Skyfire is a film that will please pyromaniacs and that’s probably about it. If you come for the fire! FIRE! and those lava bombs that seem deliberately aimed and the LAVA! THE HOT LAVA! then you might get just enough out of it that you won’t go burn down an abandoned building. So net positive for this expensive production?

This disaster flick is set on a Chinese volcanic island where a super rich Australian (played by Jason Isaacs) has built a volcano-inspired theme park and resort. Setting the symbol of your hubris on an active volcano is kind of like if Amity Island’s beaches were connected to a shark tank. But lets not worry about logic in a big dumb disaster movie. Because, wouldn’t ya know, the volcano pops and soon those lava bombs are raining down and only an intrepid band of volcanologists (who warned this would happen kind of in the way warning taxes will be due in April) can sometimes occasionally save the day but mostly just drive around and try to avoid dying.

Somebody spent a pretty penny on this flick as the fire and volcano effects are sometimes very good (and sometimes less so). But it looks costly and I imagine tapping sometimes-good/sometimes-bad action director Simon West may have paid off. Or maybe they just got good (if maybe overworked) visual FX artists. Either way, the action is always silly and over-the-top and sometimes even kind of fun.

But it’s weighed down heavily by the most stock cardboard characters who ever tried to out-emote lava. There are overly long melodramatic scenes that go on entirely too long given the sheer amount of time the characters didn’t get as setup. It weighs down a movie that should have known that, if they can’t pull off the water-works, might as well lean more on the spectacle.

So yeah… in the iffy genre of disaster film, this one is stuck right in the middle. It’s not a genre that demands a lot of the audience – just go along for the over-the-top ride. That can work sometimes and, to be fair, sometimes this movie does work as long as you don’t think too hard and don’t demand “realism” or “logic”. But it’s ultimately weighed down too much by attempts at trying to make us take the characters more seriously than the rest of the film.

Score: 69