Spoilers in this one, so if you haven’t seen a middling-bad six year old movie and still want to, tread with caution.

Things:

  1. Movies in which all the main characters die are stupid. They just are. Yes, it subverts expectations or whatever, but fuck that. It just feels futile and pointless.
  2. Movies in which all the main characters have no characterization are even stupider. Here’s what we know about the soon-to-die people: George Clooney is grizzled and possibly washed-up; Marky Mark has a mercurial hot-head woman who loves him; the scruffy guy was almost successful hitting on the chick at the bar; the blind guy from Contact has a temper; John C. Reilly has a divorced wife and a young son who is a terrible actor; the black guy exists. Tell me I’m supposed to care about these people. Now try to mean it.
  3. Tragically, the picture quality in the movie was terrible. Oh, it was still better than a DVD, but not by much. This is the sort of movie where I can legitimately see people saying, “Well, it’s better than DVD, I guess, but I don’t get the big deal.” Lame! We’re still in a launch period, people, let’s try harder.
  4. Much of the movie was completely unrelated to the actual plot. There’s the meteorologists, who exist only as a convenient narrative device; there’s the people on a sailboat, who exist for no purpose at all; there’s the rescue people, who exist only to show how much being a rescue person totally sucks. But none of them ever so much as SEE the main characters, so why are they in the movie so much? Answer: There’s no real plot, so the movie proper would have taken 25 minutes, and needed padding.

Overall verdict: Highly lame. Stupid movie about stupid people dying stupidly, and I never cared at all, except for at the end when sheer manipulativeness made me lump up a bit (amazing what you can do with a eulogy accompanied by a stringy soundtrack), and it doesn’t even look stunningly awesome. Skip it!