 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Volcano
|
 |
|
As disaster movies of the late 1990s go, Volcano is almost a humanist tract. Unlike Dante's Peak (1977) or The Lost World (1997), it deliberately eschews the violent spectacle of gleeful death. Unlike Daylight (1996), it boasts no villains whose timely demise prompts audience applause. Unlike Twister (1996), it refuses to reduce its characters to bloodless ciphers pinned into a special-effects diagram. If anything, Volcano is what genre specialists call a procedural, devoted to the intricacies and mechanics of professional activity. The earthquake rumbles that regularly threaten the daily lives of Los Angeles residents one day become exponentially scarier; it transpires that a volcano is about to spew deadly lava through the sewers and underground train tunnels and into the streets. For Mike (Tommy Lee Jones) and Amy (Anne Heche), specialists in natural disaster and urban crisis control, the key problem becomes one of how to divert this flow of lava once it has been unleashed. This is no easy task, since the glowing, implacably advancing substance destroys everything and everyone in its path. It is a mark of the film's distinctness, however, that its body count is surprisingly low, and that its one prolonged scene of gory death registers as tragic rather than sadistic. Also surprising is the film's relative lack of action-suspense. It is no Speed (1994): there are few nail-biting, split-second clinches (although the denouement is superbly generic stuff). Director Mick Jackson – who brought a similarly pleasing uniqueness to the critically underrated The Bodyguard (1992) – substitutes for the usual thrills an often amusing and sometimes surreal view of a chaotic, multicultural Los Angeles, as well as very effective low-key, atmospheric touches borrowed from the horror genre. On the down side, Volcano insists on including an extremely pat and simplistic allegorical subplot about race relations (involving a white cop and a black citizen locked in constant dispute). And it fails to avoid at least one cringe-inducing cliché of the disaster movie: although an entire metropolitan population is at great risk, it would seem that it is the survival at any cost of only a single person – Mike's daughter Kelly (Gaby Hoffmann) – which matters to most of the characters. (A similar myopia, exaggerated even further, will return later in The Day After Tomorrow [2004].) But overall Volcano is a modest treat – particularly for delightful moments such as when the giant billboard of a blonde woman catches alight and comes crashing down into the street (a homage to Frank Tashlin's Pop Art comedies of the '50s), or when workmen earnestly discuss the Hieronymus Bosch canvas they are desperately packing into a truck as volcanic ash rains down from the sky. © Adrian Martin June 1997 |
