Fun fact: If you stand in any one place in Hollywood long enough, eventually Tommy Lee Jones will come by and shout orders at you. Spend too long trying to decide between arugula and romaine lettuce at the Ralph's on La Cienega, and you may find the star of MEN IN BLACK and SPACE COWBOYS demanding that you get that water main turned off, pronto, mister! You are under no obligation to do what he says, and in fact what he's telling you to do is usually scientifically improbable, if not downright illegal, but most people go along with it just to get him to stop.

Not coincidentally, if you watch enough movies, sooner or later you will see Tommy loudly bossing people around there, too. It’s hard to tell if he's been typecast or if he just really likes yelling his lines like directives, but he’s spent the better part of the last twenty years angrily telling people that he just doesn't have time to explain why he needs you to find 450 pounds of dynamite and a delivery truck right away. He. Just. Does.

Anyway, we should just be glad he's out there because, when it comes down to it, most of us would have a hard time getting the LAPD to do something as silly as put a bunch of concrete traffic barriers in front of a river of magma, like he does in VOLCANO. The rest of us mere mortals just haven't had the practice being blustery, much less the floppy, wrinkled face necessary to pull that sort of thing off. DANTE'S PEAK, another movie about a town beset by rogue volcano effects, had James friggin' Bond telling people what to do, and even then they only listened about half the time. Yes, if you need someone to demand "a hard-target search" of, say, a Denny's, clearly Tommy's your man.

Without him, your volcano movie is basically relegated to scenes of people running away from the thing. Sure, Pierce Brosnan does some pretty cool things as he flees, like get his truck to magically run under water, but he's still mostly just running away. Not Tommy. He's going to stop that lava, no matter how many people he has to yell at. Maybe if Pierce had been in charge of the Los Angeles Department of Shouting instead of just the sexiest geologist alive, he would have taken a more proactive approach to his disaster.

Even worse, Pierce isn't saddled with nearly the dead weight that Tommy has to contend with. Pierce has Mayor Rachel Wando, played by Linda Hamilton, and her two average, not-incompetent children, Lauren and Graham tagging along, while Tommy has to contend with his apparently deaf and functionally retarded daughter, Kelly, who has noticeable trouble hearing much less following simple instructions like "Run!" "Duck!" and "Look out for that collapsing skyscraper, you mouth-breathing moron!" Isn't that just the way, though: a man so gifted at giving orders has a daughter who is utterly incapable of taking them. Life can be so cruel.

None of this is meant to be a ringing endorsement of VOLCANO, though. At least DANTE'S PEAK gives you the occasional boiled yuppie and acid-washed grandma. VOLCANO, for all its hype about the coast becoming toast, doesn't even manage to incinerate a single Arquette. Tommy's just too good at his job, I guess, to let the coast be anything more than lightly browned.

Pierce, for his part, fares much worse, with the entire town of Dante's Peak reduced to rubble and under several feet of ash, while he and the Wandos are buried in a deserted mine shaft. Sure, he manages to trigger a convenient NASA beacon and get them rescued... several days later. Which leaves the audience with a number of uncomfortable questions, like exactly what bodily fluids were they subsisting on down there? Did Pierce have his shaken, not stirred? And what kind of town elects a "Mayor Wando"?

Fortunately, NASA drops the whole space thing and mounts a rescue mission, although you can bet that, if Tommy Lee (Jones) had been in charge, they would have been down there in a day, half of which would have been spent rescuing his daughter from bears, fallen tree branches, and the occasional rogue park ranger. Unfortunately for the Wandos, though, Tommy's back in LA, saving the city and his incompetent daughter from fiery doom, and for an encore, he solves racism, too. I'd like to see Mr. Bond-James-Bond pull that off.

Yeah, that's right, Bond, I'm calling you out. What do you think of that, Mr. Fictional Character? It's go time! You heard me. And get that water main turned off! Punk.

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