Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)
Remember these? Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar, Gigli, Battlefield Earth, Waterworld . . . Is there anything worse than a huge flop that everyone remembers? Actually, yes. A huge flop that nobody remembers. Big-time failure in Hollywood is, it turns out, no less exclusive, brutal and unforgiving than big-time success.
If you find yourself revelling once again in the demented joys of Showgirls, spare a thought for humdrum stinkers such as The Avengers, Town and Country and The Adventures of Pluto Nash. These turkeys are just as bad as the enshrined canon of box-office disasters, but they just didn’t have that magical X factor of mind-boggling bathos or Zeitgeist-embodying awfulness.
Joe Versus the Volcano is just such a B-list stinker. It is, no question, a woeful, toe-curlingly pretentious misfire on every level, and it sank without trace in 1990. It does have a small place in history, but only for marking the first-time pairing of those national sweethearts Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Tellingly, it still lacks any recognition for its pioneering fusion of laboured existential fable and absurdly bouncy rom-com.
One reason could be that Hanks’s mega-budget flop Bonfire of the Vanities came out the same year. That colossal disaster was in fact quite watchable in parts, but it benefited greatly from being anointed as that year’s symbol of bloated 1980s greed.
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Despite an equally flammable title, Joe Versus the Volcano was the result of creative over-ambition backed up with an Oscar. Its writer, John Patrick Shanley, had won a Best Screenplay statue for Moonstruck three years earlier and this was his reward — the chance to direct a personal project about a mystical near-death experience.
Oh boy. If there’s one thing that guarantees pretension in Tinseltown it’s a Broadway playwright with a studio budget. And a grand theme about being afraid of living.
Try this premise for organic unity: Everyman Joe (Hanks) is told he has a brain cloud and only six months to live. An eccentric tycoon pays him to go to an island, live like a king with a tribe who drink orange soda, then appease their gods by jumping into the local volcano. Along the way he falls in love.
Most Hollywood climaxes hinge on a leap of faith which requires the hero or heroine to declare themselves with no guarantee of victory. But Joe Versus the Volcano renders this metaphor literally. Indeed, all its metaphors come in literal form. (For “brain cloud”, read tumour with an agenda.)
Hand-in-hand with his true love, Joe wavers about jumping into the volcano because he’s always been afraid to truly live. But remind me precisely when jumping into boiling lava became life-affirming and liberating?
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But jump he does, only to survive thanks to a timely eruption that throws him into the sea. Then he discovers that the brain cloud turns out to be nothing.
This kind of soft-bellied fable would be almost digestible if the film didn’t come larded with lame stereotypes (eccentric millionaire, wise black chauffeur) and random gimmicks. There is a Metropolis homage at the beginning, set in a proctology equipment factory (only a recent Oscar-winner could make that up and not wince).
The chief of the tribe is played by Abe Vigoda. That’s right, Tessio from The Godfather plays a Polynesian-Jewish islander. And, while Meg Ryan plays three different women, you can tell them apart only by their different hair colours.
Yes, it is all as bad as it sounds, but alas this cast-iron flop has to contend with a small but devoted band of admirers on the internet who think that it is one of the greatest romantic comedies yet made.
Like I said, failure in Hollywood is no cakewalk.
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Joe Versus the Volcano is on BBC2, Saturday, 3.55pm