DANTE'S PEAK (37)

Directed by: Roger Donaldson

Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Linda Hamilton, Grant Heslov

The Pitch: A dormant volcano erupts above the small town of Dante's Peak, Washington.

Theo Sez: A big FX budget hasn't made this any less hokey than KRAKATOA, EAST (though actually West) OF JAVA - volcanoes always make for the tackiest disaster movies - but it's entertaining trash, mostly because it doesn't smother everything in cooler-than-thou attitude a la TWISTER. Our hero may be a boffin but he's also a Regular Guy, sticking to just-plain-coffee when all around him are wallowing in lattes and cappuccinos, and Brosnan gives the kind of square-jawed performance that explains why he was so hilarious fiddling with his pipe in MARS ATTACKS! (best moment : driving away from the inferno with Hamilton and her children, the terrified kids point behind them screaming "What's that? What's that?" ; "That is a pyroclastic cloud," he replies, educationally if none too helpfully). The old-fashioned air is at its most annoying in the sexual attitudes, which seem to predate even the golden age of disaster movies by a good 20 years, but at its most welcome in the solid production values : Bartkowiak's photography especially goes well beyond the call of duty, with lots of striking sepia-like shots of the ghost town covered in ash and at least one image - the high-angle shot of the small boat chugging through a lake of sludge, leaving little hillocks in its wake - that's as pictorially lovely as anything in recent movies.