An unrealistic
disaster movie, directed by
Roger Donaldson (
Species,
Thirteen Days).
The premise is that a nice calm mountain, Dante's Peak, begins showing ominous signs of danger. The town government is unconcerned (obviously ignoring scientific evidence to make a plot to the movie), and refuses to evacuate, because it's been named the second most desirable place to live in America. All of a sudden the dormant volcano goes active, and people run/drive screaming from the town.
Pierce Brosnan is Dr. Henry Dalton, who tries warning everybody, but nobody listens to him. Linda Hamilton is Rachel Wando, the mayor who listens to him and gets the obvious role of girlfriend-during-disaster.
As the volcano starts to erupt, both of them go up the mountain to reescue Linda's ex-mother-in-law and kids. Then they must escape the oncoming wave of lava, rocks, and destruction.
As far as movies go, this one sucked.
A couple of reasons; first, this was the second of two summer movies dealing with volcanoes. Volcano may have been the better of the two. It's sorta predictable, we don't care about the characters any less, though, and both Brosnan and Hamilton are wasted. Everyone who is marginally bad gets killed, running through lava (and living?!), driving through fire. The F/X are good, perhaps better than 'Volcano', but at the end you just shrug your shoulders and wonder why they bothered.
I think The Filthy Critic will go with me on this one. I never saw the whole thing, I changed the channel, so I managed to snag the facts and the ending from IMDB.