Rotten Tomatoes score: 24%
The mid-90s ushered in a second wave of disaster movies, after the genre's 1970s Classical Period had faded from memory. They were longer on visual effects and shorter on just about everything else. It was at the peak of that second wave, in 1997, that two volcano-themed films were released within two months of each other. Dante's Peak was the more commercially successful of the two, but Volcano fared better with critics. Neither movie is a work of art, but this one is impressive in its downright religious obedience to formula. It's not a bad movie, but—well, yes it is.
It's watchable though.
Looking at the title card and reading the description on Netflix, I knew that one of the leads (Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton) is a volcanologist. I guessed Pierce because he was holding a camera in the picture, and I was right. I then deduced that Linda Hamilton must be the mayor of the small town that gets blown up by the volcano, and sure enough. The question is, will she be a heroic authority figure who tries her best to save the town, or will she be a venal obstructionist like the mayor in Jaws? Well, you don't hire Linda Hamilton to play Murray Hamilton, so she must be a hero mayor. Again, sure enough.
Ace USGS volcanologist Harry arrives in Dante's Peak, Washington, to investigate seismic disturbances in its eponymous dormant volcano. He and Mayor Wando discover the bodies of two bathers who were parboiled in a hot spring due to a sudden spike in water temperature. Still haunted by the memory of the South American eruption that killed his wife, Harry calls in colleagues for a consult. There are two ways the script could go from here. The geologists can either be a bunch of stubborn naysayers, or they can be a lovable gang of oddballs with funny quirks. They decided to split the difference. The boss does all the naysaying while the rest of the team are zany and wacky.
They try to be, anyway. One guy has a pathological obsession with coffee, which he manifests in about three lines of dialogue and then abandons. The others mostly stand around and look at computer screens from time to time. The movie did surprise me once, during a scene when one of the zany scientists accompanies Harry and a remote-controlled rover to the caldera to take samples. The other scientist descends the slope to readjust the rover and gets caught in a rock slide. That's not a surprise, but the fact that he doesn't die is.
Anyway, the boss goes on pooh-poohing Harry's concerns, and Mayor Wando can't convince the town council to take action because a panic might drive away a big-time investor who is mentioned for the first time in response to the stodgy boss scientist's recollection of another small town that was once bankrupted by a false alarm. ("Is your town in desperate need of investments by any chance? Because, if so, it would be a good excuse to refuse to warn people about this volcano, and that would really move the plot along.")
Finally, the shocking sight of brownish drinking water finally convinces the USGS people that calamity is imminent. But, instead of ordering an evacuation straight away, they call everyone in town into the high-school gymnasium for a meeting just in time for the volcano to blow. All the bridges out of town obligingly collapse, but fortunately Harry has an SUV that can drive underwater, so he and the mayor make it out of immediate danger.
They then discover that her two children, who are no more than ten, have stolen her car and driven it to grandma's house to save her from the volcano. It's not quite as funny as watching Ernest's dog drive a truck, but I don't think it was supposed to be funny at all. Harry and the mayor catch up with grandma and the kids and escape across the lake in a boat.
It's then that we discover that the volcano has somehow transmuted the entire lake into high-grade battery acid, so the boat begins to dissolve. (My hypothesis is that the script called for them to be rowing through hot lava, but someone told them that was impossible, so they came up with something even stupider.) A situation like this calls for a heroic sacrifice, and grandma rises to the occasion, wading through the deadly acid to pull the boat the last few yards to the shore.
And that just about brings us home. Harry fetches a NASA radio beacon from the team's equipment, then drives an SUV over a lava flow, which causes its tires to burst into flame but has no effect on his ability to drive it. (This is not the underwater SUV from before, by the way.) Meanwhile, the geologists are on their way out of town when a dam bursts and washes away the boss, drawing no perceptible emotional response from his coworkers or from the audience. In case you're keeping score, the grandma and the geology boss are the only two main characters who buy the farm in this pulse-pounding disaster film.
Actually, I can't rule out that someone might have died while I wasn't looking.
All that remains is for Harry, the mayor, and the two kids to drive away from a second eruption, crash through the doors of an abandoned mine shaft without damaging their car or injuring themselves, and escape the super-heated pyroclastic cloud—which, like the fireball in the infamous tunnel scene of Independence Day, apparently can't go through doors. Inside the mine, they activate the radio beacon and are eventually rescued by the other scientists.
I'm not going to stick up for this one. I could take or leave it, but I'm not going to pretend to think it was genius. Volcano was a little better, and I appreciated that they weren't kidding themselves with the title. If you have to watch a movie from 1997 about volcanoes, I would go with that one, but if you can't find it (and still have to watch a movie from 1997 about volcanoes), this one is your other option.
