There's a moment in "The Day After Tomorrow" when young Sam Hall (Jake Gyllenhaal) tells a boneheaded cop that leaving the relative safety of the New York Public Library is a doomed effort.

"The storm is going to get bad," the teenage son of paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) warns the officer, "Really, really bad."

"Kind of like this movie," will be the thought that pops into the minds of many people who see it.

For all the recent Sturm und Drang about this global-warming scare flick, it turns out the real question director Roland Emmerich's movie raises isn't about how much this film's pseudo-science teases us, but how much bad drama it's willing to blow our way.

Let's dispense, then, with the "Is it good?" musings and cut to the chase: Is "The Day After Tomorrow" bad enough to become a classic good bad movie?

Possibly.

Certainly by the time Sam is hunkered down with his high school academic team in the library and his father has set out from D.C. to save him, much clinking dialogue has been uttered.

And while the fish tale of a dad saving a son was a swell start to last summer's movie season, the notion of Quaid walking to Manhattan from Washington is astonishing for its super-dad absurdity. It becomes a running joke, albeit one clad in snowshoes.

Clocking in at just more than two hours, "The Day After Tomorrow" wastes no time preparing us for disaster. One of the movie's more adrenaline-pumped moments takes place in the first minutes.

Soon enough, hail the size of crystal balls pelts Japan, portending very rough weather ahead. Tornadoes rip through Los Angeles. A tidal wave swamps Manhattan. If you prefer your special effects undiluted by nuanced writing or believable character arcs, you're in luck.

Of course, there is that small matter of a certain elephant in the theater. Are we really not going to mention Sept. 11 because this movie displaces our national anxieties about the cataclysmic and unresponsive political leaders onto the natural world? Yes, global warming is a real issue, but a movie that endangers or destroys monuments (even ones as replaceable as the Hollywood sign) taps our recent past far more than our future.

Even Emmerich (who wrote the script with Jeffrey Nachmanoff) can't expect us to ignore that echo. At a conference in snowy New Delhi, Hall makes a presentation on global warming and the previous ice age. Two of the questions from the audience come from a guy in sheik drag and a man wearing a fez. The other cynical query comes from the U.S. vice president.

If there's any clever writing to be found in "The Day After Tomorrow," it comes from the cracks leveled at the movie's White House duo. But the political commentary is strictly low carb, with one great exception about American refugees.

The movie presents another nagging problem: Does proportionality matter in disaster flicks? Is a boatload or packed jet of casualties and a handful of survivors more seemly than a ragtag band of characters who make it while cities of millions are wiped out?

There is no single moment in the film as devastating as the one when Charlton Heston sees remnants of the Statue of Liberty in "Planet of the Apes." No doomed character here is as moving as Shelley Winters in "The Poseidon Adventure." And closer to home, nothing here is as rousing and kick-butt as Emmerich's "Independence Day."

Instead, characters watch the destruction on Fox News with little emotion beyond a kind of flattened awe. And we all know that's not how it would play out.