"THE HURRICANE HEIST".........GONE WITH THE WIND....(AND MAYBE NOT SO SILLY AFTER ALL)

The Hurricane Heist (2018)    How's this for irony...........the ongoing catastrophe of global warming is starting to generate storms that now come closer and closer to the idiotically apocalyptic CGI storms in movies........

               Have you seen the footage of Hurricane Michael tearing through the Florida panhandle?  That ain't CGI, folks........

                Yes, "Hurricane Heist" is a  stupid, throwaway movie that blew out of theaters and everyone's memories within days of its opening..........a connect-the-dots, boilerplate mixture of the well worn "Die Hard" formula mixed in with the Weather Porn tropes of "Geostorm" and "The Day After Tomorrow".

                  But watching this movie back to back with a real rampaging hurricane gave us the genuine whim-whams......

                  You get a sense of how screwed we all are when the real storms start to resemble the pumped up fakery of Hollywood.  We were struck by how many of the film's scenes duplicated the actual new footage we watched later.
 
                   The massive platoons of CGI artists naturally work overtime to dial it up to 11........they make the rim of their hurricane's Eye a nightmarish entity that looks like an oncoming H-Bomb blast.
You're tempted to ridicule this effect, chuckle at how silly it appears..........but then stop and think.....

                   How silly is it, really?  How long before the Mother Earth we've screwed up beyond all measure finally vomits up a storm that does carry the same destructive force of an H-Bomb?

                   After watching the news, seems to us we're not that far off.  The on-the-spot weather reporters didn't even have to resort to their usual over-hyped phony dramatics......they finally stumbled into a storm whose power eclipsed their usual Academy Award performances.

                   Meanwhile, the fake President and his GOP minions (you remember, the guys who, once upon a time, functioned as congressmen and senators) don't believe in global warming.  They think it's a hoax.  They can afford it........they'll be dead and buried while younger generations might have to use water-bikes to reach their schools that float on pontoons......

                   Oh right....the movie itself. Dumb, dumb, dumb.....with the cheese factor as extreme as the weather depicted. (In case you didn't know from where the filmmakers took their inspiration, the opening scenes are a virtual carbon copy of the first minutes of "Twister")     But if you groove on junk like this (and in the right mood, we do), it's action packed enough, with a pace that's.......dare we say it.....breezy.

                  "The Hurricane Heist", stupid and mechanical in its characterizations and plotting, still manages to come uncomfortably close to the real world......weather-wise. 2 stars (**).....the screenwriters here might have accomplished more here than just breaking wind.......