The Perfect Storm: C

It is a prerequisite for anyone that is going to die after a prolonged battle in a disaster flick to have some iota of character. Otherwise, what's the point? If the audience doesn't care as someone watches their own life slip away, then that charge of tragedy that normally accompanies a good disaster flick (say, "Titanic") is missing. This is the biggest problem with "The Perfect Storm", but not its only one. Off the top of my head I can think of the ADD editing, the ruinous writing towards the end, and the inane logic that powers some of the more "inspirational moments" that seek to stave off what really should have been the whole point of this flick: the storm.

In Gloucester, MA Captain Billy Tyne (George Clooney) is in desperate need of a good catch. His boss is breathing down his neck for not yet breaking a cold streak a mile long and his life back on shore isn't really all that great either. But Billy though, isn't willing to give up. He needs the sea (although it apparently doesn't need him). So he rounds up his crew for the "turnaround of the century" and heads out into the wild deep blue. Needless to say he manages the catch of his life but then their ice machine breaks. Hell bent to not be denied, Tyne has to race back to the coast...and through the most powerful storm ever.

Though the above story is true, you wouldn't know it from the first half-hour. Instead, big orchestral scores swell and bang with noble force and the director swoops his camera over the peers of the rough New England coast with barely contained awe. All the while, story lines are in the process of growing, of showing us these gruff sailors have wives and sons and mothers and brothers and are just all around good guys who really didn't deserve what awaits them. One of these story lines - Dale "Murph" Murphy (John C. Reilly) struggles to bond with his kid - is just as emotionally underdeveloped as the one about "Bugsy" (John Hawkes) having an impromptu, unnessecary connection with a bar whore named Irene (Rusty Schwimmer). And of course, like any "important" big-studio picture, its idea of storytelling is as good-natured, good-humored, and heavy-handed as if you're being hit over the head with a cement block labeled "Look! They're GREAT people bound for DEATH!!".

All these flaws - the poor character development, the extraneous stories - would prove minor if the true star of the show, the Storm, were anywhere near as immense and organic as it needed to be. In Sebastian Junger's book on which this movie is based, Hurricane Grace screams with the fury of a women scorned. In the adaption on screen, it merely goes slamming against people we should care about (but don't) while the camera goes hopping around with a frenzied editing intended to cause extreme intensity (but doesn't). There really isn't time to do much of anything but sit back in your seat and experience the nausea-inducing pace of this ostentatious movie. There exists so little reason to care about anyone here that I haven't found need to mention the good acting done here by Mark Wahlberg and Diane Lane.

In rare moments does director Wolfgang Petersen achieve the kind of hydrophobia he's been reaching for but these are few and far between. Petersen should have chosen either character-based tragedy or edge-of-your-seat thrills. Instead he has chosen a thudding, irritating middle road that has forsaken everthing for a thrill his movie constantly reaches for but never attains.