Volcano 1997, Rated PG-13

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Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche.

You heard me correctly, there's no need to go back and reread that last sentence. Tommy Lee Jones has a twenty story building fall on top of him and walks out of the rubble smiling. Volcano, if you can't guess it from the title, is another disaster flick, this time about a volcano that erupts in downtown L.A., a scenario I don't think everyone would call a disaster.

Some of the recent high budget disaster films have been entertaining movies, Twister and Dante's Peak come to mind, but others are missing something. Volcano fits into the latter category. The formula for disaster pics is simple; there are two parts to it. 1) there is a disaster and 2) people try to get away from it. Volcano strays, albeit slightly, from this formula.

The story being told here is not of the people escaping the volcano, but rather, of the efforts made by emergency teams, headed by Tommy Lee Jones, to prevent the volcano and lava from destroying the west side of L.A. This in itself might have been decent, but, as is often the case, there are unnecessary sub-plots thrown into the mix.

Among them, Tommy Lee Jones has a tumultuous relationship with his 13 year old daughter, a doctor wants to help injured people while her fiancee wants her to come to safety, and a white/black thing is looked at as a white L.A. cop tries to bust a black guy for asking for help. Personally, if I have a three mile stretch of lava, preheated to about four bajillion degrees, working its way toward me I don't care if I have a black guy, an Asian guy, or the Algebra teacher who gave me a 'D' in high school next to me asking for help, it's all good. Quite simply, there are bigger fish to fry.

Volcano, while the plot initially seems different, really doesn't tread on any new ground. Director Mick Jackson raids the pantry, grabs the cookie cutter and out come the scenes even J.D. Salinger has seen a million times: the dog in trouble who manages to escape danger, the relative of the hero who takes responsibility and puts herself in danger so the hero can rescue her (it was rescuing his daughter that got Tommy Lee Jones a building to fall on him) and the scene I'm really getting sick of, the heretofore movie jerk and hard... nose, gallantly taking his/her own life to rescue another person.

Volcano does present some good action scenes and the build up, the calm before the volcano if you will, is good, but too much of this movie has been seen before in other realms. Rent Dante's Peak instead.