Starring Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Alexandra Maria Lara, Daniel Wu, Eugenion Derbez, Ed Harris, Andy Garcia and Zazie Beetz

Written by Dean Devlin and Paul Guyot

Directed by Dean Devlin

In the near future, the Dutch Boy network holds the planet’s climate together. An extraordinary multi-national initiative Lee by Jake Lawson (Butler), Dutch Boy has saved the world.

But, three years after Jake is fired, Dutch Boy misfires and hundreds freeze to death in the desert. It’s a tragic accident.

Until another satellite cooks a city’s gas mains. And Jake’s younger brother Max gets a phone call from an old friend with some terrible news…Someone has turned Dutch Boy into a weapon…

For all the much vaunted massive reshoots, this is good fun. Dean Devlin has a nice ear for dialogue and spectacle and there’s plenty of the latter here. The Dutch Boy network is pleasingly chunky as well as high tech and the film’s core is a rock solid early ’00s action movie. Gerard Butler shows up. Gerard Butler shouts at things. Those things explode. The end.

But Geostorm’s cheerfully wacky premise gives the film the chance to broaden the focus and it really pays off. Maria Lara, whose character was apparently added in reshoots, is great as the smart, calm station commander. Zazie Beetz is glorious as Dana, Max’s hacker friend. She’s endlessly calm and laconic, steals every scene she’s in and this bodes very well for her work in Deadpool 2.

But best of all is Abbie Cornish. As Sarah Wilson, a secret service agent who’s dating Max, she’s the most interesting female lead genre movies have had in months. Tough, smart, determined and funny she’s orders of magnitude better than what you’d expect from Geostorm. And orders of magnitude better than what the female cast of  Blade Runner 2049 were given to work with.

Elsewhere Sturgess is fun, Harris and Garcia are exactly what you’d expect and Butler is Butler. No one’s actively bad, they’re all solid performers. The film’s a good time pretty much all the way down.

Verdict: Of course there are no surprises here. None. From the Michael Bay-like score to the massive band, generically multinational destruction, this all feels familiar. If that’s a problem for you, or Gerard Butler is, or a laughable passing acquaintance with physics is, then this is not for you.

But if you want a fun, massively OTT SF movie with surprising heart and some welcome and fun female characters? Then this is a storm you’ll want to get caught in. 6/10

Alasdair Stuart