Entertainment

Mission ‘Impossible’ for tsunami victims

J.A. Bayona’s “The Impossible’’ is a true-life disaster movie that opens with a spectacularly harrowing re-creation of the mass destruction and death wreaked by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Despite wonderful performances by Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor, anything following that spectacular sequence is bound to be something of a letdown — especially when it ends up playing like standard-issue Hollywood melodrama.

McGregor and Watts play English tourists — in reality, they were Spanish, like director Bayona, but this was presumably changed for box-office reasons — who arrive with their three young sons at a luxury beachfront resort in Thailand.

Henry (McGregor) and the boys have barely hit the pool on Christmas Eve when there’s an ominous rumble — followed seconds later by deadly 10-story-high waves that flatten palm trees and pretty much everything else in their path.

Maria (an Oscar-caliber Watts), sitting poolside, is slammed into the glass wall behind her and sucked into the roiling waters.

When she finally breathlessly surfaces, Maria is swept away in an angry torrent of water filled with cars and deadly debris.

There’s no sign of Henry and the two younger boys, but the oldest, Lucas (Tom Holland), hears Mom’s cries for help, and they struggle to take shelter on a felled tree until help finally arrives.

This is the impressive part of the movie, achieved with special effects that far surpass the depiction of the same tsunami in Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter,’’ which relied more on computer imagery.

For this movie, Bayona deployed thousands of gallons of water in a huge tank set up in Spain.

With the help of locals, the gravely injured Maria is transported to a severely overcrowded and chaotic hospital, where, because of a mix-up, the distraught Lucas is at one point mistakenly told that his mother has died in surgery.

While Lucas worries about his mom and helps other patients at the hospital find their loved ones, Henry and the younger boys (Samuel Joslin, Oaklee Pendergast) are slowly making their way from the wrecked resort into the mountains.

Henry decides to leave the kids in the care of acquaintances to embark on a desperate search for Maria and Lucas.

At this point, aside from a heart-rending phone call home that may be McGregor’s finest piece of acting ever, the film has become more nakedly manipulative. There are a series of credulity-straining coincidences and reunion near misses, backed up an increasingly schmaltzy score by Fernando Velázquez.

“The Impossible’’ is worth checking out for the acting and effects, but it’s a shame that Bayona couldn’t have approached the story with the same subtlety and rigor as his outstanding first feature, “The Orphanage.’’