Movie Review: The Final Storm (2010)

At this point I’ll consider myself a masochist. With a bad taste in my mouth from my viewing of Stoic, I continued on my Uwe Boll obsession and decided to watch his latest film The Final Storm, an apocalyptic thriller which stars Lauren Holly and Steve Bacic as a suburban couple who invite Silas (Luke Perry), a stranger who crawls on their doorstep amidst a destructive storm, into their home. However, they soon find out that Silas is hiding a deep and dangerous secret under his gentlemanly persona.

Let me start off this review by saying that the film’s title is totally misleading. Aside from a few scenes in the beginning of the movie that are mixed with various clips from media sources entailing worldwide civil disobedience caused by widespread destruction via hurricanes, floods, and other natural disasters, there is no actual flood showcased in the rest of the film. In fact, the storm from which the title derives from has almost no relevance to the film’s actual plotline which is more of a melodrama pitting Holly and Bacic’s characters against each other in one of the most unforeseeable occurrence of marital hardships that I have ever witnessed. In screenwriter, Tim McGregor’s defense, at least he had the common decency to include a branch collapsing through the window and rain during the first 13 minutes of the film, but after that it’s all sunshine and bickering.

The Final Storm seems to cherish in its irrelevancy though, and because of this, there are several unexplained plot holes and a couple of scenes that are simply superfluous. One example is a sex scene between Holly and Bacic’s character, which plays absolutely no bearing to the problem at hand.

But in the middle of god-awful acting and terrible scripting, there is Luke Perry, who seems to be the film’s one saving grace. His performance, though not great, is competent enough and for Boll’s standards, that’s pretty damn excellent. Perry hits the nail on the head and portrays Silas just as he was meant to be — well-mannered on outside but with a sense of mystery wrapped around his shady persona. However, Perry cannot save The Final Storm from its terrible narrative arc. It’s a romance at one second, a post-apocalyptic “thrill ride” the next, and then it even becomes a bit of a supernatural horror. The film has a premise but it’s overly preachy attitude and pacing, which lacks any sense of urgency, negate any message that the film may have planned.

The best part of The Final Storm must be the ending. Not only because it’s so painfully obvious and laughable at the same time, but because it signifies an end to the hurricane of stupidity which ravaged my brain cells for almost two hours.