...it’s all mindless action, but it’s fun, nevertheless, even it doesn’t make a minute’s sense.
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The nineties gave us a lot of high-octane action adventures filled with whiz-bang hardware, earsplitting pyrotechnics, and often stupefying surround audio. Among the leaders were "Air Force One," "Con Air," "Armageddon," and the subject of our discussion today, "The Rock." This 1996 action yarn may seem a frivolous choice for the prestigious Criterion Collection to be issuing in a special edition, two-DVD package, but here it is, looking and sounding as good as one could hope for.
Produced by the current king of action flicks, Jerry Bruckheimer ("Top Gun," "Days of Thunder," "Con Air," "Armageddon"), and directed by Michael Bay ("Armageddon," "Bad Boys"), "The Rock" is a quintessential example of its kind. For sheer, outright, brainless excitement, this "Rock" stands at the top of the mountain. It stars Nicolas Cage in full action-hero mode and Sean Connery in full Connery mode, with a backdrop of San Francisco and Alcatraz island in which to strut their stuff. "The Rock" probably delivers more thrills per minute than any movie made.
The story opens with a Marine Corps general, Frank Hummel (Ed Harris), and a group of commandos dedicated to him stealing fifteen rockets from an army weapons station and filling them with deadly nerve gas. Then he and his force take over Alcatraz, the former high-security prison in San Francisco Bay, hold eighty-one tourists hostage, and aim their rockets at the City. The general isn´t entirely crazy, just a little unhinged. He demands $100,000,000 from the U.S. government or he´s going to kill everyone in the Bay Area. He wants the money as reparations for the families of soldiers killed during a covert operation in Desert Storm, deaths disavowed by the country´s top officials.
Enter the heroes. Cage plays Stanley Goodspeed, the FBI´s top chemical-weapons expert, and Connery plays John Patrick Mason, a former British spy. But here´s the catch: Goodspeed has never seen field action and isn´t too keen on doing so now, and Mason has been in prison for the past thirty-odd years and is willing to get out any way he can. The thing is, Mason was falsely incarcerated because he knew too much, too many top-level government secrets. He is also the only man ever to have escaped from the Rock. So he´s teamed up with Goodspeed to break back into the old prison and defuse the situation. The government´s alternative is to send in jet fighters and blow up the whole island, hostages and all, obviously a last resort. To add further melodrama to the situation, Goodspeed´s pregnant girlfriend and Mason´s long-lost daughter are both in San Francisco. This thing just never stops.
From its first moment the movie is filled with action, and for two hours it never lets up. It packs more thrills into the first fifteen minutes than most action films do in their entirety. Of course, it´s all mindless action, but it´s fun, nevertheless, even it doesn´t make a minute´s sense. In fact, the film´s uninterrupted fast pace may be its only flaw. We can easily put up with the silly goings on of the plot, but before long we wish it would slow down and occasionally let us catch our breath.
Cage is fine and funny as the reluctant Goodspeed, sent out on the mission with only three weeks of anti-terrorist training under his belt at the FBI Academy. What I hadn´t remembered about his character from having seen the movie in a theater was his humor. Goodspeed is never made to seem foolish or inept, never the butt of any jokes, but his reactions to dangerous situations can bring a smile to one´s face. Ed Harris as the mad general is more than a caricature from "Dr. Strangelove." He´s a genuinely decent but troubled man who has just come unglued. He honestly thinks he´s a patriot in what he´s doing. But the real star of the show, no doubt, is Connery. This is Sean Connery´s picture, and he rightfully gets star billing. He is magnificent, as always, and magnetizes the screen. For those of us who always wished to see him back as Bond, his John Mason is the next best thing. Indeed, this movie could, for all intents and purposes, be described as an inelegant, rough-and-tumble Bond adventure, starring the best Bond of them all!
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[release]1035[/release]