14 Hours

As a hospital Fire Marshal, I had a hard time staying awake during the first playing of the film. So, I popped a tape into the VCR to catch the encore presentation. Having just watched the entire film, I found the beginning to be a snooze. It was not until the actual evacuation began that my interest was finally grabbed.

My applause go out to the staff of the hospital who were involved in the actual incident. To the writers of the movie my only comment is "Close, but no cigar" when trying to portray a hospital disaster. My prescription for the movie is to add an additional dose of reality to counteract some of the drama.

This movie starts off on the wrong foot and never really gets it going. The first scene shows a Life Flight helicopter landing and just outside the window you can distinctly see mountains in the background. For those of you who might not ever have been to Houston there is no elevation change. The city sits just above sea level and a 5 ft. incline is considered a big hill. To go along with that scenery, any shots outside of the hospital immediately tell the viewer that they are not in Houston. The trees are all missing leaves or are pine trees, neither of which Houston has very much of. Even the hospital itself, on the outside, is very unbelievable. Memorial Hermann Hospital is one of the top hospitals in the United States and sits smack dab in the middle of the Medical District just miles from downtown Houston, yet every outside shot of the hospital makes it appear that the hospital is out in the suburbs or even the countryside.

It is obvious that whoever was in charge of the actual tropical storm part of the movie skimped out because the numerous shots of radar are all wrong. The first radar image in the movie is that of Hurrican Hugo hitting South Carolina. We later see Kris Kristofferson leaving his job and one of his assistants tells him that Alison is moving back south across Houston yet the radar image he shows has Alison clearly moving north off of the Gulf of Mexico into Houston...probably the initial landfall of Alison.

As for the acting, it isn't all that bad. JoBeth Williams, Kris Kristofferson and Rick Schroder all do a decent job considering that this is a straight-to-TV movie. The plot of the story is decent and the fact that it is based on a true story makes it a bit more entertaining. My one problem with the acting is the portrayal of Houstonians with big thick Southern accents...the actors all sound like they are from Birmingham, Alabama and not Houston, Texas.

The movie gets its point across and to the general audience it does exactly what it is meant to: entertain. If you are looking for a factual account of what happened to the city of Houston in June of 2001 then you will be disappointed. One thing to keep in mind before viewing this movie is that it is based solely on the evacuation of Memorial Hermann Hospital and not on Tropical Storm Alison and the impact on Houston metro itself. If you are looking for a factual account of Tropical Storm Alison's impact on Houston metro might I suggest watching The Weather Channel's Storm Stories for Tropical Storm Alison.

*1/2 out of *****

I heard that Herman Hospital has been studied and examined in order to establish a protocol to follow in the event of another emergency hospital evacuation is needed. I know the storm, flood, and evacuation really did happen. I believe that only one patient died and probably would've died regardless. What I'd like to know is if the nurse and surgeon did any or even some of the things depicted in the film. The most obvious thing to me is that it seems like the National Guard should've been called earlier. I kept thinking why aren't the National Guard's Evacuation helicopters being utilized???? Hopefully the governor and Prez acted earlier than revealed in the film.

This movie is truly bad, it doesn't even have the "baddish factor", that is movies that are bad and you watch them because of that, because they are bad... not in this case, though... this movie is bad, bad, bad...

There is no good acting... no real interest, no real conflict, no action, no good lines, no dimensional characters, nothing...

Bad, bad, bad...

Avoid this movie, I am not so picky with films as I believe they have at least some redeemable quality... but 14 hours isn't one of them... pass on this one...

Okay, first let's review for those of you who are clueless about TV movies, there is a difference between a movie and a documentary. This is not a documentary. It uses archetypes as characters. It uses locations which may not look like the real locations, possibly because the real locations do not wish to have filming done there. It is true to the central fact of an important event, i.e., in this case, the total evacuation of patients from an important real major medical center. But it fictionalizes people, conversations, and timelines. Got that, all you people who rated this movie with a 1 or 2? Having said they, I offer the opinion that the script was a perfectly adequate journeyman script for a TV movie (to my knowledge, no major studio put up big bucks to memorialize this rather exciting event, so thank you TNT for taking it on), and the three major parts were filled by good actors who performed their jobs well. The film probably does not deserve a 10, but I am steamed enough at the reviews to rate it well. I found it quite exciting. If you don't like TV movies, stop watching and reviewing them.