Hard Rain

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the DirecTV free previews was Hard Rain. It's part of the Cinemax rotation, and will be on again multiple times this week, starting with 2:35 AM tomorrow on ThrillerMax. So as always, I made a point of watching it to do a review on here.

In the town of Huntingburg, IN (a real place, as it turns out, and the same town that was used for filming A League of Their Own), it's raining hard enough and long enough to flood, with people putting up sandbags and the sheriff (Randy Quaid) trying to evacuate people from town. There's a good chance the dam upstream is going to have to release more water, which is obviously a problem for the town below. The sheriff is a lame duck who recently lost his re-election bid, so some people, such as the elderly couple Henry and Doreen (Richard Dysart and Betty White respectively), plan to stay behind and even set traps to stop looters.

Meanwhile, the bank is worried about its money, so they've been sending an armored car to stop at all the towns in the area that are being evacuated and getting the cash out of the vaults. The team in the armored car is Charlie (Ed Asner), who is nearing retirement age; and young Tom (Christian Slater), who just happens to be Charlie's nephew. (I'd think putting relatives together in armored car crews is something that would give management pause, but apparently not in this plot.

It's not much of a secret that there's an armored car going around and collecting money for safekeeping, and as you might guess, that attracts the baddies. In this case, it's a gang led by old Jim (Morgan Freeman). Their plan is to get to the armored car when it gets stuck in the rising waters, as it's bound to do, and take the money, floating off with it before anybody can spot them. And maybe they could have the great good luck to have Tom and Charlie drown waiting for help.

Of course, the heist doesn't go as planned. Jim shows up at the appointed time to "help" Charlie and Tom, but Tom suspects something is wrong because Jim and his friends are deliberately blinding him with their headlights. So Tom reaches for his gun, and a firefight breaks out in which Charlie is shot to death. Since there's a goodly water-filled distance between Tom and Jim's gang, Tom is able to get the cash out of the truck and take it with him, to hide it in the cemetery so that Jim and friends can't find it and will have to keep him alive since he's the one with the vital knowledge of where the cash is.

Tom winds up back in Huntingburg, with Jim and his men following, which brings all of them into contact with law enforcement in the form of that sheriff. However, Karen (Minnie Driver) spots Tom and thinks he's a looter since he just broke out of the school where he'd been hiding from Jim's gang. She waylays him and gets him locked up, which is pretty darn dangerous what with the rising waters. Tom tells the sheriff that he's from the armored car company, but he stupidly left his ID back in the truck so they have no way of verifying his story except to go out to the cemetery themselves to find the money.

With a cool $3 million at the cemetery, it's no surprise that the sheriff, about to be out of a job, thinks about keeping that money for himself, or at least splitting it with the rest of his men. This leaves Tom subject to the rising waters back in the holding cell, and when the water does come, we have Karen rescuing him, leading to an uneasy alliance.

Hard Rain is a movie that's treading no new ground, no pun intended. There's so many plot holes and continuity errors here, notably with all of the lights that are still on in the flooded town. Characters take an inordinately long time to die, long enough for them to get an important scene. And they're also all able to function underwater longer than Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure.

On the other hand, if you just want to sit back and be entertained for 90 minutes without having to think too much, Hard Rain is a movie that will do that. And Betty White provides some pretty good comic relief.