The Day After Tomorrow

Directed by Roland Emmerich, The Day After Tomorrow follows several characters, including Dennis Quaid’s Jack, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Sam, and Emmy Rossum’s Laura, as they attempt to survive an epic storm that threatens to send the earth back into the ice age. It’s an appealingly larger-than-life premise that’s employed to mostly watchable yet thoroughly hit-and-miss effect by Emmerich, as the filmmaker, working from a script written with Jeffrey Nachmanoff, delivers a bloated, unevenly-paced blockbuster that benefits from its engaging performances and smattering of eye-popping set-pieces – with the latter certainly true of a captivating sequence in which an enormous tidal wave overtakes New York City. There’s little doubt, however, that The Day After Tomorrow suffers from a less-than-streamlined midsection that’s riddled with lulls and superfluous interludes, and it does seem apparent, ultimately, that the film could (and should) have been trimmed down from its 124 minute runtime. (It’s clear, certainly, that the lack of subplots exacerbates the erratic atmosphere.) The picture admittedly recovers for an impressively entertaining and exciting final stretch that ensures it concludes on a satisfying note, with the end result a decent-enough disaster movie that’s rarely as spellbinding as one might’ve anticipated based on its seemingly foolproof setup.

**1/2 out of ****