“There’s such a fine line between clever and stupid.” –David St. Hubbins, This Is Spinal Tap.
I’d like to make a spin-off to that classic phrase: There’s such a fine line between silly and dumb.
When you’re watching a big blockbuster movie, 95 per cent of the time, you’re watching something ridiculous. Men in bright-red tin suits punching cosmic aliens. Post-apocalyptic albinos leaping from cars. Vin Diesel trying to convey human emotions. All equally ludicrous scenarios.
But we go along with these outlandish movies as long as they respect the divide between silly and dumb. Silly is light-hearted, brisk, and humorous. It respects its audience enough to build a credible in-film universe for its nonsense. It doesn’t sneer or talk down to its viewer; it meets them halfway. A silly movie makes a promise: If we go along with its goofiness, we’ll be rewarded with entertainment. Silly movies are fun movies.
Dumb movies have none of these qualities. They’re tedious, clunky, and obnoxious. Often they take themselves far too seriously, draining their plots of any amusement. They insult our intelligence with idiotic stories and loathsome characters. Dumb movies are anti-fun.
Geostorm is so deep in the latter category it doesn’t know which way is up.
Gerard Butler continues his career-long streak of awful performances in horrendous movies. He plays Jake, a man who builds a massive satellite system that controls the Earth’s weather. He’s brilliant, but troubled, and has a clear lack of respect for authority. We know this because a character literally says, “you have a lack of respect for authority” within the first five minutes. The dialogue in this film is about as graceful as a drunken hippo on a tightrope.
Jake gets booted from the satellite after upsetting a politician, but he’s pulled back into the fray when the system starts acting up. And by “acting up,” I mean freezing a village in Afghanistan. Other mishaps occur across the globe. Jake heads to space to fix the satellite while his estranged brother Max (Jim Sturgess) stays on Earth to...drone on with his terrible American accent, mostly. Oh, and stare at computers.
But there are complications and the brothers realize someone is pulling the strings behind these disasters and if you can’t guess the culprit before the 20-minute mark, you should watch more movies.
It’s impossible to care about Geostorm. It’s a mound of clichés built upon stereotypes mixed with lazy tropes. The disaster film is well-worn territory and the movie does nothing to enliven the proceedings. First-time director Dean Devlin has zero skill for capturing large scale destruction (odd, considering he’s worked with Roland Emmerich, the maestro of disaster schlock). Hideous CGI explosions mesh with shaky camerawork to create an unpleasant film-stew. Devlin struggles even more with the quiet moments, bathing scenes in ugly lighting that makes the film look cheap. I’ve seen Syfy original movies with better production values.
The cast is uniformly terrible. Butler has trouble convincing you he’s a human being, let alone a person with real emotions. Sturgess looks embarrassed to be here, which, considering his shoddy filmography, says a lot. Ed Harris barely tries as he spouts off some of the worst dialogue of his career. You can almost see the dollar signs in his eyes as he phones in every scene.
But the MVP for worst performance of the film, and possibly of the entire year, has to go to the preternaturally untalented Andy Garcia. He stumbles through his scenes with all the grace of a lobotomized, narcoleptic Marlon Brando. He mumbles his lines, he barely makes eye contact with the actors, and he almost runs out of the frame once he’s finished talking. Never before has someone been paid so much to do so little. Even if he were paid $10 a day, I’d say it was too much.
Geostormis a horrendous movie, one of the year’s worst, but it could’ve at least been silly fun. If it wasn’t so serious and sombre and heavy-handed, it could’ve been a decent explosion-fest. But it has no levity. It doesn’t embrace the absurdity of its premise. A weather-controlling satellite is something straight out of a lesser Captain Planet episode. There’s so much fun to be had with this premise. But aside from a few creative shots of climate-related mayhem, the film is depressingly plain.
Geostormis too pitifully dumb to truly hate, but its lack of ambition is disgusting.
