Avis Metacritic

This corny and manipulative movie taxes your ability to suspend disbelief and predictably punishes characters for their hubris--earmarks of a great disaster flick, if the tone is just right.

Dante's Peak is predictable from start to finish, but the video-game style action and effects never let up long enough for you to remember how absurd it all is. It's a blast.

Dante's Peak, written by Leslie Bohem and directed by Roger Donaldson, follows the disaster formula so faithfully that if you walk in while the movie is in progress, you can estimate how long the story has to run. That it is skillful is a tribute to the filmmakers.

Director Roger Donaldson ("Smash Palace," "No Way Out," "Species"), working from a script by Leslie Bohem ("Daylight"),does a serviceable job, wrapping his narrative around the big kabooms, but the real interest comes from the extraordinary barrage of sound and spectacle.

The special effects are suitably catastrophic, though they aren't much more clever than the computer tricks that turn up in beer commercials these days.

"Twister" is a rush. Dante's Peak, on the other hand, is a bore. Oh, it has its moments, but most of them are concentrated in the final forty-five minutes. The first hour, which is all typical disaster movie setup, is interminable.

It seems almost beside the point to bring up the notion of plotting and characterization in such an effects-driven film ; nobody's going to rush out to catch Dante's Peak on account of the Shakespearean-caliber thespians involved.

As boring as the special effects are, they far outshine the stultifying plot.

Approximately the last hour of Dante's Peak is made up of action scenes, and how well one likes computer-generated destruction will determine how well one likes the movie.

Dante's Peak expands the concept of badness in movies.