May 01, 2001 03:59 AM
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Despite sounding like a porno, Deep Impact is in fact little more than yet another disaster movie in the ‘something big’ on a collision course with Earth genre. This time its a rather large comet which is the offending object and this time the hero parts are played by Morgan Freeman, Robert Duvall, Tea Leoni and Vanessa Redgrave but despite the staff change, the story remains the same.
The whole film can be summarised as this:
Oh my God there’s a big comet about to hit us
Lets divert it.
It sort of worked - The earth is saved!
But, oh dear, it still trashed America.
If you’ve seen Armageddon then you’ve seen this, although Deep Impact manages to somehow manage to be even more boring than the aforementioned movie. When Robert Duvall is listed among the big name cast members you know that there is something wrong with the movie. Morgan Freeman, whilst being a good actor, is not the most exciting chap around and quite frankly this movie drags along like a tortoise with a broken leg right up until the last 15 minutes where there is a bit of ‘big wave’ action. But then you will have already seen all this in the trailers for the film so why bother sitting through the rest of the movie which is basically packed full of ‘how are we going to divert it’ conversations, sentimentality and a really appalling scene whereby our heroes land on the comet to try and blow it up, or at least re-direct it, which looks as if it could have been ripped out of an episode of the 60s version of Star Trek, so poor are the (not very)special effects. The script is not quite so gut-wrenchingly ‘God Bless America’ as the aforementioned Armageddon, but is still pretty lame and nobody comes out of the movie with a performance worth adding to their C.V. It really is poor. The last couple of minutes are worth watching for the action, but you can not justify sitting through an entire movie just for this segment. There is no tension, no suspense, because the ending is both obvious and inevitable and most of the cast look frankly bored to be involved. Following on so closely in the footsteps of one box office smash in the form of Armageddon, this movie would have had to have been something special to have been anything other than anti-climatic, which is inevitably what it turns out to be.
Whilst Armageddon was quite sickening at points, it did at least have a decent cast and a number of good action sequences, whilst Deep Impact saves its budget busting special effects for the last couple of minutes, by which time you will be too bored to care any more. Its difficult to say anything good about a movie which has been done better by another movie which in my opinion can only be described as mediocre itself. If you are desperate to see a disaster movie in the ‘big-hunk-of-space-rock-coming-atcha’ genre, then watch Armageddon. Its cr*p, but its better than this.
