one night , during a torrential downpour that flooded the streets , we went to see -- what else -- hard rain . " so , are we all going to die ? " the sheriff ( randy quaid ) asks in the story's opening line as he evacuates his flooded town . the answer is pretty much yes , but not nearly soon enough . and to add insult to injury , the supposedly dead , regretfully , often turn out not to be so . populating this bad tv-movie-of-the-week material are a host of talented actors . one can only hope they were rewarded handsomely for acting in this hopelessly muddled picture . besides the obvious hardships of acting most scenes while dog paddling in the water , they will all receive black marks on their records for appearing in this dismal movie . graham yost's script serves up one cliche after another for the actors , who thankfully managed to mumble quite a few of the lines . director mikael salomon's staging is so confusing that you may have trouble figuring out what is happening . the befuddled presentation is exacerbated by peter menzies , jr . 's dark and ugly cinematography . the plot concerns an armored car that gets stuck in the raging water . onboard are guards tom and his uncle charlie . christian slater , who is much better in his tender roles as in untamed heart , plays tom . edward asner drops by briefly to take on the role of the soon to be dead charlie . coming to their " rescue " is a gang headed by jim , played on autopilot by the great actor morgan freeman . he views the loot , three million dollars worth , as his retirement plan . the entire movie is one big watery chase with the sheriff and his posse tracking jim and his gang , who are in turn after tom . along the way , tom picks up a love interest in the person of a crucifix-weapon wielding woman named karen , played in a totally wasted performance by minnie driver . the action sequences are repetitive and without much interest . they do feature lots of explosions and gunfire to keep you awake . christopher young's emotionless score for the film has a single trait , ear-shattering loudness . the plot holes are as big as the ones in the dam that breaks , submerging the town . the characters have an infinite number of bullets and rarely do they have to bother reloading their guns . the weapons and the ammunition spend most of the time under water or being rained on but always fire perfectly . when one of the bad guys drops a gun into the water , it stays in the same place until much later when tom swims to get it , even though the swift water is so strong it is uprooting large trees . counting these improbabilities is one of the more enjoyable ways to spend your time as you wait for the characters to kill each other . the show has a single , but unprintable , good line . betty white plays an incessantly bossy wife , and , when her hen-pecked husband finally told her off , our audience roared with laughter . the show concludes with a sickening set of twists . the best that can be said of the picture is that it is merely stupefyingly awful as opposed to laughably bad . hard rain runs 1 : 37 . it is rated r for violence and would be fine for teenagers . ( the two families behind us shockingly had a half-dozen preschoolers among them . ) 
