The Sky Is Falling! But ‘Deep Impact’ Doesn’T Give You Much Reason To Care

About 250 million Americans are about to die in “Deep Impact.” And you’ll swear that every single one of them is a character in the film.

“Deep Impact” boasts a huge, annoyingly familiar cast of actors who were chosen in the hopes that they could make something memorable of their underwritten roles. Vanessa Redgrave and Elijah Wood succeed at that mission, but most of their colleagues come and go without registering. Tea Leoni, stomping around in roomy Katharine Hepburn pants, is especially ill-used as a 30-ish TV reporter who keeps whining that she wants her divorced parents to get back together.

The movie’s about a comet headed toward Earth. Scientists know the comet is coming years in advance. So why, you may be asking, don’t they just evacuate the areas where the comet is expected to hit? Mostly because there wouldn’t be a movie if they did.

It isn’t much of a movie, anyway. Part of the problem is the expectations created by the trailer, which makes “Deep Impact” look like an “Independence Day”-style destructo-thriller in which large chunks of the United States get blown to smithereens. But you have to wait 105 minutes to get to any destruction in “Deep Impact” and, aside from a not-bad tidal wave ripping through Manhattan, it’s so-so destruction.

Since it saves the special effects for the finale, “Deep Impact” ends up being a movie about 250 million people waiting to die. Entertaining, huh? “Deep Impact” has a glum, mournful tone that is at odds with the pulpiness of the material. Director Mimi Leder takes the story way too seriously and forgets that even a doomsday thriller has to be fun.

Leder, who also made “The Peacemaker,” shows the same strengths here - there are a couple of involving action sequences and the characters have a moment or two of genuine emotion - but she’s too willing to sacrifice coherence for pace. There is, for instance, a subplot involving some astronauts’ unsuccessful attempt to smash the comet, a subplot that we keep cutting back to even after it seems clear that it will amount to nothing. Meanwhile, almost no time is devoted to the potentially intriguing idea of an effort to figure out which Americans will be saved from the comet in a specially built underground shelter.

“Deep Impact” has a random quality and it fails to work up much interest in the fact that human life as we know it may be coming to an end. As cheesy and unbelievable as “Independence Day” often was, it made me buy into the idea that the world was ending. Not so for this movie, which doesn’t have much impact and is far from deep.

“DEEP IMPACT” Location: Newport, Spokane Valley Mall, Post Falls Cinema, Showboat Credits: Directed by Mimi Leder, starring Tea Leoni, Morgan Freeman, Robert Duvall Running time: 2:03 Rating: PG-13