When you stop paying attention to Geostorm, it stops making much sense. Then again, it never made that much sense to begin with.

Geostorm is a disaster film that stars C-grade action star Gerard Butler, is built on a screenplay that was written by your 12-year-old, and directed by Dean Devlin, who you’ve never heard of and who was inexplicably given $120 million to make this disaster of a disaster film.

Set in the near future where climate change has become so unruly that the world’s governments have united to build a protective net of weather-controlling satellites literally around the globe, Geostorm has some okay if uninspired city-destroying moments that are obscured by an odd, set-in-space story where it turns out that some unknown individual is secretly using the satellites as weapons and the only way to save the world is to kidnap the President of the United States (Andy Garcia, who seems to but maybe hasn’t played the president in countless other C-grade action thrillers).

Yes, that was one sentence.

Long story short, the plot of Geostorm is just cray cray. That’s all fine and good, because it’s dumb and knows it. The problem: it doesn’t embrace the crazy.

A movie can be dumb and fun, and a movie can be dumb and not fun, and sadly Geostorm blows more toward the latter than the former. It isn’t without some entertaining sequences, and there’s enough action to hold the attention of those less critical, but this is the first movie I’ve had to review since burning myself out on Oscar contenders so forgive me for being a little fucking critical.

Butler, who I actually don’t mind as an actor even if his presence in a movie almost guarantees the film wasn’t good enough to attract higher tier talent—hence why I skipped Den of Thieves last week—is good enough, and the rest of the cast at least tries.

But Devlin, who also co-wrote Geostorm, doesn’t seem to quite grasp just how obnoxiously stupid his movie is. The concept is absurd, but the movie doesn’t own up to its B-grade qualities; it’s all a little serious and not nearly as funny nor cheesy nor quirky nor give-zero-fucks enough to be much fun. If you’re going to have a movie where Gerard Butler shouts things from a space station while tidal waves attack the Middle East, you might as well give zero fucks and have some fun with it.

After a sufficiently mediocre start, I got distracted and started reading news articles about Donald Trump, and was only half paying attention for a while. When I snapped back into the zone, President Garcia was in a taxi with Abbie Cornish and Jim Sturgess trying to escape some bad guys and the International Space Station was blowing up and for some reason that was a good thing. I’m sure it might have made a bit more sense had I watched more attentively, but then again it would have made more sense had Devlin made a more entertaining movie.

Geostorm lands a few mini-storms of entertainment, but the main event is an underwhelming fizzle, sort of like those epic winter storms the Seattle new stations threaten each year that turn out to dust half an inch of snow that melts an hour later.

Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.