Le volcan

I was expecting a funny road movie. The ridiculous title which I suspect no one outside of Iceland can pronounce or remember is a red flag. Dany Boon was great in his earlier films Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis and Rien a Declarer. Those were relatively funny movies.

This flick is not funny. Also the story line doesn't make sense. Example:with mass transit what it is in Europe why would the main character rent a a Porsch for 4000 euros (the only car available)when he could have easily gotten to the wedding by train?

The movie is composed of a series of arguments, ambushes and intrigues between Dany and his ex-wife. All rather humorless,irritating and silly. None of the wit of a Neil Simon script nor the bite of Edward Albee's George and Martha in ...Virginia Woolf. I guess I could have missed a good line or two because I have to admit I did doze off a while. If you have 90 minutes to burn and absolutely nothing else to do go ahead and watch it.

Think Danny de Vito's War of the Roses meets John Hughes' Planes, Trains and Automobiles and you will have some idea of the tone of Eyjafjallajokull directed by Alexandre Coffre and starring Danny Boon best-known for his role in the most successful French film ever Bienvenue chez le Ch'tis.Boon is a great crowd pleaser with French audiences and pitting him against Valérie Bonneton, a highly versatile comedy actress, should be a sure-fire recipe for success. Without doubt, no expense was spared to bring to the big screen this tale of a divorced couple traveling to their daughter's wedding in Greece, who are forced to find alternative transport when the Icelandic volcano of the title disrupts air traffic across the globe. A wrecked Porsche and smashed light aircraft form part of the collateral damage. But the end result is an uneven, stop- go adventure that cracks a smile now and then but little more. Only the scene where the two main characters meet an ex-con turned God-squadder (a superbly funny Denis Menichon) offers a glimpse of a darker and potentially more satisfying brand of humour.

Boon is Alain, a driving instructor who raised his daughter alone after Valérie (Bonneton) quit the marriage soon after she was born. The two meet again on an Athens-bound plane just before Eyjafjallajokull erupts. Both are forced to make alternate travel plans which inevitably result in being thrown together in a desperate race to reach their destination before their daughter ties the knot. What follows is a series of mishaps, none of which is madcap enough to raise the humour from the mundanely obvious to a higher level.

Before the two main characters appear on screen together, their mutual hate has already been established. What is infinitely less clear is how they ever got together in the first place. Boon plays Alain as dopey, harmless, but essentially 'a good egg' while Bonneton's Valérie is in overdrive as a vicious, cruel, screeching harpy who is devoid of any redeeming qualities whatsoever. No-one in their right mind would want to see these two get back together which runs against the grain with films of this kind. Boon has struggled for the past five years to reproduce the phenomenal success he enjoyed with the Ch'tis and it's unlikely Eyjafjallajokull will put him back on the A list.

Generally, I am someone who judges movie fairly. But this is excruciatingly hard, here.

Do you like watching a mediocre, worthless, unpleasant movie about a dislikable couple that goes on an unrealistic trip together, hurting each other verbally and physically, with bad and predictable humor?

On top of that, with sub-par actors?

The movie is ironically called after a natural disaster, which is funny, because itself is a cinematographic disaster.

French movies can be breathtakingly good. But this movie is an insult to french filmmaking.

Not even the cinematography of the Balkan scenery could have saved this movie

Definitely not recommended.

I don't get the negative reviews. Granted, the humour is crude - but it is precisely it being over the top that makes it so great. I haven't laughed like that in a long time! It is very well written: all the seemingly insignifigant little elements turn out to have its comedic purpose sooner or later. Brilliant if you like this kind of brutal humour.

It's interesting that a volcano who went off a couple of years ago, is responsible for a road movie. But we can see that this sort of makes sense. To a degree that is, because we are getting railroaded early on. There is so much hate between the two characters, that any kind of consolation does not make sense at all. History between them or not, circumstances and events or not.

Still, if you do not care about that, there are a lot of funny situations (and one very crude religious "skit", if you want to call it that). Other than that, we get animal abuse, jokes that are so low, they might just fly under your radar, flying and "crashing" for the sake of it and other crazy stunts. Your sense of humor might be up to par with it, but we've seen many better films from France (with and without the always likable Mr. Boon, even though his character here isn't that nice) ...