Volcano (1997)

Volcano arrives from 1997, a year when a studio could still spend ninety million dollars on the premise of molten rock oozing down Wilshire Boulevard and call it a summer tentpole. Mick Jackson directs with the grim efficiency of a man who knows the lava is a visual effect and has decided to aim the fire hoses at it anyway. Tommy Lee Jones plays Mike Roark, the emergency management director, sneering at geology as though it had personally inconvenienced him. The film is cheese, and it knows it is cheese, which spares us the usual sermonizing.

The cast is more integrated than the era strictly demanded. Don Cheadle runs the transit authority and dies a hero. Keith David stands around with institutional authority. Jacqueline Kim and Marcello Thedford fill out the ensemble. None of them announce their presence or invite applause for it. Anne Heche plays a seismologist whose calculations drive the plot, a competent professional in a genre that often prefers its women screaming. She is also, by the final reel, the supporting act to a man in a hard hat. The film holds no thesis about any of this. It hired good actors and pointed a camera at them.

Nothing here will trouble the culture warriors. No lecture, no cause, no lesson about the planet or the market or the body. The volcano is a volcano, a geological inconvenience with no interest in carbon credits. The rich are not eaten. The marginalized are not centered. The past is not revised, because the past in question never happened. We are left with a municipal crisis procedural, a fleet of helicopters, and a condominium demolished to save a hospital. The dialogue is bad in a way that audiences in 1997 apparently enjoyed hooting at. It opened at number one, which tells you something about appetites. A relic of a simpler commercial moment, and there is a strange comfort in that.