On Saturday night, I saw the second half of George Clooney vehicle The Perfect Storm and really the only where anything perfect is to be found is in the title and that in a nominal way. For a disaster movie, it was irritatingly repetitive. After going out way too far to find fish, the crew of the fishing ship come back in the middle of what at one point was predictably described as ‘hell’ (in the absence of entertainment I waited for someone to say that). So, they crash through one wave and break a window, then do the same and break another. Even when Clooney is bouncing about on a stabiliser, there is no sense of any danger – he’s the star, he’ll survive to the end or pretty near it. Characterisation comes through the saltiness of their language, to prove that they are a seafaring community; to slightly mix a metaphor (far more interesting than anything in the film), the whole reel was peppered with profanity, liberally seasoned. Aware that action on the ship and the grief of their families on shore were not enough to sustain the whole movie, they have a subplot involving a helicopter rescue crew who themselves get into trouble. I hung on with grim endurance, like the crew of the fishing ship, to see if things would improve. Even the money shot, as the boat tries to crest a 100ft-plus wave, it’s no more than yawnworthy. Maybe it would have looked better in the cinema than on a (big) television screen. Maybe developments in computer-generated effects have rendered the CGI here old-hat. Or maybe it’s just a rubbish film. I’m inclined to the latter.
Clooney has done many a fine flick in his Hollywood career, but The Perfect Storm reminded me of his attempt at screwball comedy Leatherheads, where I raised one half-smile for the entire duration. It wasn’t as bad as The Perfect Storm but a pretty near-run thing, redeemed by its obvious period detail and Jonathan Pryce’s keen performance. Renee Zellweger and Clooney might as well have leather for brains for all that the interplay works between them. The punchiest incident of the entire experience was when I walked out of the theatre and the multiplex was playing in their corridors No More Heroes by The Stranglers which woke me up and got my blood pumping in contrast to the anaemic immediate past.