Metacritic reviews

But a great sense of pace is a wonderful thing, and director Jackson and his crew (who made good use of hand-held and Steadicam shots and reportedly averaged an impressive 30 to 40 camera setups a day) move so quickly from shot to shot and location to location that viewers have a limited time to dwell on the film's predictable implausibilities.

In fact, this is one of the best pure disaster movies ever made (not that it has much competition). Congratulations to director Mick Jackson for a job well done.

I had a pretty good time at Volcano. The reason I didn't have a better time is that the characters aren't just schlocky, they're boring.

Unfortunately, Volcano is also faithful to Hollywood's legendary lack of originality.

In Volcano, the thrills are so well wrought that they eventually lose their novelty and become numbing.

A flatulent blast of superheated air from the seething bowels of Hollywood, features all the usual idiocies -- implausibility on an epic scale, bogus "human interest" elements, plot developments that offer all the surprises of a Bob Dole speech.

With its fake-looking technology and empty characters, Volcano eventually becomes as obvious as its what-if premise.

Congratulations to director Mick Jackson and writers Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray for liberating themselves from the tedious demands of believability.

This is a surprisingly cheesy disaster epic.

Crucial to the nature of the disaster film -- and something that Irwin Allen knew so very well -- is that films of this sort depend on an emotional hook, a peg of normalcy to hang the chaos from. Volcano offers no such hook, and as a result it plays like some La Brea dinosaur risen from the tar, all effects and no heart.