"The Day After Tomorrow"

So Sam, his friends and a gang of other New York refugees hole up in the New York Public Library, where they burn books to keep warm. Hall, no stranger to bad weather, sets out to walk (!) most of the way from Washington to Manhattan to rescue his son. Meanwhile, his wife and Sam's mom, Lucy (Sela Ward), a doctor, frets and worries down in Washington while simultaneously tending to a tiny, bald, blind, winsome cancer patient -- and why not? Emmerich realizes that bad weather, fascinating and dramatic as it is, is sorely lacking in the human-dynamics department, while pediatric cancer gets 'em every time.

Emmerich adds some interlocking subplots and then drops them, inexplicably, when he loses interest in them: Some of the movie's best scenes between actual human beings involve three scientists at a weather base in Scotland (they're played by Ian Holm, Adrian Lester and Richard McMillan): When the weather starts getting bad and the trio run out of fuel, they break out a 12-year-old bottle of scotch and toast, in precisely this order, England, mankind and Manchester United, the English football powerhouse. But it's the last we see of them, and that's less than halfway through the movie. Admittedly, the movie has enough decency not to show us their deaths. But despite the fact that Quaid and Gyllenhaal do their damnedest to play believable human beings, nothing they do is particularly engaging. The Scottish weather guys, tucked away in their drab yet surprisingly cheery weather base, represent everything that's potentially appealing about disaster movies: These characters radiate cozy cheerfulness in the face of disaster. When they disappear, what little human warmth there is in "The Day After Tomorrow" goes with them.

There's some wit in "The Day After Tomorrow": When the movie's handsome dummy of a president (Perry King) is apprised of the dangerous global situation, he waits a beat and turns to his obviously far more knowledgeable vice president (Kenneth Welsh) and asks, blankly, "What do you think we should do?" In another sequence, Americans hoping to escape to safe, warm Mexico are turned away at the border. (They subsequently stream across the Rio Grande to enter the country illegally.)

But Emmerich's wobbly mix of goofiness and environmental alarmism doesn't work. The picture has none of the go-for-broke ridiculousness of, say, "The Core," a sci-fi disaster movie that connects with everything that's fun and silly and suspenseful about the genre. Despite the fact that "The Day After Tomorrow" is harnessed to the very real threat of global warming, it's still just a big, dumb movie, another Hollywood entertainment that, instead of tweaking and teasing our brains for fun, leaves us feeling thick and stupid. In one of the movie's most inexplicable sequences, a pack of wolves escapes from the zoo and runs amok over snowy New York, causing all sorts of trouble for Sam and his pals, who have temporarily left the library on a lifesaving mission. The wolves are probably hungry, or perhaps they're simply angry at humans for wrecking the planet. As they crankily prowl and skulk through the movie, they must be wondering, "What are we doing here?" a question at least some of us in the audience may be asking, too. And we have free will, so what's our excuse?

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