CON AIR
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Touchstone) Starring: Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames, Colm Meaney. Screenplay: Scott Rosenberg. Producer: Jerry Bruckheimer. Director: Simon West. MPAA Rating: R (violence, profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 117 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Nicolas Cage comes up with an ingenious survival mechanism for his role in the wink-and-a-concussive-nudge bombast-o-rama CON AIR. The opening credits sequence introduces us to Cage as Cameron Poe, a Gulf War veteran convicted of manslaughter and serving eight years in prison after an ill-fated bar-room brawl. The prison scenes are accompanied by voice-overs in which Poe, in a languid Southern drawl, describes prison life to his wife back home and offers simple homilies for the daughter he has never met. If the scene gives you a tickle of familiarity, it probably should. Cage appears to realize that CON AIR is going to be utterly dim-witted and ridiculous, and that he's going to have to do something to keep himself entertained. And thus he slips into a familiar, surreal role as his own commentary on the proceedings -- Cage plays Cameron Poe as a buffed-up version of RAISING ARIZONA's H. I. McDonnough.
Cage should have known what he was getting himself into. He got a paycheck from Jerry Bruckheimer last year for THE ROCK, and if there's one thing you can count on from a Bruckheimer production (even without his late partner Don Simpson), it's that you can count on seeing everything you saw in the _last_ Bruckheimer production. The critical difference between THE ROCK and CON AIR is Cage's performance. In THE ROCK, Cage appeared to be having the time of his life jumping into the action fray for the first time. That sense of discovery has been replaced by a wry self-awareness. While the plot of CON AIR finds Poe a parolee on board a hijacked prison transport plane whose goal is just to get home, Cage's goal is different but just as simple: to get out of the film with some measure of dignity intact.
Audiences, too, should know what they're getting themselves into with a Bruckheimer production. In fact, the marketing people are counting on it. No one who loathed THE ROCK for its swear-grunt-blast repetitiveness will be converted by CON AIR; no one who loved THE ROCK for exactly the same reasons will be dissuaded. Director Simon West (yet another TV commercial auteur plucked by Bruckheimer from the advertising equivalent of the Schwab's soda fountain) delivers exactly the kind of adrenaline/testosterone cocktail which could launch an endocrinology lecture (it's perversely appropriate that one sympathetic con spends most of the flight nearing a diabetic coma; like insulin, CON AIR does the work of a gland). What he doesn't deliver is a moment of suspense. A Bruckheimer film has no use for Hitchcock's notion that showing you the bomb under the desk creates a more interesting scene than just blowing up the desk; a really, _really_ big desk and a really, _really_ big bomb will serve the purpose nicely.
If either West or Bruckheimer were interested in genuine tension, they might have done something with CON AIR's creepiest set-up. At a desert stop for the plane-load of convicts, serial killer Garland Greene (Steve Buscemi) wanders of into a trailer park where he meets a little girl having a tea party in a drained swimming pool. Their tete-a-tete is eerie and menacing, providing a welcome shift in tone and giving Buscemi a chance to stand out in a cast with too many villains (Danny Trejo, Ving Rhames and a characteristically reptilian John Malkovich among them). In fact, CON AIR usually opts for too much of something when the tiniest measure of restraint would have been an improvement -- too many characters, too much editing, too many dopey punch lines, too much of the cheap, ugly appeals to machismo which characterize too many Bruckheimer efforts.
It is that kind of exhausting excess to which Cage is responding with his detached performance. While Malkovich goes for the outrageous and John Cusack (as a U. S. Marshal) goes for earnest, Cage looks like he just wants to go to sleep. His recycled RAISING ARIZONA performance is a means of escape, his chase after a stuffed bunny a continuation of his pursuit of that big box of Huggies. It doesn't bode well for Cage's appearance in FACE/OFF later this month; perhaps he already realizes that all he can do in action films is more of the same over and over. There's a word for people like you, Nicolas. That word is called recidivist...repeat offender.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 con errors: 3.
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