Ring of Fire (2013)

Not even bad in a good way

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

Utter crap, waste of time. The first episode was mildly bad, second one was horrible. The biggest complaint was camera work. I actually got a case of motion sickness from the overly active camera shaking. I think the camera operator had Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and had been given a near lethal dose of caffeine. I understand the idea behind it but damn it, come on, there is a thing as too much. And then of course there is the poor acting and terrible "science" behind the story line. Ring of fire left me burning and yearning for a barf bag. A few changes would have made a world of difference but it is was it is. A burning pile of yak squeeze that should never have seen the light of day. Or maybe I'm being mean due to several hours of my life taken from me trying to choke down this horrible excuse for entertainment.

Ignore all the idiotic trolls complaining about shaky cams; they're apparently unaware that in disaster action movies, the ground occasionally, uhm, shakes. And those talking about "The Agenda" of this movie as it relates to environmental concerns are the same subculture conspiracists on YouTube discussing the Illuminati, 9/11 cover-up, and other elaborate government plots. In this movie--as in all such disaster movies--the environmental concerns are only used as a thin plot device to kinda-sorta-maybe support the silliness of the movie premise. It's not at all presented in a heavy-handed way like some of the religion- themed movies on here--some quite good. It's just a plot device; I would tell you if it were "one of those" films. It's not.Finally, the last bit of cuckoo in many of these reviews is that the science of the movie used to explain the potential end of the world is not sound or based on reality. Really? Are you trying to tell me that I shouldn't fear a mass volcanic reaction that could threaten everything globally? Whew! Thanks for clearing that up. Now all I have to worry about are sharks and tornados somehow uniting. You get the point. This is not NOVA on PBS. It's the same science and logic used to describe how Indiana Jones and John McClane can survive all those stunts, how the world can be covered completely in ice in 2012, and how gigantic robots from outer space can transform into cars. The pseudoscience in this movie works as well as it does in EVERY OTHER ACTION/DISASTER MOVIE. It's easy to suspend your belief with the science in this movie--it's 'sciency" enough.As you should know by now, most reviewers cannot AT ALL be relied on to accurately review a movie, and of course, tastes are so subjective. Their comments ruin movies that I skip based on them only to discover later they were completely wrong. Find a movie you enjoy like, say, "TiMer," and then read the reviews and comments. The idiots who hate movies you like take far more time to write reviews than those left satisfied; and so negative comments from those groups disproportionately rise to the top. So take mine review worth a grain of salt; but I hope you at least find it Helpful enough to mark it as such.Now onto the movie itself. Many will make fun of this B-movie. But it has a considerable amount of A-movie emotion, and far better than expected special effects, sound effects, and background music. As a straight masculine male who recognized some of the cheesiness of this movie, I have to admit that I inexplicably teared-up at *several* moments towards the ending of this movie. No spoilers. Simply, though this movie is not worthy of any best picture industry awards, it's one of those rare Netflix gems that perfectly succeeds as an entertaining mindless diversion—rather than just the standard subpar nonsense that litters the service.I really appreciated that all talents involved didn't wing it; everyone tried, from the director and film crew to the producer. There is real acting in this movie above and beyond the limits of the improbable script, with recognizable and attractive new faces keeping the standard fare fun and fresh. The leads are excellent considering the material and the supporting actors carry their load. Ultimately, that's all that really matters at the end of the day: You'll be surprised to find that you like the characters...a lot, and even more surprised that--in what essentially is a silly disposable movie--you end up actually caring about what happens to them.I personally departed the movie feeling satisfied, even to a point of wanting to see a little more in an ongoing series because the characters grow on you. No, it's not a top-notch movie, but it goes nowhere near the bottom of movies like Snakes on a Plane. So if you keep your expectations low, you'll end on a high. Enjoy!

If there was a redeeming quality, it was Terry O'Quinn. He was great on LOST, and while his character is nowhere near as interesting he does do his best here and is quite commanding. The same cannot be said for the other actors who are all unbearably wooden and emotionless. When they don't act like they genuinely care or are living their characters' situations, at best they were indifferent, it is very difficult to be properly drawn in. Good characters and writing would have helped, but Ring of Fire manages to not even have those either. The characters are badly underwritten ciphers(for a three hour miniseries there was no excuse for this), the sort of stereotypes that we see all the time in movies featuring on the SyFy channel, and they are never more than that. The dialogue is clunky, overly-talky and dissolves too much into tedious melodrama and overlong exposition, it is often very over-familiar stuff that is made even more painful by awkward line delivery. There is very little to be invested in the story either. It was increasingly predictable(especially in the second half) and takes far too long to get going, two thirds of the first half is set-up exposition, and the excessive padding isn't enough to let go of the feeling that there wasn't enough story to sustain a three-hour running time. That there are too many sub-plots and none are particularly engaging is part of the problem as well. If it was done in half the time, with less dialogue, fewer subplots, more action and more attention to character, Ring of Fire would have been much more successful. Ring of Fire even looks as though it was made in a rush, with a unappealingly drab and grainy colour palette. There's been worse use of shaky cam, but it was distractingly over-used and the constant jerky movements are enough to make anybody seasick. There's also been worse CGI but that's not saying much, it's still dully rendered. Overall, a disaster in itself really. Terry O'Quinn is the least bad thing about it but even at the halfway mark I found myself begging for a fire extinguisher, the fact that I make it my business not to judge a movie/series without seeing the whole thing was the sole motivation for sticking with it. 2/10 Bethany Cox

I'm partial to disaster flicks and I found this DVD at Redbox, although it's a TV Miniseries. It's in two parts, each one about 90 minutes long, which I felt was overly long for this film. Of course, it's not up to the quality of classics like the original "Poseiden Adventure" or "Towering Inferno", although it had some positives to it adding up to an average rating from me.Set in Oregon, it centers on an oil company, Trans Nova, using a supposedly environmentally safe laser drill to find oil in a naturally protected preserve. However, surreptitiously they're digging lower than legal depths and what they think is a vast oil reserve is actually a compressed magma (lava) deposit. After a whistleblower, who works at Trans Nova, reveals this to the head scientist overseeing the project Dr. Matthew Cooper (Michael Vartan) and to the aggressive environmentalist opposing the project, Emily Booth (Lauren Lee Smith) they project a disaster unless the well is immediately shut down.Even as livestock and wildlife begin to die, the head of the Trans Nova project Oliver Booth (Terry O'Quinn)--yes Emily's estranged father-- refuses to shut it down. You can guess what happens next--disaster with a huge volcanic eruption and the threat of triggering the Ring of Fire, whereby 75% of the world's volcanoes could be activated and erupt.In addition to the length of the movie, other drawbacks I thought were rather wooden acting and dialogue plus too many scientific technical terms as it went along. I thought overall the special effects were so/so, but at times very well conceived. On the positive side, I thought it maintained tension fairly well and the rescue and survival stories, as is the norm in these epic films, were quite well done, and at times could be moving and touching.