VOLCANO
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(20th Century Fox) Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche, Gaby Hoffman, Don Cheadle. Screenplay: Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray. Producers: Neal H. Moritz and Andrew Z. Davis. Director: Mick Jackson. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, violence, adult themes) Running Time: 103 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
It's hard to believe it has been over two and a half months since the last volcano movie hit North American screens; it seems like only, gosh, seven or eight weeks. 20th Century Fox is banking on the fact that lava's lovelier the second time around, rolling out VOLCANO as an April preview to the summer movie season, but whether or not it works depends on what you're looking for in your disaster movies. DANTE'S PEAK was frequently dumb and predictable, but it also delivered suspense down the stretch in well-packaged bursts. VOLCANO is less chained to convention, a bit more clever, and boasts a more talented cast. It is also more about spectacle than suspense, a very impressive production which is easier to enjoy from a detached distance than it is to get caught up in.
Tommy Lee Jones stars as Mike Roark, a supervisor for Los Angeles' Office of Emergency Management who is supposed to be on vacation with his daughter Kelly (Gaby Hoffman). That is before a moderate earthquake hits, and before an incident involving the death of several utilities workers suggests an unusual underground heat source. Seismologist Dr. Amy Barnes (Anne Heche) has a theory, but no one believes it -- that is, until the La Brea Tar Pits turn into a fountain of magma spewing destruction all over Wilshire Boulevard. As the sea of lava begins its inexorable march, Roark tries to figure out some way to stop it or re-direct its course. Meanwhile, Dr. Barnes suggests that there may be another more powerful eruption yet to come, and tries to figure out where and when it might hit.
There are certain elements you have come to expect in a film of this kind, and VOLCANO delivers all of them: intransigent bureaucrats who end up making a bad situation worse, a hero whose personal life is given equal footing with large-scale destruction, pets which make improbable escapes. Fortunately, the script by Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray offers a few variations on those themes along the way. The intransigent bureaucrat, instead of becoming the guy whose inevitable death is a cause for cheers, gets a shot at redemption; those amazing animals are given a satirical poke in a feel-good TV news piece about "the other victims." The dialogue sometimes does get stilted and heavy-handed, and a few of the sub-plots -- including one involving a self-absorbed real estate developer (John Corbett) -- are abandoned mid-stream without any fanfare. Apparently someone realized that a fast pace and minimal exposition make for a better disaster.
That doesn't prevent the writers from attempting some clumsy stabs at social commentary, which are notable largely because they are among the few attempts at making the film specific to L.A. As dopey as the tag line "The Coast is Toast" may be, it showed that the marketing people understood one of the more appealing elements of VOLCANO's premise: people want to get a perverse charge out of watching Tinseltown become Tindertown. VOLCANO could have used more of a sense of place, more recognizable landmarks like the Angelyne billboard turned into briquets. Sure, it's wonderful that racially-fragmented Los Angelenos become one big ashen can't-we-all-just-get-along family when forced to work together for the common weal, but be honest. Wouldn't you rather see lava creeping up on a trademark L.A. traffic jam or chasing an army of suddenly less mellow in-line skaters through Santa Monica, instead of crawling like fluorescent tapioca down Wilshire?
Which is not to say that the fluorescent tapioca in question isn't extremely impressive. In fact, there are a lot of impressive visuals in VOLCANO, including tactically launched lava bombs and a dizzying array of explosions. The pyrotechnicians earn every cent of their pay in VOLCANO, but the imagery could have been accompanied by more tense set pieces. One superb sequence finds Jones and Heche dangling over lava from a fire truck ladder, while a man lying on the ladder contends with a fire burning its way up a hose. However, that's one of the rare moments when anyone seems to be in any genuine peril. The lava gets rolling, it destroys a bunch of buildings, folks try to figure out how to stop it, and then they try to figure out _another_ way to stop it. VOLCANO loses a lot of steam after Mount Wilshire blows her top, but there's just enough magnificent magma to carry it through until Randy Newman sings "I Love L.A." over the closing credits. I love L.A., too, though I might have preferred it even more well-done.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 lava stories: 6.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw Subscribe to receive reviews directly via email See details on the MoviePage
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews