User reviews

Watching Mick Jackson's disaster flick, in which the eponymous natural disaster wreaks havoc throughout Los Angeles, is like watching a 3 a.m. infomercial. It's such silly, mindless fluff, yet there's just something about it that keeps your eyes glued to the screen.

"Volcano" is admittedly well-cast and acted, despite a dreadful script and a plot whose summary could fit on a matchbook. Tommy Lee Jones, who would give 110% making a McDonald's commercial, stars as Mike Roark, the hard-boiled head of the Office of Emergency Management, where he is assisted by his sidekick Emmit (Don Cheadle). After initially pooh-poohing the thought of a volcano in L.A. from geologist Amy Barnes (Anne Heche, who constantly ends her lines with a four-letter word like a period after a sentence), it's only a matter of time before he is proved wrong before his very eyes. Other solid performances come from Jacqueline Kim (Dr. Calder), John Carroll Lynch (Stan, the oft-maligned subway boss), and Keith David, a great actor who is otherwise wasted here in a role as a police lieutenant who has no impact on any events in the film, which is halfway over before he even appears on screen for the first time.

However, there's the small problem of having something resembling a good story to go with the awesome visuals, which are indeed spectacular. But forget the volcano; Jerome Armstrong's script poses the greatest threat to the characters. To put it mildly, it's the biggest piece of cliché-ridden muck to come along in awhile, laden with plot holes, smarmy sentimentality (the offender here being a dog rescue scene near the beginning) and heroics, forced we-are-all-brothers morals, and implausibilities. Yes, this film is rooted far from reality, but it should make a little sense along the way.

Working at the OEM must be the cushiest job in the world, for all the employees do throughout the picture is holler at each other and stare blankly at computer monitors. (And why do they continuously show news broadcasts on their big screen? Is that where their disaster briefings come from?) Mike's sullen daughter (Gaby Hoffmann, in a thankless role in the tradition of "True Lies" and "Face/Off"), due to her own incompetence, is suddenly thrust into peril and is thus separated from her father, a subplot that helps build up what turns out to be one great big joke of an ending. Describing it here can't do it justice. (After being taken to the hospital in Dr. Calder's Land Rover to receive treatment for a second-degree burn on her right leg, she is seen some time later with a bloody scab on her left cheek as she talks to Mike on the phone. And you thought your HMO was rough.) Plus, I seriously doubt that someone who jumps right into a pool of hot lava would slowly melt like a snowman in Miami while he screams and tosses the body of a man nearly twice his size to safety from a burning subway train. Then there's the wonderful family-oriented scene of two firemen burned alive in their overturned truck.

And, lest we forget that "Volcano" takes place in L.A., there's the obligatory racist-cop episode in which a black man asking the fire chief to help his neighborhood is suddenly handcuffed out of nowhere by an officer for "harassing" him, a tacky scene complete with (groan) references to Rodney King and Mark Fuhrman. (The whole time he's cuffed, the black man makes carefree wisecracks to the officers all while his 'hood is burning to cinders.) But, of course, everything's eventually resolved. "You're a good man," the other cop praises his partner after the latter grudgingly dispatches fire trucks to the black man's neighborhood, as if he has performed some immense display of generosity.

In another lovely homage to L.A., there's also a looting scene, where extras run incredibly slow while carrying empty boxes.

And what in the world was with the constant barrage of news reporters? Did we really need someone reporting "The house behind me has just exploded into flames...all hell is breaking loose!" while people were running for their lives all around her? As the volcano explodes out of the La Brea Tar Pits and lava is running onto the street, it's from a reporter describing this sight from where we hear one of the worst lines in the film: "It's as if the tar had caught fire, melted and somehow expanded." Hey, McFly, if tar is already a liquid to begin with, then how in the world can it melt?

When an army of helicopters drops gallons of water on the lava blocked off on Wilshire, the reporters and camera crews, who are camped right up against the concrete barriers, manage to stay conveniently dry the entire time.

Despite a high body count, scores of injured civilians and billions of dollars in damages, everybody's smiling as soon as a rainfall ensues, like those 7up commercials circa 1986. ("Feels so good comin' down!" Remember that?) Lots of questions are left unanswered: How will they clean up and repair everything? Will a future eruption occur soon? Will the Cubs win the World Series?

Yet for all its pretentiousness and gaping flaws, I have to admit that "Volcano" was entertaining. It's a load of escapist camp that doesn't have a care in the world. And I do have to give credit where it's due; somehow the filmmakers managed to keep slow-moving lava exciting for 104 minutes.

Plus, you can't help but get a kick out of a disaster film that includes the line "This city's finally paying for its arrogance," and finds the time to include a Bible quotation. 7/10

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.

As a Big Budget movie, I'm sure that "Volcano" took more than a few months to make. Too bad someone associated with the movie didn't take that time to wander into the local library (the children's section, perhaps), and check out a book on "Volcanoes". I've seen Saturday-morning cartoons that have a better understanding of lava.

Instead we get many scenes of outright stupidity that would challenge even the densest of viewers. In one scene, Tommy Lee Jones and an assistant are standing near a volcanic vent, and their protective suits start to melt (of course skin is stronger than a protective suit, so they escape unharmed). But in numerous later scenes, people walk by lava like you might walk past a lake. Maybe this is because no one seems to know it's lava. I lost count of how many times a character said something like "What is that stuff?" or "There's something really hot and glowing coming down the street, and things are melting into it. Wonder what it could be?"

In what has to be one of the worst scenes ever filmed, two characters load an injured man onto the outstretched ladder of a hook & ladder truck. Then they hang onto a dangling fire hose as the ladder is lifted above the lava. The heat is so intense that the fire hose SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTS, but our characters are unhurt (their boots smoke a little). I didn't know that fire hoses were so flammable...

But "Volcano"is not just a dumb disaster flick with bad science. No! It's also a Socially-Important Commentary on our Society Movie! Throughout the film there are numerous "social messages". These are so corny and contrived that they could only have been written by people who have never actually experienced them. A racist cop tries to arrest a guy for assault (in the middle of a disaster scene!), but then the two team up to help save the day. Aww. Later, a little kid notes that "everybody looks the same" when covered by ash and soot. Aww. America's racial troubles could be ended, if only a giant volcano threatened us all.

More? Oh sure, there's more! Tommy Lee Jones is the too-hard-working dad who comes to value his daughter. Said daughter is a selfish brat who learns some responsibility, and respect for her dad. There's a guy whose only role in the movie is to say obviously insulting things. This makes him the "bad guy". One can see the writers of this movie hammering his role out: "We need someone who's rich and yuppie-like and snooty. Someone like us, only not as enlightened. Someone who wouldn't make a Socially-Important Commentary on our Society Movie like we are!" Of course, bad things happen to him and all is right with the world.

In the end, the mysterious, glowing, sometimes-hot substance we come to know as "lava" is channeled into the sea, and all of LA lives happily ever after in a just and fair world. A world, of course, with a big smoking volcano plopped down into the middle of it. Certainly that won't affect the real estate values?

The lessons of this movie are quite clear. 1) lava is harmless if you don't touch it; 2) small children will inevitably wander into incredible harm (but emerge OK), and 3) only through the trauma of sudden volcanic activity will we come to appreciate the true Brotherhood of Man.

Whoever thought up this movie should be thrown into a volcano...

I loved the 90's resurgence of the Disaster movie that was cemented as a Genre back in the 1970's but like a Volcano that genre laid dormant for a long time until the 90's exploded with huge, big budget Disaster films with the likes of VOLCANO, DANTE'S PEAK, TWISTER, INDEPENDENCE DAY, DEEP IMPACT, ARMAGEDDON, DAYLIGHT & even JURASSIC PARK could be considered a Disaster movie!!! There's probably more that i haven't mentioned but those were the "Big Ones" & i consider Dante's Peak & Volcano the very best of the bunch. I've always been a big Tommy Lee Jones fan after The Fugitive & Men In Black & U.S Marshalls, Batman Forever, Under Seige, among others as the 90's were his glory days as a star & here he gets his own big budget summertime Blockbuster with his name written big above the title on the poster, this is his film & he's the main star lead of the whole damn thing & he's excellent as our rugged hero lead as he runs about Los Angeles trying to rescue everyone & save the city from a big erupted Volcano spilling out a river of scorching hot lava, Tommy is great & i love his voice & his smart authoritative manner & he puts it all to good use here. There's a nice ensemble cast to round out the supporting characters with Anne Heche, Gaby Hoffman, Don Cheadle & Keith David. I totally love the Thrilling & exciting music score by the legendary ALAN SILVESTRI (Predator 1&2, Judgment Night, Death Becomes Her, Back to the Future & so many more) & the look of the sticky hot summertime LA is captured beautifully on screen & i loved the opening of the movie just showing LA in the morning with everyone going about their day as usual & busyness of it all with not knowing what's growing under the famous city, it's just an exciting & lovely 90's opening especially with the music. The special effects still hold up beautifully & the production design is perfect for a Disaster movie & the most important thing for this big budget popcorn movie is it's simply FUN & full of entertainment. As the City of Angeles starts to crumble & the lava flows through the streets we follow Tommy Lee Jones on his mission to save it all if he can & it's a thrilling & fun experience, i love 90's movies. My favourite Tommy Lee Jones "Vehicle" movie

Almost certainly not scientifically accurate (!!!!), "Volcano" is nonetheless a fantastic example of a mid-90's disaster movie, right down to Tommy Lee Jones' Mike Roark being one of those outsiders who predicts coming disaster quite accurately. But he never says "I told you so!", he just gets on and saves the world.

TLJ (who is equally as good at playing heroes as he is villains, if you ask me) is well supported by Anne Heche and Don Cheadle, amongst others.

Of course, the special effects are what we watch these movies for, and they don't disappoint - there are some really spectacular visuals. Seeing Los Angeles as the epicentre of a volcano is pretty cool. (Side note: Hollywood has really given that city a battering over the years!)

Uncomplicated, entertaining stuff - fun!

2 words make this one of the worse movies I have ever seen: Gabby Hoffman. My god she was beyond annoying. One of the whiniest, wimpy, grating kid performances in history of movies. Take her away and this is a fun B movie that leaves you entertained for a bit. With Gabby this movie becomes grating. Best example is when she cannot run away from the lava that a baby could crawl away from. God I was hoping she would die in that scene. Didn't happen and her performance just got worse as the movie moved along. If you can tune her out the movie is fun. I just couldn't tune her out though and I could not enjoy the movie. So take away one performance and the movie is enjoyable. Leave that one performance in and the movie is terrible.

I was first in the door opening day for this film. And, I got bothered sitting in front of the theater waiting to get in. Just my luck.

Goes to show you, the theater this film opened in is NOW CLOSED.

I went to see the film because I am a fan of Tommy's.

Heche WE COULD DO WITHOUT!! The big problem here with this film is the script.

Subpar, bad side stories.

The effects were OK in 1997. Could have been better, but not the worst I have ever seen.

Course, 9 years later as I write this, computer could have much improved them if the film was done now.

I did not like, nor did we need, the side story with Tommy's character, the ex-wife & then the daughter.

I am NOT a fan of Gaby Hoffmann. Then, her character, tough & know it all here but screaming when things got tough & she DID NOT support her dad when he had to do his job.

A fair film.

One of the most insufferably boring and humorless disaster films ever committed to celluloid. Makes admittedly mediocre and predictable rival volcano movie - Dante's Peak- look like a masterpiece. It's not even camp or scary and almost every actor is unbearably annoying (though the teenage daughter of the main character that behaves like a 6 year old takes the cake as one of the most annoying children in the history of film). At least in the 70s they used to have funny fashions, campy dialogues and all-star casts. One drank Ava Gardner is worth more than the entire cast and crew of this film combined.

Almost believable until when Roark and Barnes are in the dark sewers wearing chemical suits with lights on inside their visors (so we can see them) effectively blinding themselves so they would find it hard to see where they were going LOL Only in Hollywood... And then the wobbly /shaky cam started...

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 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.

Like Mission to Mars, and Red Planet, I would imagine Volcano and Dante's Peak would've had quite a rivalry as they fought for a higher spot in the box office (which neither of them got). Like the two martian flicks, these two lava-laden flicks have equal strengths and weaknesses. Dante's Peak, is the (attempt to be) emotional one, and Volcano is the adrenaline pumped one.

In good old L.A. some mysterious gas readings coming from under the city become the tell tale signs of a much bigger problem to come. A volcano hidden under the Labrea Tar Pits, bursts to life in an explosion of lava that threatens to melt the city overnight. It is up to a heroic fire fighter and his scientist friend to save the day.

There is not a lot to say about Volcano that cannot be said about any other disaster movie. All the same adjectives apply. It's cheesy, it's silly, but it's sufficiently exiting and fun.

Tommy Lee Jones plays a top L.A. County environmental official but does not know about plate tectonics or understand that magma is underground lava. Cars drive nonchalantly by an erupting volcano on Wilshire Blvd. like it's a water main break. People walk in front of molten lava and get bombarded with volcanic ash and falling glass shards from exploding buildings with no ill effects. And these are some of the high points! Yet if Tommy Lee Jones whiny brat teenage daughter and the two dogs had been engulfed in the lava stream, I would have rated this clunker a bit higher for good special effects.

It's a disaster movie, so my expectations were already low, but I live near Los Angeles, so the premise of a volcano erupting from the La Brea Tar Pits amused me. Honestly, I enjoyed it; all I really want from a movie is to be entertained. It had drama and heroes and fantastic unbelievable action, so overall it was enjoyable. I love Tommy Lee Jones and Don Cheadle and I think they gave good performances given what they had to work with. It does, however, prove one fact I already knew; Anne Heche is one of the worst actresses of all time.

I have always suspected the tar pits of being a hotbed of adversity. And who knows what those nasty faults are planning for us. All in all, this is as good as any other disaster movie with the exception that it brings the disaster home to you and not in some remote location. The acting is as good as any disaster movie. What is spooky is that the La Brea Tar Pits are located at 5801 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036. They are approximately 6.7 miles away from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where they have some great La Brea Tar Pits finds.

Tommy Lee Jones is a good selection and carries his character to a tee. With the lava creeping around you have plenty of time to say "watch out" and "stay in the car." In this case staying in the car might be a bad idea.

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.