| Above: The eyewall of Category 17 Hurricane Tammy, as seen late in the movie, The Hurricane Heist. The eyewall looks more like some weird pyroclastic flow from an Alabama volcano. |
The Hurricane Heist is a highly improbable but somewhat entertaining weather disaster movie--complete with impressive CGI special effects and bad meteorology--married to a mediocre bank heist movie, featuring shootings, explosions, and car chase scenes. The main character is Will, a Ph.D. Alabama meteorologist (played by British actor Tony Kebbell with a very bad Alabama accent). Will drives an armored weather chase vehicle dubbed “The Dominator”, which turns out to be remarkably impervious to both Category 5 hurricanes and bullets. Will teams up with tough ATF agent Casey to foil a bank robbery and rescue Will’s estranged brother, Breeze (!), who is taken hostage by the bad guys. The robbery occurs during the cover of Hurricane Tammy, which is expected to be a Category 2 hurricane when it hits the coast of Alabama, but ends up being a Cat 5—as predicted by our hero Will, but nobody else. (Spoiler Alert: If he’s such a great meteorologist, how come he never talks about the hurricane’s storm surge, and ends up getting totally surprised by it? Serves him right when the storm surge trashes his beloved “Dominator”! Also, what was he thinking when he tried to climb a 3-story high communication tower in the eyewall of a Category 5 hurricane? OK, OK, I guess it’s just because he’s a total stud, as demonstrated when he leaps from speeding vehicle to vehicle while racing though the eye of Hurricane Tammy.)
Category 17-level bad meteorology
Meteorologically, The Hurricane Heist has plenty of outrageously bad meteorology, similar to other major weather disasters movies like Twister, The Day After Tomorrow, and Sharknado. As Tropical Storm Tammy is taking shape in the Gulf of Mexico, we see a satellite image of the storm, which shows nothing but a thin spiral of low-level cumulus clouds, which are spiraling in the wrong direction (clockwise). As the storm intensifies to a Category 1 hurricane, we are told that Tammy has a central pressure of 999 millibars (mb) and a diameter of hurricane-force winds of 500 miles. A Category 1 hurricane with a central pressure of 999 mb is a very rare occurrence, as this pressure is more typical of a weak tropical storm. Hurricane-force winds over an area 500 miles across is impossible in any hurricane, much less a Category 1 storm. Massive Category 5 Hurricane Katrina at its peak intensity had a diameter of hurricane-force winds of just 207 miles.
But as Will talks to his boss about the official forecast of Tammy hitting the coast of Alabama as a Category 2 hurricane in a few hours, they discuss how the millibars are dropping fast (terminology real meteorologists don’t use), and within a few hours, Tammy intensifies from Category 1 to Category 5--an impossibly fast rate of intensification. But the storm doesn’t stop there! During the height of the storm, as the eyewall of Tammy is pounding the mall where a shoot-out between the bad guys and good guys is taking place, we are treated to a view of Will’s handheld barometer, which shows the pressure rapidly falling to 735 millibars. Whoa! That is a seriously low pressure, totally smashing the world-record lowest pressure of Super Typhoon Tip (870 millibars). Since the eye of Tammy hasn’t even arrived yet, we can surmise that pressure in the eye of Tammy is around 700 millibars—a pressure one usually finds at mountaintops at 10,000 feet altitude. Reading the work of Dr. Kerry Emanuel on hypercanes, one could expect to see surface winds of around 400 mph in a hurricane with a central pressure of 700 millibars, making Tammy roughly a Category 17 hurricane. It turns out that a hurricane this extreme gives rise to a phenomenon known as a “pressure inversion” (Figure 1). One had best be wearing a restraining cable when that happens!
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| Figure 1. Good guy meteorologist Will (left, with restraining cable) demonstrates the proper gear for dealing with a “pressure inversion” in a Category 17 hurricane. The bad guy (center, without restraining cable), is SOL. Spoiler Alert: Curiously, the extreme winds of Tammy were unable to shatter the glass skylight in the mall—Will had to intentionally break it to generate the “pressure inversion” effect.. |
Finally, (Spoiler Alert) the climatic finale of the movie depicts a chase scene with three trucks hauling cash from the heist. The chase occurs in the eye of Hurricane Tammy, on a deserted road in coastal Alabama. Curiously, the road is debris-free and dry, with dead leaves blowing across it, even though the front side of the eyewall must have already passed through with its devastating Category 5+ winds. The mountains of southern Alabama can be seen in the distance (hmm, southern Alabama it pretty darn flat; maybe the movie was really shot in Bulgaria!).
The ominous eyewall clouds of Tammy that steadily close in on the three trucks during the final chase scene look mighty fearsome and impressive, but bear little resemblance to reality. The eyewall clouds are about a factor of three too shallow in their vertical extent, and look more like a pyroclastic flow from a volcano—black, instead of the white color of eyewall clouds. I suppose, though, if we surmise that Tammy had 400 mph winds, it could tear up the ground to the extent that the debris field in the eyewall would look nearly black. But if that were the case, we’d have other problems: Hurricane Tammy would be a low-end hypercane—a storm so powerful that it would hurl debris high into the stratosphere, blocking sunlight and causing a “Hurricane Tammy Winter” capable of sending global temperatures plummeting for years. Massive global famines and the collapse of civilization would likely result.
Some good meteorology
The movie does redeem itself a bit by showing a nice satellite image of Hurricane Tammy when it is intensifying (the image appears to be one from the International Space Station, either of Category 3 Hurricane Julio of 2014 or Category 4 Hurricane Isabel of 2003). Will also discusses how warm ocean waters help fuel stronger hurricanes, and he predicts that global warming will lead to Category 6 and Category 7 hurricanes in the future (yay, the movie gets an extra half-star for mentioning the name of this blog!)
Comparison to other weather disaster movies
The Hurricane Heist is not the worst weather disaster movie ever made, and is far better than the worst ones ever made, the wretched Into the Storm and the forgettable Geostorm (though I admit that I have not seen Sharknado 3, 4, and 5). Sharknado remains the highest-rated weather disaster movie of all-time, with a rating of 82%, as judged using aggregate critic ratings from the movie ratings site, Rottentomatoes.com. The Hurricane Heist is in the middle of the pack, with 39% of critics liking the movie. Here are the rottentomatoes.com weather disaster movie ratings:
82%: Sharknado (2013)
57%: Twister (1996)
54%: Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014)
44%: The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
39%: The Hurricane Heist (2018)
36%: Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (2015)
33%: Sharknado 5: Global Swarming (2017)
20%: Into the Storm (2014)
17%: Sharknado: The 4th Awakens (2016)
13%: Geostorm (2017)
The Hurricane Heist cost $40 million to make, and does have some good weather special effects, thanks to those bucks. The sequence of the storm surge hitting the coast is well-done, and there are some decent shots of Tammy’s powerful winds creating havoc. The acting is not bad by disaster movie standards, and there is less agonizing melodrama than usual. There are a number of moments of genuine hilarity, though I could have done without the usual Hollywood level of extreme violence. Overall, I give The Hurricane Heist two stars (out of four.)
