Disasters! Moviegoers love 'em. We may cluck out tongues in disapproval when we see footage of tornado, flood and earthquake-ravaged cities on the evening news, but, deep down inside, every person wants to see the same catastrophic forces of nature unleashed upon humanity depicted with a great deal of technical acumen on the big screen. And who could blame them? All of the audiovisual F/X porn and whole scale death and destruction with none of the guilty aftereffects. in the 1970's, schlock TV producer Irwin Allen ruthlessly exploited out fears of drowning (The Poseidon Adventure), burning to death (The Towering Inferno) and, uh, killer bees (The Swarm) in a series of increasingly elaborate films that set the template for an entire decade's worth of disastertainment that wouldn't meet it's end until the zany 1980 comedy spoof Airplane! deflated the pomposity of an entire genre.

However, with the advent of new filmmaking technology, the disaster movie has seen an upswing in popularity since the mid-90's. Now, cheesy miniature models and matte paintings have given way to photorealistic CGI as a series of films ranging from Twister to Independence Day to Armageddon have come and gone to great success, commercially if not critically. Added to the list now is the 2007 British production Flood.

In this soggy effort, Robert Carlyle portrays Rob Morrison, the head of Defiant Engineering who's asked to inspect the structural integrity of the Thames Barrier that protects London from the sea following a devastating flood that submerges most of Scotland. His father, meteorologist Leonard Morrison (Tom Courtenay), has issued dire warnings about the barrier's faults for years, his mania on the subject estranging him from Rob and his family and earning him the ire of his former colleagues. But when a massive, storm-propelled tidal surge is propelled through the Thames estuary, Leonard's dire prophecies are proven true, as the barrier is unable to hold back the towering wall of water, which crashes right through and makes a beeline for central London.

Only given a few hours' worth of forewarning, Deputy Prime Minister Campbell (David Suchet) and Police Commissioner Patricia Nash (Joanne Whalley) are faced with the impossible task of choreographing a mass-scale evacuation of the majority of London, desperately trying to herd the panicked populace to the highest ground possible while Rob and his ex-wife Sam (Jessalyn Gilsig), who were on the barrier when it gave way, find themselves swimming for their lives and attempting to rendezvous with the proper authorities in an attempt to quell the disaster before all of London is swept away.

Released to UK cinemas in the summer of 2007 in a two-hour version and shown on the telly in 2008 expanded to a four-hour block (three with commercials), Flood has all the narrative earmarks of the classic Irwin Allen films: splashy spectacle, countless subplots involving various "normal" Londoners caught up in the mayhem, grim-faced authority figures monitoring the disaster from a safe distance and bemoaning their bad luck and assigning blame.

And that's perfectly okay. No one watches a disaster movie expecting anything truly new or innovative. Just give us some picturesque destruction, copious loss of life, a few mildly likable characters and solid special effects and we're happy, right? Well, that's where Flood fumbles the ball. The film isn't good enough to stand with the best disaster productions like The Towering Inferno, yet isn't bad enough to attain the pleasurable cheesiness of turkeys like The Swarm (the lone exception being a hilariously over dramatic scene that concludes what was the first half of the miniseries version where Carlyle gets briefly trapped underwater while looking for a life raft, leading Gilseg to bellow a Vader-esque "ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOBBBBBB!!!!!!!!!" as she literally throws her head back and her arms out while the camera pulls back. This is the kind of scene that you rarely see outside of spoofs these days, and adds the only touch of pleasurable, old-school hamminess to the proceedings). What it is is a film that offers not a whit of originality whatsoever. Who wants to bet there's a scene with a character sacrificing themselves to save the rest (accompanied, of course, by a scene of another character who was supposed to take the suicide mission pounding on the window of an airtight door)? Who wants to bet that a character who, by all rights, should have drowned a day earlier, will show up high and dry? Who wants to bet that our estranged heroic couple will rediscover their love in the face of adversity?

Plus, there's a scene copied almost beat-for-beat from Jurassic Park, where Carlye and Gilseg are trapped in a flooding... tunnel or something and see a car being slowly pushed by the force of the water over the edge, threatening them and the other people trapped with them with imminent death (the only difference being, when it finally falls, a few people do get squished).

Most damning of all, the film introduces a pretty good -- if patently absurd -- gimmick late in the proceedings (opening floodgates at several dams at very specific intervals in the hopes that the combined water surge will knock the original surge back the way it came and leave London high and dry again), then doesn't let us see this happen. Oh sure, we get to see some cheesy computer simulations of this as it occurs, but we never get to see these two walls of water actually collide with each other. Imagine if in The Towering Inferno the attempt to blow the water tanks on the roof to drown the fire raging in the skyscraper below had a countdown to the detonation of the tanks... then just cut directly to the survivors walking out afterwards and saying "Man, that was close, huh?". What a gyp.

So... Flood may offer some cheap thrills and some half-decent F/X work, but at three soggy hours, it's too much time expenditure for too little reward. Stick with Allen and his 70's all-star casts for the real disaster deal.

Presentation
The film's 1.85:1 ratio is presented in a solid anamorphic transfer, but the fact that about 80% of the footage is shot in dark, rain-swept soundstages makes it difficult to properly evaluate the film's visuals. What can't be denied is the excellent, bass-heavy 5.1 English audio, filling the room with pounding rain, groaning building foundations, screams, thunderclaps, and other auditory goodies. The only demerit is Debbie Wiseman's hard-working orchestral score, which, while well-written, seems to consist of the same half-hour's worth of "mood" cues (blatting, "something bad is happening" suspense ostinato, emotional, "humanistic" flute theme, Moaning Woman vocalizations, etc.) that are tracked incessantly throughout the production, meaning you'll be sick of hearing the exact same musical material looped over and over by the one-hour mark.

Extras
Aside from a few full-frame previews before the main menu (which I didn't bother with), there's not a thing here, but considering the film's three+ hour length, they would have probably had to add a second disc to this release if they wanted to include any substantive extras, and, honestly... who wants to watch extra features for Flood?

Bottom Line
Irwin Allen fans will find a few cheap thrills and giddy moments of camp studded throughout, but Flood commits the greatest sin any film of a particular genre can... it simply adds nothing or improves upon what fans have seen before. Add a punishing overlong running time, and you've got a film that's probably best digested in it's original, 2-part TV presentation, where you can at least get up to stretch and grab some snacks during the commercials.