The Volcano

Alain is a driving instructor who raised his daughter largely alone after his marriage collapsed. Valérie, a veterinarian, is the ex-wife who left soon after that daughter was born. They have spent years successfully avoiding each other — until both book seats on the same Athens-bound flight to attend their daughter's wedding in a small Greek village, and discover, to their mutual horror, that they are travelling companions.

Then the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupts. With European airspace shut down and planes grounded across the continent, the ceremony's clock starts running and the only route left is overland. What follows is a scramble southeast by any means available — on foot, by car, by hitchhiking, by increasingly questionable improvisation — with two people who cannot be in the same room forced into the same passenger seat for hundreds of kilometres.

Directed by Alexandre Coffre in his second feature after Une pure affaire (2011), the film pairs Dany Boon and Valérie Bonneton in a large-scale French comedy that uses a real 2010 news event as the engine of a very old comic form: the ex-spouses who must cooperate, sabotage each other, and cross a continent before the bride says yes.

Beneath the slapstick, the film argues that divorce ends a marriage but never finishes a relationship. Alain and Valérie have signed the papers and divided the years, yet they remain bound by a daughter whose wedding forces them into the same frame — and the volcano simply makes literal what was already true: their lives are grounded, stuck, waiting for an ash cloud that has hung over them since the separation.

Coffre uses the road-movie structure as a therapy session neither character consented to. Every breakdown, detour and act of sabotage strips away one more layer of the performance each has built — Alain's martyred devotion as the parent who stayed, Valérie's brisk self-justification as the parent who left. The destination is the wedding; the actual journey is toward an honest account of what happened between them.

Its message is finally generous rather than cynical: people do not have to like each other to be family, and the obligation to show up for a child can outlast every reason two adults have for staying apart.

As a reconciliation comedy. The most straightforward reading takes the journey at face value: two people who have wronged each other are forced together, endure a shared ordeal, and arrive at the wedding changed — the volcano as accidental marriage counsellor, and the daughter's new union as proof that the old one's failure need not be inherited.

The film belongs to a very specific moment in European memory. The April 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull grounded flights across the continent and stranded millions of travellers, producing a shared experience of sudden immobility that was still fresh three years later. Coffre's film is one of the few narrative features to convert that news event into popular comedy, treating a geological disruption not as catastrophe but as a farcical inconvenience visited upon ordinary family obligations.

It also sits inside the industrial story of French comedy after Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis. Dany Boon's record-breaking 2008 hit reset expectations for what a French comedy could earn, and the following years were dominated by attempts — his own included — to catch that lightning again. Eyjafjallajökull was one such attempt, mounted at a budget of around $25.2 million, and its worldwide gross of roughly $19.2 million left it short of that ambition. The Hollywood Reporter, reviewing it as The Volcano, described a slickly made, sporadically funny and highly expensive production, and judged that it was unlikely to return Boon to the A list.

Its lasting cultural function is smaller and more affectionate: it preserved, in broad comic form, the strange spring when a word almost nobody in Europe could pronounce became the reason they could not go home.

Overall verdict: mixed. The film holds a modest 5.6 user rating on IMDb, consistent with a comedy that entertained a broad audience without winning much affection from critics or generating strong word of mouth.

Praised: Valérie Bonneton's performance is the near-universal high point — reviewers called her franchement épatante, and much of the film's energy is credited to her willingness to play the ex-wife as genuinely abrasive rather than lovably prickly. The premise itself was widely admired as a clever hook, and the production values were acknowledged as slick and expensive by the standards of French comedy.

Criticised: the dominant complaint is unevenness. The Hollywood Reporter's review described an uneven, stop-go adventure that cracks a smile now and then but little more, and other reviewers found the film formulaic — a strong setup serviced by episodic gags that arrive and depart without building. The scale of the budget also drew scepticism, with the money visible onscreen but not obviously translating into laughs.

The contested point is Dany Boon himself. For his large audience he remains a reliable comic presence; for critics, the film was another entry in a five-year run of attempts to recapture the phenomenal success of Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, and it was not judged the one that would do it. Commercially the picture landed in an awkward middle — around $19.2 million against a budget of roughly $25.2 million — which colours much of its reputation.