The Day After Tomorrow

Reviewed by:
Paul Ulane

The term "natural disaster" can encompass a great many things: tornado, hurricane, failed summer blockbuster. The Day After Tomorrow borrows from all three as it lays waste to every single disaster movie cliché in its path. At the center of the storm is climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), who opens our adventure in India, warning anyone with a bendable ear about the threat of impending doom posed by global warming. Once he's roundly ignored, we have a movie, and a violent storm that tears through landmarks in L.A., New York, and several less important foreign locales. Softball-size hail, dueling twisters, and massive flooding through the streets of the Big Apple all build momentum for a special effects destructathon. But when Jack's son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), enters the equation, providing the impetus for his father’s impossible trek from blanketed DC to buried NYC, the floodgates open wide for needless subplots and impassable plot holes. Children with cancer headline the heartstring-pullers, while a remarkably left-wing political undercurrent highlights the rest of the movie’s divergent tangents, combining to wreck far more havoc than any computer-generated cold snap ever could.

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