This one was truly awful. Watching with fascinated horror, I kept on asking "why have they done this?" That is, taken all the scenarios out of "The Day after Tomorrow", "The Perfect Storm" and "Twister" and remixing them in a three-hour miniseries, directed by long-time junk TV director Dick Lowry, with every disaster movie cliché known to man and not an ounce of real suspense. Many of the cast were unknown Canadians and location filming was done in Canada, Winnepeg doubling for Chicago, so no doubt tax breaks had something to do with it. Although some ambitious special effects were attempted, the execution is so poor no decent spectacle is achieved. The actors may be a competent lot; the script is so bad no-one had a chance to show it, except perhaps for Randy Quaid as Tommy the Tornado chaser, who went right over the top and was quite amusing.
Believe it or not, the producers have since made another one of these Canadian disaster turkeys called "Category 7 the End of the World" which was very tastefully shown on CBS in the US a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina. How could the network of Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite do such a thing? In prime time? PT Barnum "nobody ever went broke underestimating public taste" is proved right once more.