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Jack Hall (Quaid) is a climatologist who's right about global warming ... except that it's happening right now instead of a century in the future. The world is in the grip of crazily destructive weather, the President and Vice-President (King and Welsh) won't do anything, and Jack's ex-wife (Ward) is worried that their son Sam (Gyllenhaal) is trapped in Manhattan, which of course he is. So Jack gets all heroic and heads to New York with his colleagues (Mihok and Sanders), while Sam and a huddled mass of survivors tries to stay alive as the new ice age dawns.

It's all terribly exciting, and Emmerich clearly loves trashing New York and L.A. on screen (he's done it before). There's enough outrageous end-of-the-world stuff to keep us entertained, and the cast give it everything they've got. Sadly, they get no help from Emmerich, since the script abandons all of them when they need it most; the characters are paper thin, the plotting is lazy and the dialog is painfully earnest. The only joy in watching this film is in the over-the-top disaster effects and a series of extremely witty sight gags.

Otherwise, this was done more profoundly in Deep Impact and with more wit in The Core. Not to mention obvious references to Titanic and AI, plus a general lack of logic (if trapped in a freezing library, which would keep you warmer: burning the books ... or the wooden chairs?). And why do we never see anything outside North America, besides two guys (Lester and Holm) huddled in their Scottish weather station? There are a couple of contrived romantic subplots, a one too many sermons and way more digital sequences that were required. Some of the catastrophes are impressive, but others (like the wolves at the zoo) are just pointless. The whole film feels stingy and vacuous. And it's only barely trashy enough to be fun.