Am I Missing Something?

it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Huntingburg, Indiana faces flooding as the dam is forced to open the gates. Sheriff Mike Collins (Randy Quaid) is directing the evacuation even though he lost the election. Tom (Christian Slater) and his uncle Charlie (Edward Asner) are collecting cash in the armored truck but they are stranded in the flood road. Jim (Morgan Freeman) leads a group of thieves looking to rob the the truck. They kill Charlie as Tom escapes with the money. Karen (Minnie Driver) knocks him out thinking he's a looter. The story is contrived. Mikael Salomon is mostly a TV director. Compared to Graham Yost's earlier hit Speed, this has all the action but lacks the fun. Betty White is able to add a couple of laughs. The acting is perfectly fine although they're not doing any heavy lifting. The rainy water action gets a bit mind-numbing with its sameness.

In Huntingburg, the armored truck with three million dollars driven by Tom (Christian Slater) and his Uncle Charlie (Edward Asner) gets stuck in the flooding and realizes that the town has been evacuated since the dam does not have capacity to hold the storm. While waiting for the National Guard, they are attacked by Jim (Morgan Freeman) and his gang formed by Kenny (Michael Goorjian), Mr. Mehlor (Dann Florek) and Ray (Ricky Harris) and the clumsy Kenny kills Charlie. Tom flees with the bags of money and hides them in the cemetery. Then he is hunted down by Jim and his gang and he hides in a church. Out of the blue, he is knocked out and awakes locked in a cell. Soon he learns that the restorer Karen (Minnie Driver) believed he was a looter and hit him. Sheriff Mike Collins (Randy Quaid) and Deputy Wayne Bryce (Mark Rolston) go to investigate Tom' story while Officer Phil (Peter Murnik) takes Karen out of the town by boat. However she escapes with the boat and goes to the church. Meanwhile Tom is trapped in the cell full of water and Karen rescues him. He decides to return to the armored truck to retrieve a shotgun but he is captured by Jim and his men and learns that Charlie was part of the gang. He tries to retrieve the hidden money for the gang, but Sheriff Collins and his men have already taken it. Soon Tom learns that the Sheriff wants to keep the money for him and his men and Tom and Karen are witnesses and he teams up with Jim. "Hard Rain" is a combination of disaster genre with crime and action. Despite the negative reviews, the action scenes are spectacular, the cast is excellent and the plot has a great twist based on the ancient proverb "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "Tempestade" ("Storm")

The premise of Hard Rain is interesting enough. The cast was more than a cut above this level of thriller. The sets were impressive enough. But after the first 45 minutes or so, this film seems to run out of ideas and interesting set pieces. The film draws you in, but it can't quite hold your interest, and by the final twenty minutes, you are left with a bunch of useless posturing by unlikeable characters, and too much random gunfire that misses its targets.But how about the cast, though? Christian Slater and Minnie Driver were big names back then. Randy Quaid as a crooked Sheriff? Sure. Ed Asner as a grizzled old security guard? Okay, he still needs a paycheck every now and then. Betty White and Richard Dysart as a bickering old couple that refuses to evacuate as the flood waters rise... a nice touch to be sure. But they didn't seem to know what to do with Morgan Freeman. Theoretically, his character is the arch villain, and mastermind of this plot to rob an armored car during a massive flood. But he's just too likable as an actor to make him the bloodthirsty, cynical thief his character needed to be.The film starts well, and proves the technical skill of its makers from an early point. There are some great stunts and effects here. A chase through a flooded high school on jet skis is really cool, for example. But the film doesn't stay consistent as far as how high the water is between different scenes. How does water rise to the top of a building in one scene, and then in the very next scene, its only up to the top of car roofs in the street outside the building?? Oh, come on! Maybe some parts of this town are at different elevations, you might argue back at me. But we never get any establishing shots that indicate what the rules are. And things like that do matter. At least a little. The cast must have all caught pneumonia making this. They must have been absolutely miserable. The film was a bust at the box office, too. Even basic cable movie channels have avoided it over the years. There are some fun moments, though. Overall its worth about 6 stars.The Hound.

Hard Rain comes at us like a rigid and thoroughly uneven, although enjoyable in that way things that are less than perfect sometimes are, soft-back pulp novel; a heist story with a twist and its own unique selling point; in this case, the fact that it will rain just as much as throughout the piece it has done the last week leading up to these events, which in turn will lead to rising water levels no doubt destined to prove a problem to those within. The film's catalyst is the robbing of an armoured van, a heist movie idea which, chances are, isn't anything we haven't seen before, and yet we smile at the places the film takes us; enjoy the application of this idea that the water levels are rising at a gross rate and have fun with this hybridisation of the varying disaster movie conventions which rear up with crime movie archetypes.Swedish director Mikael Salomon is having fun, and we're having fun with him; he seems to spend most of the film channelling a kind of mock-Western genre aesthetic to the overall film. Such a thing begins with the opening shot, a heck of an opening shot in truth during which a long tracking shot begins in the sky and floats across the more rural parts of the town before arriving in the centre within which we observe people being evacuated. Flying down to ground level, we note the harmonica music and the boarded up windows belonging to varying businesses in what is a launching of the film's Western tendencies. It is perhaps true to say the film's ambition does not match this opening. The film comes to unfold within a locale very much cut off from the rest of the world; under the characters' feet, water replaces sand and dirt but a small isolated town eventually succumbs to corruption and two people whom are initially at odds must pool resources to survive. One character, the instigator of the heist played by Morgan Freeman, waltzes throughout the film donning a stetson, whereas the hapless lead, a victim of this van robbery played by Christian Slater, even finds time to bury the treasures numerous parties are gunning for in a graveyard evoking Leone's The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.We begin with the Sheriff of the town directing traffic away from the town; he is Randy Quaid's Mike Collins, and works with a number of deputies. After an establishment of some of his more pleasant; more helping characteristics, the temperature of his presence on screen briefly changes when the town's mayor drives by and off, and Collins briefly reveals a franker nature when he expresses his disdain for the man. Not so far away is Slater's character, a young armoured van guard named Tom standing in a bank lugging large bags of money with an accomplice in a faceless and anonymous fashion. It is revealed they are not robbing, but removing; so as to transport the cash away from the soon to be water-logged town to safety. The initial establishment of these people as folk to be wary of precedes a revealing of their more genuine nature, in that they are upstanding and present on justified terms; something that encapsulates this idea of transition later becoming more prominent and standing in equal measure to that of Collins and his deputies, whose natures began as helping and unassuming before taking a nastier turn.Tom reiterates that there is little adventure in his life, although he would like there to be, while his partner in security points out that when he was Tom's age, he too suffered from a great lack of 'happening' in his life. This alludes to an apparent lack of life experience, and aids in increasing tension as later events play out – events of which we doubt Tom will be able to rise to. Then there is Freeman's character, Jim - an ageing man seemingly too embittered to even raise his voice; a man whom forms a posse with three others, each epitomising varying clichés in that the glasses wearing nerd; the wise-cracking, bible-quoting African American and the hot-headed kid make up his troupé. They plan to hit the truck, the cash being Jim's "retirement fund" in the fleeting few hours he'll probably get to spend it out of dropping dead with hypothermia. When he stands in a sparsely populated bar early on, he deals with a situation involving one of his gang and their exuberance with a crossword puzzle in a newspaper, in what is an instance of the man dealing with a scenario in a calm; creative and intuitional manner which should bode well for certain later exchanges. The bulk of the film consists of surprisingly engrossing chase as well as neatly unfolded allegiances which come to differ throughout; Salomon's film a series of really rather well constructed set pieces involving causality, rescue and evasion which come together and work much more than they have any right to. The director, a man whose work I had not come across in any other capacity prior to first seeing this guilty pleasure several years ago, nor indeed have I experience any since, keeps things chugging along without trying to dress it up as anything it isn't. Hard Rain is a film difficult not to get into, and tough to really dislike.