I had a choice between Michael Bay’s interpretation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Into The Storm. No disrespect meant to Rafael and the guys, but I just could not stomach another Michael Bay ‘splosions! Boom! Michael Bayyyyy! movie, so Into The Storm it was.

Into The Storm is what it would look like if the Blair Witch Project and Twister had a baby, with Jake from State Farm being the surrogate parent. It was good, and it was horrible. It was exciting, and it was boring. It was fun, and it was drudgery. All in all, the dichotomy of shades the movie creates should be considered an accomplishment for director Steven Quale, but it isn’t.

Honestly, I won’t even mention any characters and actors because there isn’t enough good acting or character development to really care. The only character you really care about is a kid named Jacob and he isn’t a main character. The movie tries to do too much with too many things and it tries to do this with a director, writer, and troupe of actors who do not have the talent to do it right.

The movie is billed as one of those lovely and pervasive “found footage” movies, yet it is not that at all. Half the cameras that supposedly contributed the found footage were destroyed throughout the movie and left behind. In order to be found footage, someone has to find the footage and it is hard to find the footage in a camera that has been bashed into a million pieces or sits at the bottom of a deep well inside an industrial park.

The other issue with the movie is that there is plenty of professional camera work that enhances the found footage part of it. In other words, Into The Storm has no idea what kind of movie it wants to be and it does a terrible job at mixing in found footage with real movie camera work. It is confusing and, towards the end of the movie, the idea of found footage is almost completely abandoned in lieu of getting better quality shots. So it really isn’t a found footage movie, but it also really isn’t a professionally shot movie either.

Into The Storm is a series of really great action scenes duct taped together with State Farm commercials. I want to say that I have never seen more forced and horrible acting in my life, but I have. So saying that Into The Storm has the worst acting I have ever seen is not accurate. But there are moments when I actually wanted to pull out my smartphone and see what was going on with Facebook.

The one unique talent this movie has is being able to make the audience care, if only for a few minutes, about the fate of certain characters. There was a couple of exciting action scenes where I almost cared enough about what happened to the characters to learn their names. But when the action scenes were over, Jake from State Farm showed up and I didn’t care anymore.

What do I mean by Jake from State Farm? The scenes that are uncomfortably forced in between action scenes (most of them were interviews that served absolutely no purpose to the story) looked like State Farm commercials. I mean, these scenes had the look of State Farm commercials and the corny, predictable acting of State Farm commercials. I honestly felt like I was watching television in my living room during these scenes. It does not help that the drive-in literally shows 15 commercials before even starting the previews, but that did not affect the way I looked at the movie.

The movie was inspired by the series of horrific tornadoes that ripped through the Midwest a couple of years ago. While I respect the inspiration for this movie, I cannot use that inspiration to wipe away the fact that it is a terrible movie.

There are cliché characters in the movie that add a sense of stupidity that cannot be ignored. We are forced to believe that a man in an armored vehicle has problems surviving a tornado, but two drunken rednecks do just fine completely exposed to the elements. We laugh at these drunken rednecks at the beginning of the movie, but they get more than tiresome by the end.

All in all, Into The Storm gives some great visuals that looked amazing with the drive-in’s digital picture on the big screen. But as a movie, this was barely worth the price of admission.

Rating: 1 ½ out of 5

George N Root III is a movie junkie and a drive-in addict. He spends all of his spring and summer weekends at the drive-in wondering when you are going to show up and watch a movie.

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