Geostorm 2017 ***

Gerry Butler’s name is so synonymous with so-bad-it’s good films that he’s likely to gain a cult status alongside his status as a box office draw. Dean Devlin’s Geostorm made over $220 million at the box-office worldwide, despite being identified by pretty much everyone as a turkey. But what a greased and freshly basted turkey it is; Butler plays Jake Lawson a satellite designer who has created ‘Dutch Boy’, a climate control system which protects the world from the potential ravages of climate change. A farcical exposition dump establishing this unlikely scenario ends with Jake being hauled before the U.S. Senate and getting his knuckles rapped for his fly-by-the-seat-of your-pants attitude. But Jake has no chance to sulk, because his brother Max (bad movie eminence grise Jim Sturgess) gets wind that someone is sabotaging Dutch Boy, creating abnormal weather conditions. Jake heads straight to the International Space Station to sort things out in a whodunit scenario, while Max stays on earth to wrestle with his boss (Ed Harris) and the President (Andy Garcia). Geostorm bears evidence of multiple reshoots, rewrites and a general lack of confidence in paper-thin material; an Independence Day-style spectacle is the intention, but Devlin’s film works best as a comedy, which several notably silly scenes particularly the risible limo vs rocket launcher action scene and Jake and Max creating secret school-boy conversational codes to avoid surveillance-camera attention. Geostorm feels more like a parody than a real movie; all concerned would rather you forgot it, but it finally crept out on DVD and VOD last year.