Hard Rain (1998)

(On TV, February 2001) Natural disaster plus bags of money and big guns should equal pretty good action film, but while the production qualities of Hard Rain might be impressive, they’re the only thing that really stand out from this relatively average action film. There are few memorable moments beyond the sights of a town being submerged and the associated mayhem when criminals want to rob a money truck. Christian Slater makes a good -but not spectacular- action protagonist (though he was better in 1996’s Broken Arrow) and Morgan Freeman carries an inimitable presence as the bad guy, but the rest of the script is ho-hum. On the other hand… the quality of the script may not be overly impressive, but let’s face it; a soggy Minnie Driver is worth about thirty bad pages of dialogue. Worth a Saturday-evening cheap rental for action junkies.