2 gibbles outta 5

Director: Uwe Boll

I’m not a Boll hater.  It’s not that I’d recommend his movies, but after having my eye redirected by the writer at horror-movie-a-day, I started watching his films a bit differently.  Boll loves movies and will continue to make them.  He seems great at production and applying his budget well, and that also works in Final Storm.  He’s also proven willing to take some risks – Rampage, Postal, Seed, Stoic – not all of those are good films, but they’re different from the “awful” video game adaptations which gave Boll his infamy.  And yes, I put awful in quotes because I’m not convinced.  They’re cheesy, and filled with bad acting and bad dialogue, but I reserve the term-slingin’ for films that I feel are sloppy, or manipulative, or just aren’t… committed.  Which Boll is.  Furthermore, the focus with which he tends to apply his budget lends itself to some pretty impressive production design.  Instead of wasting a ton of money on effects or spreading his dollars thin, the look of Boll’s movies are generally pretty b-movie slick.

Womp.

So that’s all my positive proof.  Alas, the bar is still low expectation-wise, and The Final Storm doesn’t budge it.  It’s a new genre for Boll – psychological thriller -and he just doesn’t know how to pitch it, drumming up a good visual feel but staging the story like his more fly-on-the-wall films, Rampage and Stoic, which didn’t require the plot entwining that Storm’s writer (Dan McGregor) probably put on the page.

We get some funky fresh end-of-the-world apocalypsism via a biblical storm that’s battering the farm of family man Steve Bacic.  Things are strange – there are riots, animals aren’t acting normal, and there’s just no end in sight.  Thankfully there’re Lauren Holly’s fake boobs, which get shown off in a strange, Watchmen-esque elongated love scene that’s strangely blocked to only partially show our fake boob nudity and unravels in its weird skinemax / PG way to wrap Bacic and Holly in peaceful, post-doggy-coital bliss.  But that’s the last of that.  Their son spots a weirdo stumbling through the storm and fields and, hey, it’s Luke Perry, babbling some weird stuff about this being his farm and he’s got some creepy tattoos.

Now this is a cynical description, but except for that odd love scene this is all brought up pretty well.  As mentioned, the design on the film is good – it looks and feels like a farm, and Boll gets good performances out of his leads, who are believable as big-city transplants trying to start over on a farm.  The actual lines are a bit wooden here, and have that neat film sensibility where you act first and ask questions later, as our couple totally takes Perry in and lets him sleep in a spare room and have some clipped exchanges as to the What and Why of their actions.

The storm ends.  Suddenly the nearest city seems abandoned except for some zombie-like violent stragglers, and Perry quotes more biblical things about the end of the world and maybe this was The Final Storm before the stars in the sky are snuffed out one by one…

Except none of these pieces ever come together.  Those “clipped exchanges” probably seemed tense on the page, and the building wonder of Perry’s role in the fiasco could’ve been incredibly creepy with a bit more actual atmosphere, but Boll just hasn’t learned how to do that yet.  He can set it up and shoot it, and thankfully he abandoned most of the shaky cam that he used in his non video-game films, but he just doesn’t know how to shoot this kind of movie, ending up with a 90-minute pretty snooze-fest that promises a lot but, man, delivers only the bare minimum.

It’s not stupid, it’s not even boring, really, but… hm.  If only something happened.