CON AIR
Review by Simon Calloway
Recently, I saw Nicolas Cage in City of Angels and Snake Eyes. Now, neither were great films, but Cage supplied two excellent performances in them. So, I went back and took a look at Cage's other films, most notably I saw The Rock (again; I forget he is in that), and Con Air, both produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.
The Rock wasn't good. I didn't like the mindless action scenes and incoherency of the screenplay. Now, Con Air is even worse. A plethora of over the top action sequences and ugly acting by Cage and such other wonderful actors as Ving Rhames and John Malkovitch.
Cage plays military man Cameron Poe. When he accidentally kills a thug who harrasses his wife, he is sent to prison for seven years. His sentence is up, so he, along with many other convicts, ride home in Con Air, a plane made especially for rapists, killers, kidnappers, etc. All these grease balls make for some predictable mayham.
A prisoner escapes him clutches, kills the pilots, and fly the plane to Arizona. All this makes for a mindnumbing blurr or a film.
Case No. 1: How did the con escape? The film never fully explains.
Case No. 2: There just happens to be a con on board who knows how to fly.
Case No. 3: There happens to be a female security guard on the plane. A perfect match for the rapist who needs to have sex even during a plane crash.
Con Air pretty much destroys all expectations of action films. It is the anti-Spielberg.
* ~TeenViews (c) 1999~
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