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Title: This film is a storm of its own.
Review: "The Perfect Storm" wants to be a blue-collar, modern day "Titanic" with its disaster-at-sea plot. Oh, if only it did. Clooney and Wahlberg are wasted talents in this film about a group of fishermen that get caught in a severely powerful storm. To be sure, the storm scenes sound great on DVD; this is a good movie with which to show off your sound system. But the effects, which get redundant after a few minutes, look and feel fake (almost as fake as Diane Lane's Boston accent!). It's as though you're watching not a catastrophe at sea but a video game at a local arcade. Sometimes, digital effects, when overdone as they are here, can strip a film of its realness. Director Wolfgang Peterson probably wanted to give us a reason to care about the story and its characters, but no such luck. "The Perfect Storm" is a near-washout.
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