Dante’s Peak (1997) – Review

In hindsight it all becomes staggeringly obvious. Of course you’d send a James Bond actor to tackle a monstrous volcano – after all, don’t most of his villains live in one?
Seriously though, as the mid-90s distaster movie revival picked up momentum after the incredibly successful Twister and we were treated to not one, but two volcano movies within a six month window back in 1997, not only did Pierce Bronsan have to best a hot, dribbly mountain, but he had to try and outdo that other lava spurting upstart, Tommy Lee Jones’ Volcano.
When the ash settled back in the day, I was convinced that the latter, with its blunt social commentary and urban setting, was the better of the two cinematic eruptions, but after giving matters a little time to cool down, I found myself swinging back to the more traditional movie of the two. So what made Dante’s Peak the eventual King of the ‘Canos? Well, the same thing that always make a good disaster flick, of course.

Years prior, we find out that absurdly dashing volcanologist Harry Dalton tragically lost his partner/fiancee in Colombia when an erupting mountain dropped the bomb on them quite literally when she’s killed by a sizzling projectile. Jumping ahead a bit, we find Harry buried deep in his work thanks to being still emotionally burnt out by the whole shebang, so his rather manipulative boss, Paul, sends him off to the idyllic town of Dante’s Peak, Washington, in order to check up on some seisemic activity thanks to the place bordering on a long dormant stratovolcano.
Things start of rather well. Harry arrives as Dante’s Peak celebrates being voted the second best place to live in the USA (with a population under 20,000) and soon sparks up a snappy rapport with single mother Mayor, Rachel Wando, that fires up middle-aged libidos that had long since given up the ghost.
Speaking of getting fired up; Harry soon notices some subtle hints that the volcano may soon be about to blow – finding a couple of skinny dippers boiled to death in a hot spring like a pair of nubile lobsters is something of a smoking gun – and gets his colleagues to come running as he prepares to order a full evacuation. However, Paul and the town’s investors have obviously gone to the Jaws School of Town Management and laugh off Harry’s claims as the over-zealous actions of a traumatised man.
Of course, as if on cue, the volcano blows its top putting everyone at risk, but in among the choking ash, whistling lava bombs, surging lava and a collapsing dam, Rachel’s kids steal the family truck in order to go get their stubborn, reclusive grandma who lives up the mountain. Racing even deeper into the danger to save the kids (and possibly an old lady and a dog), Harry and Rachel have to brave the hellfires of a volcano that’s about to go nuclear, but can they save those reckless loved ones and get back down the mountain before they’re burnt to a crisp?

While Mick Jackson’s Volcano tried to switch things up with a more wry sense of humour and the sight of the La Brea Tar Pits going up like an oil refinery, I have to admit that it’s the frantic box ticking and the sheer familiarity of Dante’s Peak that succeeds in warming (pun intended) my heart the most. As an unabashed fan of a genre that, let’s be honest, is usually defined by its faults, I have to say that while the film doesn’t particularly reinvent the wheel (and then melt it), the fact that you could probably predict what’s going to happen before even the filmmakers could, ends up being a large part of the fun.
Director Roger Donaldson, the man who gave us Cocktail, No Way Out and the sight of Alfred Molina humping an extraterrestrial Natasha Henstridge in Species, seemingly had no plans to try to invert the usual tropes of the set ’em up, knock ’em down nature of past distasterpieces as we head through Dante’s Peak’s rather lengthy set up (it takes around 50 minutes for the titular mount to pop), but instead gleefully racks up those cliches like he’s got them in a two for one sale.
Brosnan is his usually charismatic self and fully understands that he’s primarily here to flirt with Linda Hamilton and run from explosions – but even then the guys seems to be on some major charm offensive in order to be a guy so ludicrously nice, it actually beggars belief. And yet the tropes entertainingly mount up, offering up mischievous kids, an impervious dog, disbelieving peers and a grumpy grandma who might as well be wearing a sign around her neck that reads “redemptive death on standby” the second she walks into frame. But the thing is, what was hilariously predictable in 1997 has become weirdly fun now as the need for Dante’s Peak to do anything new has been dulled by the fact that time has now lumped it in with all the other classic (read: old) disaster movies on the block.

As a result, Dante’s Peak ends up being a shed-load of fun as Donaldson has fun going through the motions delivering vast amounts of foreshadowing while John Frizzell’s score gets all shifty whenever we pan up the the mountain, and once all the pleasantries are dispensed with, all you have to do is sit back and relax while the moviemakers work their magic and obliterate this hapless town clean of the face of the earth. Firstly, the film tosses physics into the nearest lava pit as gives us something of a swiss army volcano as the thing pretty much shows off all the characteristics an exploding mountain can feature even if it’s impossible to feature them all at the same time. Not only are there building crushing earth tremors and floods caused by a crumbling dam, but we also get stampedes of terrified idiots, snow-like ash showers, acid rivers, lava bombs, lava and – for the big finish – a pyroclastic cloud that hand-of-God’s everything in its destructive path.
It’s utterly ludicrous of course, made all the more silly by the fact that Harry Dalton’s superpower seems to be choosing unkillable pickup truck in which to make his escape. When he isn’t driving one through a river to the point where its virtually a submarine, he’s driving another one over burning lava – and in top of that, the dog lives (spoiler) and the volcano has an unerring ability to offer up the worst deaths to those in the cast in dire need of some cinematic payback. Be it an acid bath for one, penickity character, while another serial nay sayer is granted that most exalted of demises – one where his death at the hands of a collapsing bridge comes complete with a Wilhelm scream.

Before the days when CGI was used for everything, the model makers put in exemplary work with all the shattering buildings and tumbling cars and even though every lives who’d you expect to, it still runs them through the wringer enough that it still feels earned – so for these reasons, I guess I declare the film the (Dante’s) Peak of 1997 volcano movies.

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