Vulcano - Los Angeles 1997

In the mid-90s, the disaster movie experienced a revival thanks to the advancement of CGI technology, which made creating scenes of destruction on a massive scale far easier and more convincing than ever before; 1997 was the year of the volcano, seeing both the release of Universal's Dante's Peak, and this rather unimaginatively titled effort from 20th Century Fox, which starred Tommy Lee Jones as Office of Emergency Management director Mike Roark, who must try and prevent downtown LA from being entirely engulfed by lava that erupts from the La Brea tar pits.

A slick, major studio, big-budget summer blockbuster, Volcano naturally benefits from a solid cast and state of the art special effects, but proves less thrilling than the premise suggests thanks to a lack of genuinely exciting or particularly innovative set-pieces: too much of the action centres around Jones's attempts to stem the flow of lava, which travels at walking pace thereby presenting little danger to anyone but the elderly and the infirm; meanwhile, director Mick Jackson ticks off the expected clichés from his disaster movie checklist—personal dramas, heroic sacrifices, a sexy scientist, even a cute dog in peril—before wrapping matters up rather too neatly with a finale that delivers far too low a death toll to be truly satisfying.

I first saw this with my friends in Regal theater, South Mumbai in 1997.

Those times there were no trailers or YouTube or any reviews. Enjoyed it a bit then but aft revisiting it, i found it to b lame.

The film doesnt have any tension or suspense. It has the same lava stuff going on again n again. The best part is, the film's name is Volcano but we dont get to see any mountain bursting. At times, the lava looked too fake. Even the plan and the strategy to contain/pool the lava and later divert the lava's direction is a big lol.

Anne Heche's character is a scientist but the character does stupid stuff.

The only good thing is the way Stan Olber (John Carroll Lynch) saves the driver. The jumping into the lava flow n throwing the driver to safety is epic.

Despite a history of major geological events in the area, nobody really suspects anything when a handful of pipe engineers die from intense burns while underground. Investigating the accident, OEM chief Mike Roark almost gets killed himself when an underground fissure throws up intense heat and flame. Expert Dr Amy Barnes believes that magma may be coming up to the surface of the earth and causing the events but, would you believe it, nobody buys it. Nobody that is, until the tar pits overflow and start to pour lava onto the streets, destroying everything in its path. With Roark convinced and Barnes wishing she had been wrong, the race is on to protect the city.

Better known as 'that other volcano movie of 1997', this film gets out the disaster movie handbook and follows it step by step. So we have a manly and practical hero, an expert, children and pets in peril, human conflict, sacrifice, special effects, 'bad' politicians etc etc. So far so formula, and so it all continues. The basic set up does the usual things by setting up the most basic of characters for us to use as a focus before then just letting the lava go and relying on special effects to do the rest. The need to turn the drama into a specific story around Roark means that it occasionally forces him and his into unlikely dangerous positions that require them to be inches away from the action; this is not convincing and at times just feels like overkill, sucking any real tension out of the film.

Without much real excitement the film just piles on the special effects and, unfortunately, these look dated with some poor back projection failing to really cut the mustard.

The film soldiers on, unsure of how it can keep raising the stakes while remaining plausible (it doesn't!) and it will satisfy those just looking for a noisy disaster movie but no more than the clichés that those produce. The script has a few digs at LA (the news reporting, the pet obsession etc) but these don't amount to much but it works much better than the rather sickening attempts at racial commenting in the final few scenes ('everyone looks the same' – ugh!). The cast try hard to convince us that they are real people in real danger but even the talent involved cannot do much more than put on grim faces and soldier on. Jones is a good lead because he has a solid presence, but even he cannot make it exciting when he is placed within inches of anything falling/burning/exploding. Heche simply fits into the 'I hate it when I'm right' expert without really bringing more than competence to the role, while Hoffmann simply tries to find trouble to get into anytime the film dips. Cheadle is good support but minor subplots featuring the likes of David, Corbett and Rispoli only serve to highlight that the film cannot even manage to do the disaster movie stable of having each character have a background to make us care.

Overall this is an average disaster movie at best and, as such, will only really play well to those that like that sort of thing. The script is weak and cannot wait until the lava flows but even then struggles to make it exciting, throwing specific near misses at us again and again to keep us interesting. The cast have nothing to work with and make little impression but viewers may find this has just enough going for it to make it watchable if totally forgettable.

I'm not going to pretend that this movie is realistic. It isn't. But if you want to just sit down and watch a film with action, drama and entertaining characters, then this is the film for you.

Most disaster films are unrealistic, have no science behind them and if you think about them too much just get worse and worse. This movie is no exception. However, it is still a brilliant film if you want to sit down and not think too hard, or if you want to put a movie on without having to give it your full concentration. Personally, I think this film is great. There are better films out there, including better disaster films, but there are so many films that are ten times worse yet get better reviews. That's probably because they have better actors or are more realistic - but the job of a movie is to entertain, and this film does that brilliantly.

A blockbuster with a colossal budget of $90 million according to IMDb, but everything rhymes with cheapness: the dialog, the script, the plot twists, the soundtrack, ... It looks like a tv movie we may watch during a rainy Saturday afternoon, with a bad cold.