Forces of Nature (1999, PG-13)

Starring Ben Affleck, Sandra Bullock, and Maura Tierney

Written by Marc Silverstein

As Reviewed by James Brundage

Scratch the thesis set forth in the review of Never Been Kissed. Hollywood, as the year goes on, becomes progressively worse. Why? Because you don't expect it to be bad. Through some constant naiveté that the movie buff displays of believing that movies will somehow ever improve, they forget that the movies are destined to fail. In January, when we all expect bad movies, they are not as much of a disappointment. In February, as things start to improve, they are mildly surprising. In November and December, they're downright shocking. In April I was greeted by the terrible movie Forces of Nature, after seeing a streak of fairly good movies.

Forces of Nature follows Ben Holmes (Ben Affleck) in his undying quest to marry his undying love, Bridget (Maura Tierney). Note the key word here is undying. No matter how much you want someone to croak, no one does.

Ben, your basic neurotic blurb writer whose afraid of flying, goes down to wed his bride in good old Savannah, George on a flight out of La Guardia that doesn't make it off the ground due to birds flying in the engine. This is only the start of his troubles. He saves the life and befriends the wild and tediously uninteresting Sarah Lewis (Sandra Bullock), who manages to get him a ride with pot smoking Vic, and basically manages to screw up every single chance he would ever have of getting married.

Ben, Sarah, and Bridget are your basic stock characters, pulled out of the closet of Dreamworks' dying creative ability. Ben you would find in the dictionary under neurotic, stupid, and sappy. Sarah you would find under psychotic, can't hold a job, and new-age. Of course, as always in the cinema, opposites get over their initial revulsion to one another and attract, ending up being a match made somewhere in hell.

Of the many virtues that screenwriter Marc Lawrence declined to give this film, comedy and drama reign supreme. Although you can see that the film is trying to be funny, is trying to touch your heart, it ends up about as touching and funny as your standard action film. If the guy really wanted to turn out something enjoyable, he should have handed Uzi's to the two main characters midway through the movie and had them shoot their way to Savannah past drug dealers on their tail. It would have at least been an unexpected plot twist.

The only thing the film actually succeeds in doing is being predictable, which any old idiot with a pen can do. I talked to a theatre employee afterwards who had a much better ending to the movie than the one put in front of me. In its effort to make a twist, the film ends up taking a turn for the worse (if such a thing is possible) at the ending. For that, I suppose you can say that it will come as a surprise to the majority of moviegoers... but not to this one.

I would like to claim that without the stupid and supposedly surprise ending the film would be half-decent, but it wouldn't. Who are we kidding, anyway? Forces of Nature not only was the terrible film of the day, it was the terrible film of the year. It was almost as bad as The Mod Squad, which set a new low for the already low genre of action movies. Forces of Nature, too, bottoms out its genre. Even The Wedding Singer, my previous pick for worst romantic comedy ever, made me laugh at one point. In Forces of Nature the only time my mouth opened was to say, "I've been there" when the two main characters arrive at a place called "South of the Border" which is about an hour south of my old home. Yeah, they don't get much worse than Forces of Nature.

But, hey, look on the bright side: if you're a masochist, it's just what the doctor ordered.