Force of Nature

Some movies are born bad; some achieve badness through lack of care or budget. Some seem to aspire to it and Michael Polish has had a long enough career to know the difference.

The material's exploitation of a fictional Puerto Rican hurricane for cheap and contrived white-savior thrills pushes it into the realm of ugliness.

"Force of Nature" plays by the timeless rules of pulp fiction, and only when the eye of the hurricane passes over and an eerie, tense calm takes hold does the movie strike a note of originality.

Force of Nature is more of a nasty little rainstorm than a Category 5 anything.

Regrettably, and predictably, Force of Nature isn't interestingly bad - it's just bad.

Even without the stir ignited by casting Mel Gibson and Emile Hirsch, both with assault charges on their records, as white cops battling "Rican" villains during Hurricane Maria, this downpour of cliches and ethnic stereotyping is a total washout.

An appalling film packed with excruciatingly embarrassing acting, horribly dated sound design, a nonsensical attempt at creating a catastrophic atmosphere, awful editing, impressively lousy action, and one of the worst screenplays ever put to screen.

Personally, I liked this film better when it was called Hard Rain starring Morgan Freeman and Christian Slater, but not really.

An odd mix of snappy and silly, of culturally aware and culturally clueless, this thriller may pass muster with a few viewers, but others will likely find it problematic in more ways than one.

Force of Nature is a disappointing morass of predictable action beats that builds to a terribly telegraphed finale.