Like a civil-defense training film, Volcano offers a social blueprint for a city surviving a geological riot instead of racial fissure. Roark's ex-wife and the chief of police are both offscreen meddlers who phone in their roles. The true heroes on Roark's watch are civil servants in the water and power department, fire department, police department, and mass transit. The pocket-protecto r set rallies with feats of engineering and interagency networking. Supervisors and coworkers lay down their lives.
Bureaucrats save the day.
If LA blew it with the 1992 riots, here's a cinematic pep rally that shows how to quell a real eruption. Volcano 's pinnacle of civic uplift is a scene in which a crew-cut white cop handcuffs a burly black man for trying too vigorously to get emergency crews to stop by his neighborhood. The cop's kinder, gentler partner releases the Herculean black man, who then joins the groaning cops to lift a massive cement barricade for a lava dam. In a final heart-tugging montage, a jubilant multicultural throng uniformly dusted with ash embrace one another amid apocalyptic rubble. In another nod to local color, the film gives airtime to 45 members of the Los Angeles media, who as a group outnumber the film's 43 stunt players and 43 special-effects technicians.