Skyfire

Director West makes excellent use of the film's set pieces, from runaway trams to spectacular underwater lava spills. Yes, Skyfire stretches believability to its breaking point. But with comic-book action so firmly planted in most every scene, any attempt at credibility would only be an unwelcome intrusion.

This thrill-packed tale about an angry volcano wreaking havoc on thinly written characters at a luxury island resort plays like a souped-up and much better remake of Irwin Allen’s 1980 turkey “When Time Ran Out.”

The admirable efficiency of Skyfire means that you don't have to waste a lot of time sitting through endless exposition.

Skyfire is not a very good movie, but it isn’t the kind of bad movie that I feel compelled to come down on too hard. It's dumb and cartoonish as can be and there's never a single moment in which you care at all about anything going on, not even when they drag in an endangered child in order to tug on the heartstrings.

With no building of suspense, little connection with a lot of the thinly-scripted characters, and no volcano movie ever having much of a story to go with its effects, Skyfire still falls short of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano,” even if it is marginally better than “Miami Magma.”