ivo-cobra8 Disclaimer: If you are a viewer that mainly prefers art-house-type movies, then you might as well ignore this review. In addition, if you're not able to take a an underrated incredible Christian Slater's solid action heist classic flick, ignore this review, as well. We'll both be better off.Hard Rain (1998) is a classic! An underrated incredible disaster action heist film from the 90's and one of the best Christian Slater's movies. My top 2 Christian Slater movies are Broken Arrow (1996) and this one Hard Rain (1998), which Christian Slater started and co produced him self. I love this flick and it is my favorite action flick! It is far way better than Stallone's Daylight (1996) which that disaster movie sucked and I hate it! Hard Rain is an pure action heist flick in which a gang of thieves try's to rob an armored car in which are $3.000.000 cared in the truck. An armored car driver Tom (Christian Slater) has to run for his life and hide the money from the thieves, because they killed his partner who was also his uncle and now they will kill him too, if he doesn't hide the money. The movie has a great cast, great score, decent performances and all round very entertaining. I love the score from Christopher Young in the opening scene the main theme. I love that the film shows flood and rain's and it is also entertaining filled with action. I think Hard Rain and Deep Rising which both come out the same year are both underrated action flicks that I love them.Plot: The setting is the food-ravaged, evacuated town of Huntingburg, where armored car driver Tom (Slater) is in deep danger. A gang of thieves (led by Freeman) figures the flood is its chance to heist the $3 million Tom's transporting from local banks. But there's one thing the gun-carrying criminals don't count on - Tom. Come hell, high water or both, he's determined to deliver the money entrusted to him. But before he does, he'll have to survive a relentless pursuit filled with close calls, ever-rising waters, uncertain loyalties and heart-stopping heroics.Get swept up in the action as Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater, Randy Quaid and Minnie Driver race against time and the elements in this high-energy thrill ride where survival and money are the core of it all. I love Christian slater in this movie and I seriously love his character Tom, just like his character Capt. Riley Hale from Broken Arrow, his character Tom is also heroic character well written. He wasn't selfish he was a real hero alongside with John McClane (Bruce Willis) Die Hard (1988) they are both a heroic characters. I love how Tom tried to help that young boy Kenny ( Michael A. Goorjian) from been electrocuted in the water, he came back for Karen (Minnie Driver) when she was handcuffed in the fence, up in the stairs, his character was decent and honest human been and he tried to return the money. I love the chase sequences in a high school in a jet skies. I like Minnie Driver as Karen her character also wasn't selfish she also helped Tom and saved him from prison. I seriously love the scene when Tom tried to saves him self in the prison when the flood raised and he accidentally grabbed the car keys and not the cell keys and his was talking with him self ha ha.I love Morgan Freeman in this film which he was a good thieve, but he was also greedy, "Damn it I'm here for the money and that's it!" Randy Quaid was a decent villain as the greedy Sheriff Mike Collins, which he was outstanding in this flick. Director Mikael Solomon did a great directing job directing this disaster action flick. Even tough this film is a cheap because there was less actors playing in this film, it still outstanding and pure entertaining. I love it I just watched it on Blu-ray and I love it to death. This movie is actually pretty entertaining with some decent chase scenes even one involving jet skis inside a flooded high school. Morgan Freeman is good as always and one of the few bad guy/good guy roles he's had in his career. Christian Slater was decent as the main protagonist even is he was a bit generic.Very good 90's action flick that is essentially a western set in a flooded small town. There's something really cool about a movie taking place entirely in one night in the rain and the script has some terrific one liners and the cast are all excellent especially Morgan Freeman playing a bad ass thief & Randy Quaid.Overall: This flick is very underrated and for Christian Slater fan I must say, it is my favorite action flick, there are other movies he made but this one alongside with Broken Arrow is one of his best work. I love this action flick.Hard Rain (also known as The Flood) is a 1998 American/British disaster action thriller film, produced by Mark Gordon, written by Graham Yost (the writer-producer team also behind the film Speed) and directed by former cinematographer turned director Mikael Salomon.10/10 Grade: Bad Ass Seal Of Approval Studio: Paramount Pictures, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment Starring: Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater, Randy Quaid, Minnie Driver, Edward Asner, Michael Goorjian, Dann Florek, Ricky Harris, Mark Rolston, Peter Murnik, Wayne Duvall, Richard Dysart, Betty White, Ray Baker Director: Mikael Salomon Producers: Ian Bryce, Mark Gordon, Gary Levinsohn, Art Levinson, Allison Lyon Segan, Christian Slater Screenplay: Graham Yost Rated: PG-13 Running Time: 1 Hr. 37 Mins. Budget: $70.000.000 Box Office: $19,870,567

GeneralUrsus Finally caught this film on cable and thoroughly enjoyed it. A rain drenched town flooded to the gills with Christian Slater as an armored truck guard protecting three million from a band of outlaws. This is a suburban Poseidon Adventure with many superb set pieces that continuously entertains and includes some great moments of suspense. Watching bandits blaze through high school corridors on Jet Skis in pursuit of Slater was a great highlight. In an age before CGI dominated every film it is refreshing to see practical - not animated effects with actual water flooding the roads, homes, alleys and buildings of a small Indiana town. Slater and Minnie Driver have a nice chemistry and Morgan Freeman always strong turns in a top notch performance. Some nice cameo appearance from Betty White and Richard Dysart liven up the action and add a few chuckles along the way. There are few adventure films today that provide the same escapist entertainment as Hard Rain. Put this one in your queue, it's solid entertainment where action and suspense reign hard.

johnnyboyz Hard Rain comes at us like a rigid and thoroughly uneven, although enjoyable in that way things that are less than perfect sometimes are, soft-back pulp novel; a heist story with a twist and its own unique selling point; in this case, the fact that it will rain just as much as throughout the piece it has done the last week leading up to these events, which in turn will lead to rising water levels no doubt destined to prove a problem to those within. The film's catalyst is the robbing of an armoured van, a heist movie idea which, chances are, isn't anything we haven't seen before, and yet we smile at the places the film takes us; enjoy the application of this idea that the water levels are rising at a gross rate and have fun with this hybridisation of the varying disaster movie conventions which rear up with crime movie archetypes.Swedish director Mikael Salomon is having fun, and we're having fun with him; he seems to spend most of the film channelling a kind of mock-Western genre aesthetic to the overall film. Such a thing begins with the opening shot, a heck of an opening shot in truth during which a long tracking shot begins in the sky and floats across the more rural parts of the town before arriving in the centre within which we observe people being evacuated. Flying down to ground level, we note the harmonica music and the boarded up windows belonging to varying businesses in what is a launching of the film's Western tendencies. It is perhaps true to say the film's ambition does not match this opening. The film comes to unfold within a locale very much cut off from the rest of the world; under the characters' feet, water replaces sand and dirt but a small isolated town eventually succumbs to corruption and two people whom are initially at odds must pool resources to survive. One character, the instigator of the heist played by Morgan Freeman, waltzes throughout the film donning a stetson, whereas the hapless lead, a victim of this van robbery played by Christian Slater, even finds time to bury the treasures numerous parties are gunning for in a graveyard evoking Leone's The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.We begin with the Sheriff of the town directing traffic away from the town; he is Randy Quaid's Mike Collins, and works with a number of deputies. After an establishment of some of his more pleasant; more helping characteristics, the temperature of his presence on screen briefly changes when the town's mayor drives by and off, and Collins briefly reveals a franker nature when he expresses his disdain for the man. Not so far away is Slater's character, a young armoured van guard named Tom standing in a bank lugging large bags of money with an accomplice in a faceless and anonymous fashion. It is revealed they are not robbing, but removing; so as to transport the cash away from the soon to be water-logged town to safety. The initial establishment of these people as folk to be wary of precedes a revealing of their more genuine nature, in that they are upstanding and present on justified terms; something that encapsulates this idea of transition later becoming more prominent and standing in equal measure to that of Collins and his deputies, whose natures began as helping and unassuming before taking a nastier turn.Tom reiterates that there is little adventure in his life, although he would like there to be, while his partner in security points out that when he was Tom's age, he too suffered from a great lack of 'happening' in his life. This alludes to an apparent lack of life experience, and aids in increasing tension as later events play out – events of which we doubt Tom will be able to rise to. Then there is Freeman's character, Jim - an ageing man seemingly too embittered to even raise his voice; a man whom forms a posse with three others, each epitomising varying clichés in that the glasses wearing nerd; the wise-cracking, bible-quoting African American and the hot-headed kid make up his troupé. They plan to hit the truck, the cash being Jim's "retirement fund" in the fleeting few hours he'll probably get to spend it out of dropping dead with hypothermia. When he stands in a sparsely populated bar early on, he deals with a situation involving one of his gang and their exuberance with a crossword puzzle in a newspaper, in what is an instance of the man dealing with a scenario in a calm; creative and intuitional manner which should bode well for certain later exchanges. The bulk of the film consists of surprisingly engrossing chase as well as neatly unfolded allegiances which come to differ throughout; Salomon's film a series of really rather well constructed set pieces involving causality, rescue and evasion which come together and work much more than they have any right to. The director, a man whose work I had not come across in any other capacity prior to first seeing this guilty pleasure several years ago, nor indeed have I experience any since, keeps things chugging along without trying to dress it up as anything it isn't. Hard Rain is a film difficult not to get into, and tough to really dislike.

screenman It's an armoured-car heist. And apparently, the villains not only knew when it was going to set off, how much was in it, and which way it was going; they also knew what the weather would be like en-route. Now that's forward planning! The old geezer driving it is apparently the villains' inside man. He drives the truck into a road flood, stalling the engine. Now all the gang have to do is turn-up in a boat and help themselves.Starring Pixie-faced Christian Slater as the honest sidekick; he puts up a fight which results in the old guy being gunned-down. After that, he hides the money and runs. The villains give chase. They need him alive in order to know where he's hidden it. Cue all manner of water sports.The rain is incessant (though not heavy enough to put out a simple church-roof fire). Flooding worsens. The dam breaks. Minnie (donkey jaws) Driver appears as a restorer of stained-glass windows, giving her usual acting-by-numbers turn. The sheriff goes crooked at the thought of $3 million, so enmity and loyalty become ambiguous though offer few additional thrills. Shooting gets almost incessant, mostly to little effect. In the end; it's boring.For me, the biggest problem is that non of the characters move me to care for them. The old guy, who might have excited sympathy, was one of the gang. Slater's and Driver's characters both incline towards the unbelievable. The rest are mostly just cameos of one particular human trait or another. The most heavyweight and potentially likable character is that of Morgan Freeman. But he is the lead baddie. And while he may not have wanted anyone hurt, it nevertheless happens and on his watch. If you don't care about the characters, then you don't care what happens to them, so there's no story to speak of.It's basically a thick slice of robbery ham, to which floods of water do not bring the additional drama its makers had hoped.One-watch hokum, can't recommend it.Incidentally; by 1998, armoured cars in Britain contained 'a locked safe to which the crew had no access', a homing device that was tamper-proof, explosive dye-bags that would render money un-useable, and 'smart-water' contaminants. Apparently the Yanks need to modernise. Mind how you go.