Los Angeles is the entertainment capital of the world, which, for many people, makes it the sellout capital of the world. If you think all the ills of the planet can be traced to the stench from the movie, recording and television industries, L.A. is Sin City incarnate. The natural disasters--the mud slides and fires and earthquakes--are regarded as divine retribution for all those sky-high salaries and kidney-shaped swimming pools and hot-tub orgies and sleek limos that stretch to the smog-rimmed horizon.
The unnatural disasters, such as the riots and free-for-all gang warfare and celebrity murders, are perceived as retribution, too; it's all part of the Armageddon-in-progress that is L.A. It's a great place to be a hater; but, of course, a real hater can't be truly happy for long inveighing only against the show-biz factories. So for extra target practice, there exist the waves of Latino and Asian immigrants who are impertinent enough to want to make a better life for themselves in L.A. The city is probably the best place to be a racist in America--there are so many races to target. With all this bile going for it, is it any wonder a lot of people want to see L.A. bite it big time?
Volcano, directed by Mick Jackson and scripted by Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray, is a lot better than John Carpenter's recent I Hate L.A. opus Escape From L.A., which exploited the hell out of the city's racial antagonisms in the guise of a punk cartoon. And it's way more fun than this year's other volcano movie, Dante's Peak.
Starring Tommy Lee Jones as L.A.'s Emergency Management Control honcho and Anne Heche as a smarty-pants volcanologist, Volcano really piles on the magma. It rolls down Wilshire Boulevard like an enormous melted-cheese sandwich; it even clogs the arteries of the underground Metro Rail. It's all kind of pretty, really; even the volcanic fireballs that thump the air like Scud missiles have a party-time panache. Earthquake movies aren't very photogenic, but volcano movies--a subspecies of the earthquake genre--are spangled and show-offy. It's as if even the molten forces of nature wanted to get into show biz. That's how corrupting L.A. can be.
A sense of humor can go an unconscionably long way in a disaster movie. In Volcano, the filmmakers and the audience are in on the same joke. L.A. is once again the target of divine retribution--ain't it wonderful? The film's hate-L.A. jokes aren't mean and vindictive, though. This is, after all, an anti-L.A. movie made by Hollywood insiders. They have a high old time torching their own playground, and they'll probably make a fortune in the process.
There's an affectionate knowingness to the knocks in this movie--like the shot of the Metro Rail conductor reading the book Writing Screenplays That Sell or the ineffably surreal image of the huge Angelyne billboard kerplunking from a great height into a lava bed.
The jokes in Volcano aren't wedged into the action as an afterthought. They're part of the film's texture, and you keep waiting for them. Watching this film is a little bit like getting mauled and tickled at the same time. The filmmakers have given the whole shebang a hefty levity, and that's not easy to accomplish in a full-scale disaster movie.
The cast helps. Heche's role is familiar, but she spouts her smart-ass lines as if she's really smart. As an Emergency Management aide, Don Cheadle is like a one-man jive-ass Greek chorus; looking at the lava, he says, "Even Moses couldn't reroute this shit." Cheadle is such an original actor you forget what a bummer his role could have been if played straight. His taunting, insinuating wit must act as a kind of inner metronome; his comic rhythms--velvety, but with a snap--are unlike any other actor's. As in Devil in a Blue Dress, Cheadle is funny in ways that catch you off guard. Maybe he's caught off guard, too--he shares with us his delight in his own delight.
Tommy Lee Jones isn't exactly sounding any new depths here, but he gives his stalwart-hero role some recognizably human shadings and some spunk, and in a big special-effects movie such as this one, that can make all the difference in the world. Playing Mike Roarke, apparently the only guy in L.A. who knows what to do when the plates shift and the magma mounts, he's a whirling dervish of counterattacks. It's Mike versus the Volcano.
Still, the film saddles him with one of those heart-tugging subplots in which he must finally rescue his daughter (Gaby Hoffmann) from a collapsing mall as she attempts to save an errant toddler. Volcano may be smart, but it's far from shameless. The sequence where Mike sprints to his daughter's aid is too flat-out melodramatic; the crosscutting is as wham-bam as anything in Eisenstein. The scene is exciting, all right, but too square-jawed for this movie at its best. What you take away from the film aren't its last-minute-rescue extravaganzas but the little human touches and Cheadle and the terrific lava effects and the jibes--like the exchange between two rescue workers as they retrieve from the flame-engulfed L.A. County Museum of Art a painting by Hieronymous Bosch.
Perhaps I'm asking too much from this kind of film. But Volcano is just off-center and squiggly enough to make you wish the filmmakers had jettisoned the usual disaster-movie plot mechanics and gotten really nasty-funky. It's still the wittiest entry in the trash-L.A. genre. Mick Jackson made his valentine to Los Angeles with the 1991 Steve Martin comedy L.A. Story, and that was such a sweet little picture he probably thought his next greeting card should be more appropriate for Halloween.
Jackson's a Brit, and even though he now lives in L.A., he probably still sees the city as a bemused outsider. That bemusement serves him equally well whether he's torching the town or smothering it with wet kisses. Either way, L.A. is no more real to him than a theme park. That's how he's able to send it up with such impunity.
But Jackson doesn't take our love/hate L.A. fantasies to the max. His theme park has too many themes. He balances the good jokes with dreary stuff about an emergency-room physician (Jacqueline Kim) risking her own life to save others. There's a why-can't-we-all-just-get-along section featuring a racist white cop who handcuffs a black brother until he realizes four hands are better than two when it comes to stopping Mr. Lava. The volcano seals up their racial divide.
As bubble-icious as the lava is in Volcano, the filmmakers end up giving it short shrift. The triumph of man over magma is depicted with the kind of high-five hoopla that makes us think we're watching an ESPN special. And the final shot of L.A.'s very own volcano--which should be both hilarious and terrifying--is barely a blip on the screen before the credits encroach.
Yet you still walk out of the film in a strangely mellow mood. There's a lot of bile fueling the L.A.-disaster-movie genre, but in Volcano, the bile doesn't eat away at the fun. What the filmmakers are saying is, Yes, maybe Los Angeles should blow sky-high, but we'll sure miss having it around. Probably most of us in the audience feel the same way.
Volcano
Directed by Mick Jackson; with Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche, Don Cheadle and Gaby Hoffmann.
Rated
