Film Review: Ridin’ the Storm Out

Note: this article was also published on SciFi4Me.com.

Into the Storm, written by John Swetnam; directed by Steven Quale. Copyright 2014. Seen August 6, 2014.

Some movies you watch because the plot sounds interesting. Others you go to because you like that genre. And then there are the movies you go to because you’ve enjoyed the work of the director or one of the actors and you want to see more.

For Into the Storm, I went because I saw Richard Armitage was listed in the cast. I’ve enjoyed his acting so far (especially when I had the chance to see him live in The Crucible at the Old Vic), and this overpowered the fact that the movie seemed to be just an updating of Twister.

I had wondered, going in, why I hadn’t heard anything about this film – having now seen it, I now understand why. At least with Twister, Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton (not to mention Cary Elwes and his god-awful Southern accent) are entertaining enough – and there’s enough humor in the movie – that you just go with all the bad science and unbelievability because it’s still entertaining at heart. Into the Storm … was not.

The plot is actually three stories, all converging in a found footage ‘documentary’ style (or as director Steven Quail called it in the Q&A that followed the screening, “first person narrative”). There’s the story of Pete (Matt Walsh, who doesn’t have much of an onscreen presence), a documentary filmmaker with a couple of stormchasers (including Sarah Wayne Callies, our only fully realized female character) trying to film the eye of a tornado; the story of Gary (Armitage, who’s barely in the film, even when he’s on screen), who apparently has some issues relating to his two sons; and the story of two rednecks (Kyle Davis and Jon Reep, who are the only two characters with any kind of humor to them) trying to get on YouTube in any way possible. The storylines seem to have nothing in common until the tornadoes start to hit the town Gary is in, and a plethora of CGI destruction makes the documentary folk run into Gary as he seeks out one of his sons.

The plot and science is tenuous at best: there’s a lot of ‘running from the weather’ (which seems at one point to be sentient and seeking out our main characters). But in a disaster movie like this, you sort of expect that and I would have let that go, except the acting, too, is tenuous at best. None of the characters are engaging, and you get the feeling that most of the actors were doing it for the paycheck. The movie’s not even ‘so bad it’s good’ – it’s just mediocre enough to be blah.

While watching a film because you’ve enjoyed the work of the director or one of the actors and you want to see more is a valid reason, sometimes even that doesn’t save you from what is, in the end, just a disaster.

Into the Storm opens August 8 nationwide. The full Q&A with director Steven Quail will be available on The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith podcast, available on iTunes.