Part tornado, part hurricane, part blizzard, part tidal wave/flood and part super-freeze, The Day After Tomorrow is a mega disaster flick. And in true disaster flick form, Los Angeles and New York bear the burnt of the destruction. And of course, the Statue of Liberty takes a beating reminiscent of the Planet of the Apes.

The Day After Tomorrow is filled with stunning special effects and lots of action. If stunning special effects and lots of action are enough to sustain you, then The Day After Tomorrow is pretty entertaining. But, if you like a little story with your special effects and you aren’t ready to make incredible leaps in logic, The Day After Tomorrow falls short.

Dennis Quaid is Professor Jack Hall, a paleoclimatologist studying the origins of the first Ice Age. While he’s in Antarctica with his team, the very ground beneath him begins to fall apart. Weeks (or days?) later it’s hailing footballs in Tokyo and snowing in India. Speaking to a packed room of international dignitaries at an environmental conference, Hall predicts the next Ice Age will occur within a few hundred or even thousand years. His calculations are a little off.

Mere days later, the new Ice Age is underway. Fed up with greenhouse gases and selfish humans, Mother Nature has opened an industrial-sized can of whoop-ass and the storms she’s producing are monumental. In fact, snow and ice are expected to cover most of the northern hemisphere in a matter, of months, weeks, days, hours? I don’t know for sure because the forecasts kept changing. Anyway, this is when the effects get good. Tornadoes wipe out LA and ‘erase’ the Hollywood sign. Tidal waves sweep over New York and the super-freeze immediately freezes anything it comes in contact with. Amidst all of this hell breaking loose, Jack’s teenage son, Sam gets stranded in New York. In spite of the deep freeze, the tidal waves, the blizzard conditions, and the fact that he seems to be the only one who has any idea of what is going on, Jack defies the odds to save his son.

The story logic was all over the place. Pay phones submerged in freezing water amazingly work. Just closing a door abruptly stops the unstoppable deep freeze and walking from Philadelphia to New York in sub-zero temperatures in snowshoes is supposed to be realistic.

The irony for me wasn’t the faulty science (I don’t know much about global warming anyway) but the political implications of an Ice Age that pretty much killed off all the Canadians and sent US citizens literally “running for the border.”

Amazing as it may seem, the effects and credible work by Quaid and Gyllenhaal almost carry the movie in spite of the faulty story. Almost but not quite.