RING OF FIRE

2012 / Director. Paul Shapiro.

RING OF FIRE is an enviro-disaster movie that ought to come with a "Greenpeace Presents" moniker attached to it. It's a disaster movie similar to Dante's Peak and The Core and it essentially toes the same line. A high profit mining company digs deeper than regulations permit and what they thought was a colossal oil deposit turns out to be compressed magma. They cause a volcanic eruption, which triggers a series of further eruptions around the globe. An extinction-level catastrophe threatens mankind. And there you have it. I am going to be more generous with this movie than I should be due to the fact that I enjoyed it... but that's not to say I wasn't shaking my head or laughing at it. It's a movie that reaches for credibility and never quite gets there. It is sincere with it's characters and they're not as contrived as this genre would usually make them. The VFX are good at times and occasionally terrible but the emphasis of the story is on the crisis-management and not the event itself. What bothered me about the movie was it's pacing. It wanders along fairly fluently but rushes into the final act as though the director looked at his watch and said "shit, look at the time. better wrap it up". And so the resolution happens way to fast and what should have been some genuinely touching moments have been reduced to quick hugs and "i love you"s. iMDB list RING OF FIRE as a miniseries but it's running time is just under 2 hours... perhaps I saw an abridged version, which would explain the pacing. This is not something I would rush out to see but if you're having a lazy, couch-bound, sloth kind of day like me then it's an enjoyable and easily digested no-brainer. 

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