Techtonic Plates got nothing on Will Smith

He first graced our lives as the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air . Then he saved our planet (and America!) from mind-controlling humanoid aliens in the prophetic Independence Day , and then twice more saved us from aliens in the Men in Black franchise. He taught you and me how to score with the enigmatic opposite sex in the genre-defying Hitch . He survived an apocalyptic spread of zombifying-vampirification disease in the epochal I Am Legend . (Although, this last assertion is debatable. It is not clear whether they are truly vampires. At least not by the Twilight system of classification.) He forever endeared alcoholism to our hearts as the titular superhero in Hancock .

In his next feat of superhuman performance, Will Smith, noted sort-of-Scientologist, will unite the Western World by reëdifying its collective consciousness with a story of true, unfettered love: Welcome, world, to the City That Sails : a 20th Century Fox production about “a father and daughter living on opposite sides of the ocean whose love is so strong that it causes Manhattan to split off and float across the Atlantic.” (No, really. Variety says so. )

You might not know this, but we pitched this movie a few years ago as National Lampoon’s High Seas .  The movie runs as follows:

Famed novelist Kato Kaelin is stranded in New York. His ex-girlfriend, Seneca, is in Paris, and has signed up for a wet T-shirt contest to best all wet t-shirt contests. Kato wants to be there—he needs to be there so he can prove to Seneca once and for all his undying love for her through his indomitable game of Flip Cup. In one of the more moving scenes of the film (and modern cinema), Kato channels all of his passion—his ferocity, his anger, his jealousy, his pure, unfettered desire—and, in doing so, manages to break Manhattan free from the stranglehold of the American continent. Kato has set sail, on a quirky and unique barge, for France, to meet up with his lost love.

Conflicts abound for Mr Kaelin once he’s deep in the Atlantic. Manhattan is boarded by a gang of Somali pirates, who savagely repress the people on the island and destroy the spirit for which Mr Kaelin lives, embodied in what should surely have been the slogan for the film, “Let the Good Times Sail Across the Ocean.” Who can save Manhattan? None other than Kato Kaelin, defeater of pirates and totalitarianism across the world. Kaelin makes a deal with the pirates: if he can defeat the pirates in a game of “strike out” (in which a participant smokes, drinks a shot, shotguns a beer, and then exhales), the pirates will pack up and leave the floating city. In a montage scene that could rival Rocky ’s, Kato trains intensively, smoking as much as possible, drinking a case of Natural Ice every hour, and watching and rewatching Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure until the dvd player burns out.

Will Kato defeat the pirates and make it to Paris for the Wet T-Shirt Contest? We’ll never know—the script didn’t get picked up. Because somehow making a movie about Manhattan moving across the sea just did not seem like an intelligible premise.