Actor's Director

Pre-review huddle: The Rock was the first R-Rated film I ever saw. At the same time, my generation considers it a minor classic. As such, I have some affection for it that is surely going to stain my review with prejudice.

The Rock falls into an elite category of films known as "things that give away how Michael Bay's brain works". These are fun things, usually. For example, The Rock tells us that Michael Bay thinks trolleys are every morning filled with mercury fulminate and launched down the street (presumably out of a giant slingshot) and into oncoming traffic. They don't have any passengers who aren't token black conductors or mannequins made of mercury fulminate.

Like all passable movies, though, not that much can be interpreted about Michael Bay's brain chemistry from this film. Unlike in Bad Boys, where it was revealed that Michael Bay thinks cops are rich, it seems like the studio executives were able to get him filled with downers every morning so that his brain would react at least somewhat normally to his surroundings for a few months.

The Rock is an action thrill-ride (I expect to see that on the DVD case) about US General Edward Hummel (Ed Harris), who, having seen the deaths of his covert troops marginalized and ignored by the US government, takes it upon himself to steal some poisonous gas rockets and take hostages on Alcatraz in the hopes of extorting a modest $100 million for the purpose of reparations to the families of the dead soldiers. It's up to the best rag-tag duo the Pentagon could throw together to stop him: chemical weapons expert Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage) and former MI6 agent John Mason (Sean Connery).

Mason was a convict at Alcatraz back in the 60's, imprisoned for some shady espionage stuff, and he's the only person to have successfully escaped. Blah blah blah. Bring on the shootouts.

This film is shockingly, painfully...explosively average. Everything about it is as average as I could possibly imagine and this is a film that came out in the 90's, a time when mediocrity in action movies held sway. It even has the aesthetic that I associate with mediocrity: lights shown through colored mist.

The only reason that this film has any kind of reputation is its three central performances.

Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris are fantastic in the way that so few actors were in action films released in the 90's (the only other film that immediately leaps to mind is Air Force One).

That's no surprise coming from Sean Connery. Sean Connery is known to make crazy motherfucking yogurt ads into 15-second rollercoaster thrill rides. Sean Connery thinks that the list of ingredients on the back of a cereal box are a terrorist plot. Sean Connery thinks that any sentence longer than five words is a ransom note. Sean Connery drives a gun to work every day. Sean Connery makes his own beef jerky out of Barbara Walters' disapproval.

So because it's not a bad film, it's made an awesome film just because of Sean Connery's presence. We could call Connery's presence in mediocre action movies "The Rock Effect", meaning just because of his charisma and perfection of the action movie performance, he elevates the movie.

As I mentioned before, Nicolas Cage also acquits himself nicely. I've made no secret of my dislike for Cage. The only time he's ever good is when he's working with immensley talented directors, and that never happens because he spends all his time making Next and Ghost Rider. But this is one of the very, very few times that his presence in an action film makes any sense at all. His character is a nerdy chemist inexperienced in combat, which makes plenty of sense for Cage. Nicolas Cage has two looks: nerd and professional creep. He never looks like he has any reason to be holding a gun, unless he's robbing a teenage girl of her innocence.

And Ed Harris, who is always great no matter what he's in, simply because he's a great, great actor (as opposed to Connery, who's only great because he's spent the last forty years defining the modern action hero).

The rest of the movie is bog-fucking-standard. All the pieces just sit there in a pile waiting to be put together into something cohesive. Aside from the performances, the script is okay, peppered with some amusing jests, although the amateurish editing does more to derail the comedic aspects of the film than I've thought editing capable of (I've been told that comedy is as much in the hands of an editor as an actor or writer, and I believe it now).

And...Alcatraz looks pretty cool in a few scenes. And that's it. Like all of Bay's films, it's too goddamn long with a lengthy chase scene stuffed into the middle of the film for no reason at all, and it's forty minutes before we even get to Alcatraz, and even longer before our two heroes engage the bad guys. But for an action film, the action has surprisingly little appeal. It's all about those three guys.

7/10