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Produced amidst a spate of disaster thrillers that proliferated in the mid-'90s, this predictable epic from director Mick Jackson is contrived, preposterous, and overblown, though no more so than any of its contemporary competitors. Fans of the genre will assert that it's exactly the credulity straining concepts, absurd action sequences, and tendency toward pat character melodrama that make disaster flicks so much fun. On that low-brow level of unintentional entertainment, Volcano (1997) is a keeper, never taking itself as seriously as the same year's rival volcano flick, Dante's Peak (1997). Jackson also provides some eye-popping special effects, which is maybe what the genre is really all about, but not enough of them to dazzle visually; the audience definitely needs a bigger helping of lava raining explosive havoc down on Los Angeles. Tommy Lee Jones is fine in the gruff, competent professional role he's patented since The Fugitive (1993), but other performers don't fare as well in parts straight out of central casting. Particularly wasted are the talents of Anne Heche and Don Cheadle, who appear to have been hired in order to brush up the film's dicey credibility. In its attempt to work in some "B" and "C" stories involving a compassionate doctor and her selfish husband and a gang member who antagonizes the local fire department, the film goes seriously awry, stumbling over the debris of TV movie cliché. It gets a few things right, but in trying to be all things to all people, Volcano (1997) never quite achieves the heights of cheeseball cinema it might have scaled.