TWISTED FUN
By ADAM BUCKMAN (New York Post)
Canadian actors were the obvious beneficiaries of the decision to film a Chicago disaster movie in Winnipeg.
Unfortunately, though, the locals were not able to shed their Canadian accents.
And that’s a disaster for a disaster picture in which the most frequently uttered word is “blackout,” which translates to “black-oat” in Canadian.
But rather than let the film’s Canadian-isms bother me, I decided to turn them into a little game called “Spot the Canadian.”
“There’s one!” I would think triumphantly every time a fireman or an emergency worker would recite a few lines of dialogue with a Winnipegian lilt.
The game was a welcome distraction from the miniseries’ many flaws ó including but not limited to the prevalence of Canadian accents in a movie about Chicago.
“Category 6: Day of Destruction” ó starring Brian Dennehy, Randy Quaid, Thomas Gibson and Nancy McKeon ó is kind of like three disaster miniseries in one.
Instead of merely inflicting Chicago with a power outage or a series of tornadoes or one huge hurricane, “Day of Destruction” slams the town with all three at once.
And yet, the very windy city shown in “Day of Destruction” bears almost no resemblance to Chicago, despite the occasional insertion of aerial pictures of the Chicago skyline.
Instead, the only recognizable landmark to bite the dust is the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, which gets twisted into a giant pretzel in a storm scene that’s a run-up to “the big one” set to hit Chicago.
I’ll lay it right on the line: This miniseries is one big jumble of mistakes. The plot is implausible, the acting is unpersuasive and the script is made up of parts that don’t quite fit together.
In spite of itself, however, it manages inexplicably to emerge as a real nail-biter.
And if the suspense doesn’t float your boat, you can always play “Spot the Canadian.”
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