MonsterPerfect Good idea lost in the noise

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Stephan Hammond It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

kate8277 I might start a petition to get back the last hour and a half of my life.I love disaster movies. The first few minutes though made me want to bang my head against the wall. A girl can't go up in a hot air balloon because she has a scholarship. Right, OK, valid reason. (Really?) The protagonist goes out of her way to annoy a fracker which results in a total disregard for safety leading to her own personal tragedy. Yep, that is the sort of thing a protagonist would do. Turns out she's a paramedic or something too, as someone mentions in passing post-main disaster. The relevance? 'Do something, your mum's a paramedic!' And then the Junior Protagonist is able to help someone because her mum's able to do it. Who knows, maybe all kids of paramedics know how to treat people. I'm the daughter of a tailor, and the only thing I know is how to iron (not without incident either) so I'd be useless in a crisis.There are unanswered questions for me, and that in itself infuriates me. The main problem to me is the rescue attempt. Every rescue needs an obstacle to overcome - that's what makes it exciting, right? Well, this one has a pretty big obstacle but how it's overcome is a mystery. There's this whole bit in between danger and safety that's missing. Thankfully the writers never penned The Prestige.In fairness, the actors weren't awful. The script was, the effects were, but the actors weren't. Sadly, good acting would not have been able to redeem characters you just don't care about, and you can't care about them because the writing is appalling. In this industry though, as a screenwriter you only have to get lucky once, and somehow these ones got lucky. Not sure how. It's hard to imagine any of these (older) actors read the script and thought 'this is going to be a box office hit'. The young ones, OK. They might have done. It feels like the writers were told it was their last day, finish what you're doing and clear your stuff out. This movie is their revenge.It's not bad enough to be good. I've rated as a 2/10 because someone managed to get a couple of decent actors in that cast, and that person deserves a treat. Realistically though, if you value your time, go and do something you really love - and if that's watching movies, avoid this one. It's a shame though as I do quite like some of the actors in this and I was really hoping it'd be Snakes on a Plane bad.

Leofwine_draca I'm not surprised that nobody else has bothered to review this no-budget disaster flick filmed in L.A. because it's really terrible. It doesn't even have the budget of your garden variety SyFy Channel or Asylum movie to do the subject matter justice, so what you're left with is a completely inept production with zero redeeming features.After an unintentionally hilarious opening disaster sequence involving a hot air balloon crash, the viewer hooks up with a group of teenagers travelling on a school bus. Through whatever machinations the scriptwriter comes up with, the bus ends up stuck inside a sink hole, and the various emergency services have to do their best to save the kids before they die.Despite the potential of that premise, this is a really dull film. It should have been like the Stallone disaster flick DAYLIGHT but instead it's just amateur hour all round. The performances are really poor with only a few familiar faces in the cast (hi, Eric Roberts!) who are underutilised anyway, and the CGI effect of the sink hole itself is among the worst I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of bad effects in my time. If you want an idea of this film's kind of talent level, I can report that the director also made ATTACK OF THE KILLER DONUTS, the writer also scripted THE ART OF WAR II: BETRAYAL, and the lead actress also made SAND SHARKS.