Review: Volcano (dir. by Mick Jackson)

Posted on September 27, 2026 by Arleigh

“Lava? Right here in L.A.?” — Mike Roark

In Volcano, Los Angeles does not just face an earthquake, fire, or some ordinary civic emergency—it finds itself threatened by a river of lava tearing through the heart of the city. Directed by Mick Jackson, the 1997 disaster movie takes a premise that is almost impossible to accept on paper and sells it through speed, scale, and the sheer force of Tommy Lee Jones barking orders at people. A volcano erupting beneath Los Angeles, near the La Brea Tar Pits no less, is not exactly a model of scientific credibility. Still, the film is energetic enough to make its absurdity part of the entertainment.

The setup is wonderfully direct. An earthquake rattles Los Angeles, workers begin dying in underground tunnels, and a strange source of extreme heat is discovered beneath the city. Before long, lava is spilling into the streets, buildings are catching fire, and the city’s Emergency Management director Mike Roark, played by Tommy Lee Jones, has to coordinate an increasingly desperate effort to keep downtown Los Angeles from being wiped out. Anne Heche plays Dr. Amy Barnes, the geologist who realizes that the city is dealing with more than an earthquake or a gas leak. Together, Roark and Barnes become the film’s central problem-solving team: he is the practical, politically frustrated municipal leader, while she is the scientific expert trying to explain the impossible thing happening under everyone’s feet.

What makes Volcano enjoyable is that it does not waste much time pretending to be a subtle character drama. The movie’s main concern is escalation. Every time the heroes think they have contained the problem, the lava finds another way to spread. It comes through the subway. It crashes through pavement. It turns a normal Los Angeles intersection into a landscape from hell. The film understands the simple pleasure of watching ordinary urban infrastructure become a weapon or a liability. A train tunnel, a concrete barrier, construction equipment, storm drains, and even a city block all become parts of an enormous improvised plan to redirect molten rock.

Mick Jackson directs the action with enough urgency that the movie often works even when the science is wobbling badly. The special effects are very much of their era, combining practical fire, miniatures, digital lava, and lots of actors reacting to bright orange light. Some of the CGI has aged about as gracefully as one would expect from 1997, but the physical effects still have impact. The lava itself has a thick, almost muscular quality in the film. It does not just look like glowing liquid; it moves like an unstoppable wall that eats concrete, cars, and people. The images of lava flooding Los Angeles streets remain the reason to watch the movie. They are absurd, but memorably absurd.

The film also benefits from treating the crisis as a citywide emergency rather than simply a personal survival story. Roark is not a scientist, soldier, or superhero. He is basically a city official who has to make decisions under impossible conditions, manage multiple agencies, argue with politicians, and keep people from panicking. Tommy Lee Jones is perfect casting for that role. He has the right mixture of exhaustion, irritation, authority, and reluctant decency. Jones does not play Roark as a polished action hero; he plays him like a man who had plans for a quiet weekend with his daughter and instead ends up trying to stop Los Angeles from being buried under lava. His natural gruffness gives the movie more weight than it might otherwise have.

Anne Heche brings a different energy as Amy Barnes. Her character is often stuck delivering exposition, explaining volcanic activity, underground pressure, and why everyone is probably about to die, but Heche commits to it. She gives Amy enough urgency and intelligence that the scientific dialogue feels less like a lecture and more like another kind of emergency response. The relationship between Roark and Amy is also refreshingly restrained. The movie could have forced a big romantic subplot between them, but it mostly keeps their connection professional. They respect each other because they are both good at their jobs, which is more interesting than a last-minute disaster-movie love story.

The supporting cast is solid as well. Don Cheadle has a memorable role as Emmit Reese, a subway supervisor who becomes one of Roark’s most important allies. Keith David also adds welcome presence as a police lieutenant helping coordinate the response. Gaby Hoffmann plays Roark’s daughter Kelly, and while the daughter-in-peril material is fairly standard, it gives Jones’s character an emotional stake outside the command center. The film occasionally leans hard on familiar disaster-movie formulas, including separated family members, skeptical officials, and civilians making terrible decisions near obviously dangerous lava, but that is part of the package. Volcano is not trying to reinvent the genre. It is trying to make the genre run hot and fast for 104 minutes.

It is hard not to compare Volcano with Dante’s Peak, the other major volcano disaster movie released earlier in 1997. Dante’s Peak at least tries to ground its eruption in recognizable volcanic warning signs, scientific procedure, and the danger of officials ignoring experts until it is too late. Even when it becomes exaggerated, the film wants viewers to feel that its disaster could plausibly grow out of real geological conditions. Volcano, on the other hand, does not have much interest in maintaining that kind of credibility. Its premise is already much wilder: molten lava suddenly emerging beneath one of the largest cities in the United States. Rather than fight that inherent silliness, Mick Jackson’s film leans into it. Where Dante’s Peak aims for science-flavored suspense, Volcano goes for spectacle, turning Los Angeles itself into a giant disaster-movie set piece.

The biggest issue is that the movie never really decides how seriously it wants to take itself. At times, it is a grim urban catastrophe film in which people die in horrifying ways. One scene involving a transit worker trying to rescue another man from the lava is still surprisingly brutal and sad. At other times, Volcano is close to accidental comedy, especially whenever the film attempts to explain its geology with complete confidence. The idea of a full-scale volcanic eruption beneath Los Angeles is already a major stretch, but the movie goes beyond that into a kind of aggressively convenient science. The lava moves where the plot needs it to move, barriers hold until they need to fail, and the city seems able to mobilize massive engineering projects at a speed that would make any real emergency planner laugh.

Still, questioning the realism too closely misses the appeal. Volcano belongs to that specific 1990s era when major studios were throwing big budgets at destruction spectacles with recognizable stars and high-concept premises. The movie is essentially a monster film where the monster is a river of lava rolling through Los Angeles. Instead of a creature smashing buildings, it is molten rock swallowing streets, derailing infrastructure, and forcing ordinary people to run for their lives.

The movie is also unintentionally revealing about late-1990s disaster filmmaking. It has a strong faith in public-service workers, engineers, transit employees, firefighters, police officers, and regular people doing dangerous jobs because somebody has to do them. Roark’s strategy is not to defeat nature through one genius solution. It is to coordinate an enormous group effort, with people hauling concrete barriers, driving equipment, evacuating neighborhoods, and taking risks to buy the city more time. That civic-minded quality gives the film a little more heart than its reputation as a silly lava movie might suggest.

In the end, Volcano is neither a great disaster movie nor a completely disposable one. It is too scientifically goofy to be taken seriously as a realistic thriller, and its dialogue can be very blunt. Yet it has pace, personality, some genuinely effective spectacle, and a reliably entertaining Tommy Lee Jones performance at its center. It is the kind of movie where a man can face a molten river in downtown Los Angeles and somehow make you believe that yelling louder might solve the problem. For viewers in the mood for a big, fiery, unapologetically 1990s popcorn movie, Volcano remains a fun eruption of chaos.

The Films of 2025: The Alto Knights (dir by Barry Levinson)

Posted on September 1, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In The Alto Knights, I’m pretty sure that Robert De Niro sets the record for saying “What’s the mater with you!?” the most times in one movie.

I don’t know for sure, of course. While I was watching the movie last night, I didn’t keep an exact count and, for that, shame on me. That said, when you consider that The Alto Knights features Robert De Niro playing not just one but two old school Italian gangsters, you can be sure that there were a lot of scenes of either Vito Genovese (Robert De Niro) or Frank Costello (De Niro, again) demanding to know what was the matter. When Genovese watches Costello testifying in front of a Congressional hearing, the “What’s the matter with you!?” count truly goes haywire.

The Alto Knights was directed by Barry Levinson, who has directed some great films. It tells the relatively true story of the rivalry between Costello and Genovese. Both Costello and Genovese were present when the modern Mafia was first created. The diplomatic and negotiation-minded Costello was known as the “Prime Minister of the Underworld.” Genovese was a much more violent gangster and he became one of the most powerful members of the New York Mafia by basically killing anyone who stood in his way. Costello and Genovese started out as weary friends before coming mortal enemies. Costello retired from the rackets after Genovese ordered one of his men to shoot Costello in the head. Meanwhile, Genovese ended up involving the Mafia in the drug trade and died in prison. In the film, Costello narrates their story. There’s a lot of shots of an elderly Costello sitting in what appears to be a park as he speaks directly to the camera. Interestingly enough, Gotti tried to do the same thing, with Travolta’s John Gotti speaking directly to the audience while standing in front of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Alto Knights pretty much features all of the usual Mafia tropes. All the usual points are hit. Albert Anastasia (played by Michael Rispoli) is assassinated while getting a haircut and some viewers will remember that, before De Niro played the man who ordered Anastasia’s assassination, he also played the man who claimed to have shot Anastasia in The Irishman. Personally, I love Mafia films but The Alto Knights felt a bit too recycled to be truly effective. Barry Levison does the usual thing of dropping real-life newspaper headlines and photographs into the middle of the film and it doesn’t so much add verisimilitude as much as it just reminds one of David DeCoteau’s film about Bonnie and Clyde.

The film’s main selling point is that it features Robert De Niro playing two gangsters but there’s really not much gained from casting De Niro in both roles. We get a few scenes of De Niro acting opposite of himself and it’s hard not to notice that Genovese’s reactions often don’t seem to match whatever it is that Costello’s saying. As an actor, De Niro has the ability to be believable as both the cerebral Costello and the hot-headed Genovese but ultimately, the double casting just feels like a distraction. Watching De Niro acting opposite himself, I found myself thinking how much more entertaining it would have been if Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, or even John Travolta had played Genovese. To be honest, if Levinson really had any courage, he would have given the role to James Woods and given us the Once Upon A Time In America/Casino reunion that we all deserve.

The film did win me over a bit towards the end with a recreation of the Apalachin meeting. That was when Genovese invited every mob boss in the country to come to a meeting in upstate New York, just for the feds to suddenly show up and send everyone scattering. For most of the film, it was hard not to feel that Barry Levinson was past his prime as a director but he actually did a good job with the Apalachin scenes. I genuinely laughed when Genovese got into a pointless argument with his driver. I loved the way the film captured the real-life absurdity of a bunch of mob bosses fleeing into the woods, all of their bravado suddenly dissipating as they scrambled into the wilderness. If the entire film had just been about the Apalachin meeting, this review would probably be a lot of different. As it is, one good sequence can’t save the film as a whole.

This is an offer you can refuse.

October True Crime: Summer of Sam (dir by Spike Lee)

Posted on October 21, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1999, Summer of Sam is Spike Lee’s sprawling, frustrating, flawed, occasionally compelling, and ultimately rather intriguing film about the summer of 1977 in New York City.

As one can guess from the title, it was a summer that was dominated by the reign of terror of the serial killer known as the Son of Sam. While New York suffered one of the hottest summers on record, the Son of Sam shot couples while they sat in their cars. Because all of his victims had been women with long, dark hair, women across the city wore blonde wigs. While the police searched for the killer, the city was also caught up in the World Series. Club 57 was the hottest club in New York but a growing number of rebels, inspired by the news that was coming out of the UK, eschewed the glitz of disco for the gritty and deliberately ugly aesthetic of punk and the Mud Club.

Though the film is centered around the murders of the Son of Sam, he remains a largely shadowy figure in the film. Played by Michael Badalucco, David Berkowitz spends most of his time in his filthy home, yelling at the dog across the street and writing cryptic messages on the walls. He only gets a few minutes of screen time because the film is ultimately less about the Son of Sam’s crimes and more about how one Italian-American neighborhood in New York deals with the atmosphere of fear and paranoia created by those crimes. It’s a neighborhood that’s ruled over by the ruthless but benevolent Luigi (Ben Gazzara). When the two detectives (Anthony LaPaglia and Roger Guevener Smith) come to the neighborhood in search of information, they know that Luigi is the man to see.

Vinny (John Leguizamo) is one of the neighborhood’s citizens, a hairdresser who hasn’t let his marriage to Dionna (Mira Sorvino) stand in the way of his compulsive womanizing. Vinny is the type who cheats on his wife and then goes to Confession to get forgiveness. He’s the type who gets angry whenever Dionna wants to have sex with the lights on or do anything other than a quick three minutes in the missionary position. When he realizes that the Son of Sam was watching him while he was having sex in a car with Dionna’s cousin and that he could have been one of his victims, Vinny starts to spin out of control. Vinny’s childhood friend is Ritchie (Adrien Brody), who shocks everyone when he spikes his hair, puts on a Union Jack t-shirt, and starts speaking with a fake British accent. Ritchie and his girlfriend, Ruby (Jennifer Esposito), embrace the punk lifestyle and even put one the Son of Sam’s letters to music when they perform at the Mud Club.

It’s an ambitious film but it’s also an overlong film, one where the slow spots can truly test the viewer’s patience. With a 142-minute running time, Summer of Sam finds the time to touch on almost every trope of the late 70s. Vinny and Dionna hit the clubs, where the usually quiet Dionna truly comes to life as she dances. (Vinny’s moves are far less impressive. Tony Manero would have laughed at him.) Ritchie not only embraces punk rock but he also makes his money by performing in live sex shows. When a mysterious man offers to give Vinny and Dionna a ride in his limo, it’s hard not to smile when it’s revealed that he’s taking them to the infamous sex club, Plato’s Retreat. One can respect Lee’s ambition while still finding the film itself to be a bit too self-indulgent for it’s own good.

Spike Lee, for all of his other talents, has never been a particularly subtle director. Vinny and his friends spend a lot of time hanging out at the end of street, strategically placed in front of a sign that loudly proclaims, “DEAD END.” At one point, Vinny is inspired to run to his window and start screaming insults at the Son of Sam and Leguizamo’s histrionic delivery of the lines make it impossible to take his anguish seriously. At the same time, there are moments that work brilliantly. I particularly liked the scenes that took place during the blackout of 1977. Luigi automatically knows how to keep control in his neighborhood and he sends his men out with baseball bats, channeling their aggression into a search for the phantom serial killer. For every scene that doesn’t work, there’s a scene like the Baba O’Riley montage or Vinny, Dionna, Ritchie, and Ruby having a candlelit dinner.

“We really dig your vibe.”

John Leguizamo is shrill and miscast as Vinny, though I’m not sure if anyone could have made much of such a one-dimensional characters. I preferred the performances of Mira Sorvino, Adrien Brody, and Jennifer Esposito, who all brought their characters to authentic life. (I especially liked how Brody switched from being tough to being a wounded child at the drop of a hat.) As is so often the case with Lee’s films, it’s the supporting actors who make the strongest impression. I loved Mike Starr’s earthy performance as Ritchie’s father and Ben Gazzara’s sly turn as the neighborhood mobster. Bebe Neuwirth is underused but memorable as Vinny’s boss.

The film is overstuffed and overlong but it effectively portrays a community in the grips of paranoia and anger. In the end, the film is epitomized by a scene in which the neighbor’s dog enter David Berkowtiz’s living room and starts yelling at him in the voice of John Turturro. It’s a scene that’s so ludicrous that it somehow becomes effective. It’s a scene that most directors would have left on the editing room floor but Spike Lee included it. It takes courage to write, film, and keep a scene like that. Summer of Sam is a wreck of a film but it’s also ultimately a compelling portrait of a community coming apart. In the end, just as in real life, Berkowitz is brought to justice and a community is left wondering what to do now.

Summer of Sam features some of Spike Lee’s best work and also some of his worst. The film opens with columnist Jimmy Breslin describing New York as being the city that he both loves and hates and that’s the way that I feel about this film. For all of its flaws, there’s enough strengths to make up for them. It’s a New York story and, appropriately, it’s just as messy as the city that it is about.

An Offer You Can’t Refuse #9: Rob the Mob (dir by Raymond De Felitta)

Posted on June 11, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 2014 film, Rob the Mob, tells the true story of a young couple in love who became minor celebrities when they robbed the mob. Of course, they also ended up with a huge target on their back, which tends to happen when you repeatedly humiliate a bunch of angry men who have weapons at their disposal.

The year is 1992 and Tommy Uva (Michael Pitt) and his wife, Rosemarie (Nina Arianda) are professional criminals who, after getting busted for trying to rob a florist on Valentine’s Day, end up working at a debt collection agency. Their boss (played by Griffin Dunne) spent time in prison for insider trading and he believes in giving convicts a second chance. The problem is that Tommy doesn’t really want a second chance. He’s actually pretty happy being a criminal.

Tommy has some issues with the Mafia, largely due to the fact that his father borrowed money from the mob to open up a shop and spent the rest of his short life being beaten and humiliated by loan sharks. Tommy believes that the pressure is what led his father to an early grave. Tommy’s mother (Cathy Moriarty), on the other hand, claims that it was the stress caused by Tommy being a criminal. Regardless, seeing his father repeatedly mistreated has definitely left Tommy with some anger issues.

Even though Tommy claims that he hates the Mafia, he still seems to be rather obsessed with them. At times, it’s hard to tell if Tommy is angry with the Mafia or if he’s just jealous about the fact that he’ll never be as rich or as powerful as the local neighborhood mobster. Tommy starts to skip work so that he can observe the trial of John Gotti. It’s while doing this that Tommy hears that guns are not allowed in Mafia social clubs.

Soon, Tommy is robbing those same clubs, taking all of the money that he can and humiliating the mobsters at the same time. (He forces one group of paunchy gangsters to march outside in their underwear.) With Rosemarie serving as his getaway driver, Tommy soon becomes something of a legend. The mobsters even nickname the pair “Bonnie and Clyde.” Because the Mafia doesn’t want to attract any unnecessary attention during the Gotti trial, Tommy and Rosemarie are able to get away with their activities for a while. But then they make the mistake of stealing a list that could bring down the entire New York Mafia….

Rob the Mob is a bit of an uneven film. The film starts with Tommy and Rosemarie getting high and then attempting to rob a florist and, in that scene, they both seemed like such idiots that I really wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend 104 minutes of my life watching a film about them. Even after Tommy got out of a prison and got a legitimate job, he still seemed like such an unsympathetic loser that I found myself wondering why I should care.

However, once Tommy and Rosemarie start actually robbing the mob, the film picks up. We meet Big Al, the temporary head of the New York mafia, and he’s played by Andy Garcia, who gives an intelligent and understated performance. Big Al may be a mobster but he’s not an unsympathetic character. The film presents him as being someone who has been unexpectedly thrust into a position of power and who is doing his best to keep everything from falling apart. Then, as the robberies continue, Ray Romano shows up as Jerry Cardozo, a reporter who makes “Bonnie and Clyde” famous but who realizes too late that he’s also put their lives in even greater danger than they were before. Over the past few years, Romano has gone from being a former sitcom star to being a surprisingly effective character actor and his performance here gives Rob the Mob its conscience.

Perhaps even more importantly, during the second half of the film, the chemistry of Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda finally won me over and I actually started to care about what would happen to Tommy and Rosemarie. Tommy and Rosemarie find a reason for living in their criminal activities. They go from being losers to being minor New York celebrities, even if they can’t reveal their actual identities. They may be idiots but their love is real and there’s something very touching about how much they actually do care about each other. It’s hard not to be happy for them, even if it’s obvious from the start that their story is not going to have a happy ending.

Rob the Mob is uneven but, in the end, it’s more than worth watching. This is an offer you should not refuse.

Previous Offers You Can’t (or Can) Refuse:

Film Review: To Die For (dir by Gus Van Sant)

Posted on February 13, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1995 satire, To Die For, is a very clever film about some seriously stupid people.

Of course, you could debate whether or not Suzanne Stone-Maretto (Nicole Kidman) is actually dumb or not. Suzanne may not know much about anything that isn’t on TV but she does have a natural understanding for what makes a good story. She knows exactly the type of story that the public wants to hear and she does a good job of faking all of the right emotions. As she proves throughout the course of the film, she’s also very good at convincing people to do stuff. Whether it’s convincing the local television station to put her on the air as a weather person or convincing two teenagers to murder her husband, Suzanne always seems to get what she wants.

Of course, what Suzanne really wants is to be a celebrity. She wants to be a star. As she explains it, that’s the greatest thing about America. Anyone can become a star if they just try hard enough and find the right angle. If the film were made today, Suzanne would be a social media junkie. Since the movie was made in 1995, she has to settle for talk shows and murder.

So maybe Suzanne isn’t that dumb but her husband, Larry (Matt Dillon) …. well, if we’re going to be honest, Larry’s more naive than dumb. He’s the favored son of a big Italian family and it’s obviously never occurred to him that a woman would possibly want something more than just a husband and a lot of children. He thinks it’s cute that Suzanne’s on TV but he’s also fully convinced that she’s going to eventually settle down and focus on starting a family. It never occurs to him that his wife would be willing to sacrifice him on her way to stardom.

Of course, if you really want to talk about dumb, just check out the teenagers who Suzanne recruits to kill her husband. They’ve been appearing in a documentary that Suzanne’s been shooting. The documentary’s title is “Teens Speak Out,” which is something of an ironic title since none of the teens that Suzanne interviews really has anything to say. Lydia (Allison Folland) is just happy that the “glamorous” Suzanne is pretending to care about her. Russell (Casey Affleck) is the type of grinning perv who drops a pen just so he can try to get a peek up Suzanne’s skirt while he’s on the floor retrieving it. And then there’s Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix), with his flat voice and his blank stare. Jimmy is briefly Suzanne’s lover before he ends up in prison for murdering her husband. It doesn’t take much to convince Jimmy to commit murder, either. Apparently, all you have to do is dance to Lynyrd Skynyrd while it’s raining outside. Media interviews with Lydia, Jimmy, Suzanne, and Larry’s sister (Ileana Douglas) are sprinkled throughout the film and Jimmy continues to insist that he will always love Suzanne.

As for Suzanne, she’s got stardom to worry about….

Though the subject matter is a bit familiar and the film, made before the age of Twitter and Instagram, is a bit dated, To Die For‘s satire still carries a powerful bite. One need only watch A&E or the Crime and Investigation network to see that Suzanne was absolutely correct when she decided that killing her husband would make her a star. If To Die For were made today, you could easily imagine Suzanne leveraging her infamy into an appearance on Dancing With The Stars and maybe Celebrity Big Brother. At the very least. she could get her own house hunting show on HGTV. Delivering her often sociopathic dialogue with a perky smile and a positive attitude, Nicole Kidman is absolutely chilling as Suzanne. Meanwhile, Joaquin Phoenix’s blank stare will continue to haunt you long after the film ends.

And speaking of endings, To Die For has a great one. You’ll never hear Season of the Witch the same way again!