Coombs wrote:
Joe Vs the Volcano is a masterpiece. Can't stand either actor, but that movie is the only way you can actually make them work, both against themselves and for the film. Brilliant.
Yes! It's done in such a good way too. It's a very cinematic movie. Instead of obsessing over images of cities you've already seen on a million postcards (like Seattle and New York in the other two Hanks-Ryan films) it creates its own little world. The opening scene where people are zombie walking up a barren hill towards the factory along this crooked, flash-shaped path is so good. You wonder why it's been laid out that way when it only makes that dreadful walk longer and more difficult, and then the movie cuts to an image of the company logo which is shaped the same way. It's better than any shot in Metropolis.
Hanks has always been one of those actors that James Baldwin called escape personalities for the audience. He wrote something along the lines that you don't go to the movies to see Humphrey Bogart be Philip Marlowe, you go to see Philip Marlowe be Humphrey Bogart. Baldwin also noted that there's usually a white racial superiority theme to these escape fantasies by pointing out that "no one makes their escape personality black."
Hanks was launched by Hollywood as the perfect image of the good old white American do-gooder. But in this film his character is the anti-Hanks, someone whose corporate-shaped existence is so lousy and undesireable that jumping into a volcano would be an improvement. It makes him extremely relatable for once without people necessarily wishing to be him. It also has the good taste to place him in a supporting role in scenes that he shares with more charismatic actors, like the beautiful Ossie Davis. Even the story about jumping into the volcano is a reversal of the race theme that often plagues these type of movies. The island people are way too content with their own existence to do it, so they call on Joe instead whose life is empty and simple. The emotional journey he embarks on in the film that ends up giving his existence meaning closely corresponds to the physical journey that takes him far, far away from a typical Tom Hanks role.
