Defending ‘Hard Rain’: Morgan Freeman’s zany 1990s action flick
Following Bruce Willis’ game-changing Die Hard, action cinema moved away from the musclebound meatheads that defined the 1980s in favour of the everyman hero, which in turn gave rise to one of the greatest decades in the genre’s history. Is Hard Rain one of best? Objectively not, but it absolutely deserves to be lauded as such.
It would be difficult for any critically shunned box office flop to be remembered as one of the greats when the 1990s gifted the world with classics like Point Break, The Fugitive, Speed, The Matrix, The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off, GoldenEye, Hard Boiled, Air Force One, Terminator 2: Judgement Day and even more beyond, leaving Hard Rain to sink without a trace and go largely forgotten.
Matters weren’t helped by the fact the movie had no idea what it wanted to be. Was it a blockbuster action spectacular? A disaster thriller? A thinly-veiled Die Hard rip-off? A transparent attempt from writer Graham Yost to replicate the high concept success of Speed? A heist caper? The answer to all of the above is a resounding “yes.”
It also marked a lot of firsts, for better or worse. It was director Mikael Salomon’s first major Hollywood production, Morgan Freeman’s first time playing a villain in a blockbuster, Christian Slater’s first leading role since being convicted of assaulting a police officer while under the influence of drugs and alcohol, Minnie Driver’s first credit since her Academy Award-nominated turn in Good Will Hunting, and the first action movie of Betty White’s career.
The premise is deceptively simple despite the eclectic assemblage of talent, but also highly convoluted. Freeman’s thief steals $3million from an armoured car, killing the uncle of Slater’s character in the process. The leading man’s Tom escapes and gets arrested under the presumption he’s the culprit before rising flood waters turn the small town of Huntingburg into a watery wasteland, as well as the battlefield between Tom and his desire to reclaim the money.
Sure, it’s basically “Die Hard in a flood”, but that’s precisely why Hard Rain is wildly underrated. Taking a very familiar premise and then literally holding it underwater opens the doors to a string of inventive action sequences, with Salomon’s background as the cinematographer of James Cameron’s The Abyss applying a sense of familiarity and visual dynamism to the shot composition, staging, and execution of the set pieces.
Five minutes are never allowed to pass without gunfire, explosions, near-death experiences, or corny dialogue, which is exactly how it should be. Do you want jet skis? There are jet skis. Do you want logic to be tossed out of the window as water affects firearms in entirely different ways depending on the situation? Done. Does Randy Quaid get mangled by a stray propellor immediately after Freeman powers a speedboat over a makeshift ramp? Oh yes. Does the trailer quote scripture? Of course. Do you want to see the genesis of Betty White’s salty old lady cameo phase, culminating in her husband telling her to shut the fuck up? Hard Rain has it all, and so much more.
It even set a world record that harks back to the Golden Age of cinema and the era of practicality for featuring the largest hand-painted backdrop ever used in a film at the time, which nobody even noticed because there was a high-speed boat chase happening through a flooded graveyard in the pouring rain in the dead of night at the time.
One-dimensional characters and preposterous story developments are easily offset by top-notch effects, wall-to-wall action that leaves no stone unturned in its extravagance, a comprehensive cast of stars and character actors fully understanding what kind of movie they’re in and treating it with an almost reverential sense of silliness, a recipe that cooks up an unbridled sense of unintentional cheese that’s so thick it may as well be cinematic fondue.
Hard Rain may have been a box office bust of embarrassing proportions that took a pasting from all corners back in 1998, but that doesn’t mean it’s not one of the most underrated and unfairly maligned delights the genre has to offer.
