The Rock A Film Review By Michael Redman Copyright 1996 By Michael Redman
***1/2 (out of ****)
Summer action films are an odd thing to review. The genre is so narrowly focused (low on characterization, plot and just about everything else, big only on the keeping-you-on-the-edge-of-your-seatness), that it's remarkably rare for it to produce a truly great movie.
The season is usually filled with mediocre -- occasionally downright horrendous -- offerings and the tendency is to compare: `At least this one isn't as bad as that one.'
"The Rock" is definitely different. Starting with wonderful casting and featuring a mastery of the genre, the film strikes at the heart of summer excitement with surgical precision. It is so well crafted that you'll be holding your breath for over two hours and not notice its defects until after the credits roll. Exactly as it should be.
Ed Harris is a renegade Brigadier General who leads a group of Marines first in stealing enough deadly gas and rockets to destroy a major city, and then in taking over Alcatraz along with 81 hostages so they can be in position to take out the city by the bay. Their demands are on the noble side: money and recognition for US servicemen killed during illegal military actions.
His very reluctant opponents are the makings of the best odd couple in years. Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage) is a bookish FBI bomb defuser and self-described chemical `superfreak' drafted into the action hero role. Sean Connery plays John Mason, a street-wise highly trained British ultra spy who was in his heyday during the early sixties. (Wait a minute, you don't think he's...?)
Mason was arrested and jailed for 30 years without a trial for stealing microfilm from J. Edgar Hoover revealing such major US secrets as who really killed JFK and other nefarious truths. He comes into play here because he is the only person ever to have escaped Alcatraz. Now he's going to lead the anti-terrorist squad in.
Mason is exactly the role that Connery is best at: the grand old man still capable of kicking butt with the best of them. Cage is his perfect foil who goes by the rules but then loosens up with begrudging admiration for the convict.
Everything starts of with slam-bang action, then goes to big guns, then deadly gas, then missiles, then more slam-bang, and more big guns and -- you get the idea. There's not a moment to stop and smell the roses before they get blasted away.
And it's a good thing that you don't have that moment or else you would realize that the plot is almost exactly the same as "Executive Action", that some of the filmmaking is sloppy (exactly how many missiles did Cage disarm in the morgue?) or that "Bad Boys" Michael Bay films the thing like a damned music video.
But as I said, you never get the time to realize that and Harris, Connery and Cage are so good that you don't want to and besides it's summer.
[This appeared in the 6/13/96 "Bloomington Voice", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be reached at redman@bvoice.com] -- mailto:redman@bvoice.com This week's film review at http://www.bvoice.com/ Film reviews archive at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews