The Rock

The Rock

Before he became obsessed with making one boring, shitty, CGI filled movie after another featuring charisma free robots who can morph into everyday household items, Michael Bay was actually well on his way to becoming the greatest action movie director to ever live based entirely on his early credits which included Bad Boys, a hip hop variation on the cop buddy movie formula, Armageddon, undoubtedly the first major disaster movie that stood an outside chance at a Best Picture Oscar nomination, and this one from 1996 which falls somewhere in between, in many ways an unstoppable thrill ride that also manages to raise key issues about both a political and military stumbling block while easily qualifying as being an all out E ticket extravaganza. The film starts out by introducing us to the almost seemingly benign “villain” played by Ed Harris, a VERY highly decorated general who in recent years has overseen command on a number of top secret, under the table, and highly illegal Black Ops missions where unauthorized incursions into other countries led to him sitting by his radio whenever things got hairy and painfully listening to his men die in the field. Problem is, because these missions were considered to be classified recon, the United States Government has refused to compensate these men’s families with any proper military benefits or honors whatsoever, even after he had pleaded his case before Congress to do so. Now armed with a rock solid motive, Harris endeavors to take his own loyal men along with a handful of mercenaries (a big mistake on his part), hijack some super deadly chemical weapons of mass destruction, and then to take control of Alcatraz Island of all places along with any available tourists as hostages, and then threaten to strike The Bay Area all over with these weapons if not only the military families are compensated over the recon soldiers’ deaths, but they themselves get a little bit of cash before relocating to a non extradition country and in essence, turn their collective backs on America in disgust. A pretty nifty plan, and many viewers may tend to find themselves rooting in favor of Harris to actually pull it off, since he makes it a special point to use non lethal force every chance he gets (tranquilizer darts are used on the soldiers guarding the weapons for example) and also to absolutely refuse to take any children as his hostages as he immediately sends them off the island and to apparent safety before the siege even occurs, as it goes without saying here that even with the other big name stars in the film that Harris does the finest job acting wise, never really letting us know for sure if he’d actually be willing to use the weapons on innocent civilians to achieve his goals or if he’s merely bluffing in order to get The Pentagon to take this issue more seriously. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to care much about honoring dead soldiers’ memories (the possibility of just simply paying him off is never even shown being remotely discussed) but they DO take very seriously the possibility of a terrorist attack on San Francisco using chemical weapons, and to that extent bring in their top guy on the matter in Nicholas Cage’s Stanley Goodspeed, with Cage being at the peak of his career at that time about to win his Best Actor Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas but more notably than that warming up here for his roles in the all out action filled classics Con Air and Face / Off, even as his role here is the least of the three, a jolly yet nerdy chemist with a gorgeous girlfriend forced to have a gun put in his hand as he is told that he is being sent in with an elite team of Navy SEALS led by the legendary Michael Biehn to infiltrate the island, find the weapons, and utilize his expertise to disarm them. However, to insure that the mission to come up from below and move through the bowels of the prison goes smoothly, they have to turn to a man described as being both a “professional escape artist” as well as someone who apparently “does not exist”, in reality a highly trained British operative who himself was captured and imprisoned without trial for being caught during his own illegal mission on U.S. soil and played by who else other than Sean Connery, who might still be Bond Number One to most people but here plays a guy who was literally kept in a hole for the past 30 years, but when his intimate knowledge of the tunnels underneath Alcatraz (of which he was the only man to have been confirmed to have escaped AND survived) enables him to convince Biehn to take him along on the mission as well to be their guide, we then see the brilliance of having this so called “wild card” character along for the ride, with the SEALS not knowing for sure if he can be fully trusted. It’s fascinating to see the way that Bay starts the movie off colorfully and then manages to work in a major action scene about every 10 to 15 minutes (including a raucous car chase through the streets of San Francisco) even before the main story of the mission itself seems to get going proper with the heightened tension and extended battles as Connery proves to be one of the best kind of imperiled action heroes, one who can use his wits to kill his enemies while also being able to improvise with various weapons at hand against the rogue Marines who know how to do little more than just stand there and shoot. The film suffers from some bits that strikes one as either being unnecessarily goofy or just plain unrealistic, as when in Cage’s introductory “action scene” (defusing a bomb inside a glass protective bubble), he tries to keep his focus on the life or death task at hand while his fellow specialist panics and runs around engaging in what appears to be some kind of half assed stand up comedy routine, or when Biehn and his SEALS make a horribly fatal tactical error that results in Harris’ troops staging a hugely successful ambush, notwithstanding the fact that Biehn and his men should have been smart enough to have avoided that from happening even if it does give Biehn himself the opportunity for some great acting on his part. As with Armageddon, Bay has the same actor (Stanley Anderson) play the role of the United States President, a pompous jackass who always likes to pontificate deeply on the symbolic meaning of the given situation at hand before ALWAYS then promptly making the absolute WRONG decision, and we also get a slew of good actors playing both the government higher ups as well as the other soldiers on the mission, including John Spencer, David Morse, William Forsythe, John C. McGinley, Tony “Candyman” Todd, Gregory Sporleder, Bokeem Woodbine, Philip Baker Hall, and Stuart Wilson, with Spencer’s FBI Director having a particularly antagonistic past relationship with Connery and Todd and Sporleder being the aforementioned mercenaries brought in to help out on the mission that turn out to be the bloodthirsty true villains of the piece. We also get Vanessa Marcil as Cage’s very cute (and pregnant) girlfriend and Claire Forlani as Connery’s estranged daughter whom he has never met until now. The film goes along at a rapidly good clip while utilizing the Armageddon formula of having the first half set up and introduce the characters while the second half focuses on the mission itself where seemingly everything that can go wrong will, even as Bay in these early films despite the brightly lit, flashy alternate take on our reality that he is known for still seemed to know the extremely high value of the human element, always finding ways for the viewer to care about these characters even as they wind up facing the most gravest dangers imaginable, and while Cage does play the weakest of his action characters in terms of being a badass, it is his performance that brings the heart and soul of the film to light, seemingly having more to fight for than anyone else by sole virtue of having both his girl and unborn child in the line of fire, while the big scene where Connery finally confronts Harris, who finds himself stunned to be facing off with a British secret agent of all things, turns out to be the single best part of the movie when Connery reminds him that you do not honor the dead by threatening to kill others, showing that he is much more of a refined type in contrast to Harris who can do little more than bark out orders but not really think in a truly abstract sense. So it is the little moments like these along with the big explosive moments that everyone remembers that not only insures this film a spot amongst the all time action classics, but shows that Michael Bay had indeed cultivated a unique talent that could still one day bring him to true greatness…

9/10

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