Stream It Or Skip It: ‘All Hail’ on Netflix, a Nutty Argentinian Comedy About a Disgraced Weatherman (2024)

Netflix Argentinian comedy All Hail wrings a double meaning from its title: It references a famous TV weatherman who inspires worship (that’s one meaning) for his on-point forecasts, but finds his career in a tailspin when he inaccurately predicts a destructive hailstorm (there’s the other). That’s a chucked iceball hitting you right on the nose. So is it too much farce? Or just enough? Let’s find out.

ALL HAIL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: An old home movie dated 1997: A woman, apparently someone’s mother, is playing around happily when BAM, she apparently gets struck by lightning. Yipes. Present day: Miguel (Guillermo Francella) is on top of the world. He lives in an apartment that would give Zillow stalkers priapism. He chats with his beloved goldfish, Osvaldo, who enjoys a vast aquarium all to himself. Everyone knows Miguel as the greatest weatherman in Buenos Aires, and tonight, he’s about to achieve another career milestone as he graduates from the news broadcast to headlining his own program, The Great Weather Show. He can’t walk a block to his cab without people stopping him on the street, asking for selfies and chatting about the sun and the clouds and the rain and various weather whatever. When people say they can just check out the forecast on their weather app, Miguel pooh-poohs them – he’s a true meteorologist, a well-studied scientist, with degrees and expertise. And that’s why his forecasts have never, ever ever ever ever been wrong. Ever. Ever ever.

Ever!

Nope, not even once. Swallow that one! Miguel therefore calls himself “infallible,” and writes his own intro copy for the show: “With you tonight, the amazing weatherman – the man who brings gods to their knees!” This, we’re all thinking, is the type of person who needs to be taken down about 600 pegs. He seems like a nice enough guy, save for the ego and the fact that his adult daughter, who lives across the country in Cordoba, keeps calling him and he half-listens to the voicemails and never returns the calls. Too busy pampering his goldfish, I guess. Meanwhile, one of Miguel’s biggest fans is a cab driver named Luis (Peto Menahem), who keeps his car spotless and is endlessly nagged by his cartoonish wife and has to listen to his elderly father-in-law wish for death frequently and loudly. Sounds like it sucks to be him, but at least he has Miguel to watch on TV and admire, like no person in reality has ever admired a weatherman.

Despite having to share the set with a bubbly Instagram star and her little chihuahua – an addition forced upon him by his producer for cross-generational appeal – Miguel’s first show is a success. Clear skies tonight, he says, and wouldn’t you know, within hours the city gets its corn utterly CREAMED by golf-ball-sized hail. Miguel slept right through it. He wakes up and voila, instant pariah, just add ice. The science failed him. And now his life is falling apart: His producer nudges him out and gives the new show to the influencer dingus. All his passerby admirers blame him for their busted windows and dead dogs (don’t ask). Protesters congregate outside his apartment building with signs, chanting for – for what? His head on a pike?

So Miguel flees to his daughter, Carla (Romina Fernandes), with whom he has a somewhat prickly relationship, likely due to all the unreturned phone calls and his Uranus-sized ego. She’s single, in her 30s I’d guess, a respected pediatrician. She apparently hosts sex parties or something, I think – I’m not sure what that one scene with her friends wandering around her house in their underwear was trying to imply. Weird bit, there. Anyway, Miguel and Carla have some stuff to work through, especially since he basically moved into her place without really asking. Meanwhile, that guy Luis, remember him? The hail put a million dents in his beloved taxi, and he’s losing fares, because people who need rides are real snobs about the aesthetics of their cabs, apparently. The poor guy’s crestfallen, and it only gets worse after he gets dicked by his insurance company for the repairs, which is the most painfully realistic moment in this otherwise ludicrous movie.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Nicolas Cage played a weatherman torn between his family and career in The Weather Man, a movie we forgot existed. Also, the hailstorm in All Hail is so absurd, it makes The Day After Tomorrow look like A Room with a View.

Performance Worth Watching: Fernandes finds an earnest foothold in Carla, but the character is too thinly rendered to yield much in the way of memorable comedy, drama or insight.

Memorable Dialogue: “F—ing Buenos Aires weatherman.” – A line uttered by a crazy hermit who can predict the weather better than Miguel by sniffing toy figurines he buries in the dirt. Got that?

Sex and Skin: None, save for an implied orgy at Carla’s place? Or maybe it was just a strip poker tournament?

Our Take: All Hail’s core premise – wanting to stone the weatherman in the public square for one single lousy dumb inaccurate prognostication – is so deeply flawed, so eye-rollingly implausible, it fatally infects otherwise passable elements of the movie. Despite some solid performances resulting in reasonably likable characters, the dopey concept makes their emotions feel bogus. Maybe the film intends to satirize the lightning-fast, viral spread of stupid ideas during the social media age (or wants to say something about – ugh – “cancel culture”), but such an assessment feels far too charitable.

For a while, the film is wholly unpredictable, but not because it’s suspenseful or original. It adheres to an illogic bordering on nonsense, as if the filmmakers tried to develop an original idea (there aren’t many movies about meteorologists out there) but didn’t stop to consider whether this poppyco*ck would yield amusing farce or constant eyerolls. The heart of the movie is a weary old father-daughter reconnection story that struggles to get much traction; the Luis subplot goes nowhere until it lands on the film’s only decent punchline; Miguel ends up meeting an eccentric man who has a more natural, intuitive way of predicting the weather, an anti-science, pro-woo-woo statement that just rubbed me the wrong way. This is big, glossy sitcom stuff, too broad, exaggerated and silly to be palatable.

Our Call: SKIP IT. All Hail will leave you cold.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.