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'Volcano' is a B-movie at best, and at worst is more of a disaster that what it's supposed to be depicting. To be fair, you have to be prepared in any movie to suspend disbelief for one major concept. 'Volcano' asks you to suspend disbelief in science, human interaction, and common sense.
Tommy Lee Jones gets to be the studly-yet-1990s-sensitive head honcho of the Office of Emergency Management, and he's fine when he's not stuck with the stupid dialogue the script provides. However, Anne Heche gives a howlingly bad performance as a smart-ass geologist who becomes Roark's love interest (while the city is burning down, natch). Gaby Hoffman goes from Field of Dreams and American President to a turn as a whimpering, needy, and victim-for-life daughter of Jones. Don Cheadle gets to sit in a really coooool office and take Jones's phone calls, doing the job that in reality Roark would and should be doing.
Anyway, the movie really starts going downhill when Heche's geology partner gets sucked into a lava vent while they're breaking into the subway lines. It picks up speed when Jones starts suggesting that they use buses to dam the flow of the lava flowing down the street, Heche's geologist (who loves to lecture everyone about The Science Of Geology) being apparently oblivious to the fact that lava is hot and it melts metal, and rock, and a dead bus is unlikely to have much effect. It really starts to suck when the film introduces Rodney King-like racial tension between two bad actors dressed as cops and an angry black man who can't understand why the fire department is busy with this large river of flowing lava. But hey, in the end, the three of them will be working together to build a K-rail dam to stop the lava from eating up his neighborhood, even though the dam is built in the wrong direction and the material used wouldn't stop lava anyway. Besides, K-rails are hardly watertight, but I guess lava wouldn't think to poke its head through the gaps, not when Tommy Lee Jones is glaring at it. Don't even get me started on the stranded-subway-car subplot, where a tunnelful of hot lava is coming down but oddly enough, it's not too hot to attempt a rescue, it's not too smoky to see, and there aren't any poisonous gases so everyone can breathe. This must be LA Lava, or Lava Lite. You know, it eats cars but is eco-friendly.
There are moments of sheer camp here that almost make you wonder if this was meant to be a comedy. For instance, the two security guards packing up Hieronymus Bosch paintings have a completely meaningless and farcical conversation about weight, and at the end, no sooner does the little boy Roark/Jones rescued note that everyone looks the same while covered in ash, than a rainstorm breaks out and cleans everyone up -- and then the sun comes out and Heche says something along the lines of, "aw, shucks, Roark".
'Volcano' almost achieves Battlefield Earth status, but except for Heche no one approaches Travolta-like badness and the technical aspects are handled pretty well. If you are from the LA area as I am, it's kind of funny to think of a lava flow wiping out Wilshire Boulevard. I gave it a three for the effects and the little amount of tension you get from this.


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