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Starring Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater, et al. ![[Photo]](/photos/hardrain1.jpg) Continuing with this issues' preoccupation with water, we figured we'd try Hard Rain on for size. Sure we could have done a sinking ship issue including The Poseidon Adventure, Dead Calm, and Hudson Hawk--a movie that was truly dead in the water--but it seemed as if that could get to be a little repetitive, and besides where else could we see Christian Slater and Minnie Driver dripping wet for an hour and a half? So we created a new genre to focus on: the H2Oh my God genre, of which Hard Rain is a founding member. At its heart though, Hard Rain is just your average, run-of-the-mill action flick, but what separates this movie from the majority of other action films produced during the last 10 years is the quality of the setting and the perverse fascination one receives from watching an entire town in Indiana get flooded. The plot and character development are admittedly rather weak, keeping right in line with screenwriter Graham Yost's previous effort, the similarly vacant Broken Arrow, but strangely, this doesn't affect the final product as much as one might expect. Slater and Ed Asner star as two Hoosier armored car guards, transporting over three million dollars in cash, between differing banks. Due to the flooding caused by the excessive amounts of rain the land of corn has received, the armored car hydro-planes off the road and settles itself firmly into a nearby ditch. Morgan Freeman and his gang of farmboy criminals arrive on the scene to relieve Slater and Asner of the money, but thanks to a miscommunication, they allow Slater to escape intact, with the bags of money. And thus the chase begins. Director Mikael Salomon doesn't have an extraordinary sense of rhythm in Hard Rain, but does have an excellent command of the film's true star, the water. Personally, the idea of having the state of Indiana filled with water sits just fine with me--wasn't it Mike Royko who suggested making Indiana into the sixth great lake?--and Salomon, through the use of miniatures and elaborate interior and exterior set pieces has created a most ![[Photo]](/photos/hardrain2.jpg) engaging setting for an otherwise lifeless story. Slater and Driver perform stoically in the face of grave danger, but the acting as a whole is rather poor. Freeman, and especially Randy Quaid, who stars as the town's sheriff, seem curiously out of place in Hard Rain, basically delivering phone-it-in performances on one dimensional characters that might not deserve that kind of treatment. What makes Hard Rain worthy of seeing though, despite the poor acting and screenplay, is the tension that comes from being in a locked jail cell as water begins to flood the police station, and frantically swimming down to the first floor of a house to save a woman who is handcuffed to the banister. Like Twister, Hard Rain is a natural disaster movie that is stolen by man's recreation of mother nature's fury. And in this respect, Hard Rain's entertainment value wasn't watered down in the least. And to think, I was worried I'd have run out of bad puns to use...
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