By KIMBER KAY
“Volcano” will rock your world.
Critics are roasting “Volcano” for its cheesy plots, and theater audiences have been laughing at the trailer for months. But “Volcano” has the last laugh, grossing $14.6 million to date.
The plot has a vent in the earth’s crust opening up under downtown L.A., centering around the La Brea Tar Pits.
Aside from the fact that there are lots of geological inaccuracies, audiences will buy the plot. It isn’t as hard to swallow as a cryogenically frozen secret agent, or Tom Arnold being in command of something. If anything can happen, it will in California. Everyone who has seen more than one movie knows this.
After several city workers are baked to death in a storm drain, geologist Amy Barnes (Anne Heche), who also happens to be a cute blonde, wants to check things out. She clashes with the head of the office of emergency management, Mike Roark (Tommy Lee Jones).
The crusty Roark goes to the scene and determines that it is too dangerous for a cute little lady to go down the storm drain. So, of course, she sneaks off and explores it, getting into trouble at the same time.
The action begins when we see water boiling in nearby lakes, and the beginnings of a mother of a lava flow. Lava bombs spew out of the developing crater like major league homeruns, crashing into people and buildings willy-nilly. A racing fire truck desperate to put out the raging fires gets hit by a bomb and careens out of control.
Because this is L.A. there just happen to be dozens of reporters all over the place. Actual L.A. newscasters play themselves, giving realism to the film. The press is held up to ridicule, like in the movie “Die Hard,” as they watch the disaster unfold without helping anyone escape.
It may sound gruesome, but watching people die is the best part of the film. The computer graphics are eerily realistic. At the end of the film, newscasts report over a hundred deaths caused by the volcanic eruption, but we are not fortunate enough to have seen more than a score of them.
The cheese pops up when the film hints at a romance between Barnes and Roark. With the obvious twenty-year age gap between them, and only paper-doll characters to work with, the romance seems even more implausible than lava running through the streets of L.A.
Because this film tries to bring the racially diverse city together through a crisis, it adds a few minutes of political correctness. This is the point in the movie when you can go get more popcorn, or remind yourself to stop biting your fingernails. The race relations storyline is lame, but mercifully lasts only a few minutes.
The real intensity is in battling the lava. It’s a perfect villain, never really going away but showing up again in a deadly, silent way to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting populace. It changes its flow depending on if there are large numbers of people in the way. It seems to slow down so that people can escape, except for the characters destined for a heroic death.
Don’t bother keeping track of any relationships or plots in the film. If you want plot, see “The English Patient.””Volcano” is great escapism entertainment, a nail-biter movie to see with someone to hold on to. And don’t worry, all the animals miraculously survive.
