The Perfect Storm *** (2000, George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Diane Lane, John C Reilly, William Fichtner) – Classic Movie Review 999

In the stirring, fact-based 2000 adventure drama film The Perfect Storm, set in New England in October 1991, a team of fisherman head off aboard the Andrea Gail on a stormy fishing trip into the North Atlantic. But a fearsome tempest brews up.

In director Wolfgang Petersen’s stirring, fact-based 2000 adventure drama film The Perfect Storm, set in New England in October 1991, a team of fisherman head off aboard the Andrea Gail on a stormy fishing trip into the North Atlantic. But a fearsome tempest brews up – the worst, fiercest and most destructive of the century – leading the crew to inevitable tragedy.

George Clooney, looking far from his usual gorgeous self in greasy whiskers as Captain Billy Tyne, an old Captain Bird’s Eye-style sea-dog, makes a super hero at the helm of this ultra-tense, real-life sea-disaster thriller. Apart from Clooney, the best thing about the movie is a perfectly splendid special-effects storm, courtesy the magicians at Industrial Light & Magic.

Mark Wahlberg (as Bobby Shatford) and John C Reilly (as Dale Murphy) are fine as Clooney’s salty-dog crew of assorted caricatures, while Diane Lane (Chris Cotter) and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (Linda Greenlaw) emote nicely as the New England women who watch and wait back home while their men go down to the sea in ships.

William Fichtner, Karen Allen, Bob Gunton, Allen Payne, John Hawkes, Christopher McDonald, Dash Mihok, Josh Hopkins and Michael Ironside also stand out in the cast.

You’ll need to stand by for some spectacularly lousy dialogue, acres of sentimentality, a plastic shark worthy of Jaws, a wave of computer-generated bad weather and a perfectly wet ending. But that movie storm is a brilliantly realised stonker, and there’s plenty of passion, tension and suspense along the journey.

The Perfect Storm was filmed at the Warner Bros studio soundstage water tank in Burbank, built back in the 1930s, but now re-excavated and expanded from 8ft to 22ft deep.

Bill Wittliff’s curate’s egg of a screenplay in based on the book by Sebastian Junger.

Petersen went on to direct Troy in 2004.

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