is almost on par with these shows in terms of computer graphics, sets, and picture and sound quality. The audio is in Dolby Digital 5.1 and the picture is in widescreen.

 

So what’s worse than bad writing with no plot structure about banal characters that are acted poorly?  Sitting through it for three hours.  This is a movie that should have been a one-hour rest period on the Sci-Fi channel between Chupacabra Terror and Boa vs. Python.  But instead it’s released on DVD so that unsuspecting victims can be lured to boring, watery grave.  Save yourselves, get out while you still can, and avoid The Flood.

 

 

-   Matthew Carrick