CON AIR
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: A roaring behemoth of an action movie that manages to be great fun and totally ridiculous at the same time. All that's missing is Jackie Chan.
Somehow this movie works. CON AIR is totally ridiculous and over-the-top; there's not a moment in it that could be believed. And yet there it is, and it's great fun. Hong Kong ultraviolence comes to Hollywood, sort of.
Nicholas Cage stars as Cameron Poe, a Gulf War veteran. After coming home from the front to his sweetheart, he gets into a vicious fight with a bunch of rednecks for threatening his wife and kills one of them. For this he's sent to jail for seven years, and while nobody in the audience believed that such a thing would ever go to trial (self-defense? hello?), we bought it and went on, because the movie proceeded to set up Poe as an interesting fellow. He spends his time in jail educating himself, keeping himself together, and forming a rapport with other inmates. And now that he's being let out on parole, he's preparing to see his daughter in the flesh for the first time.
Something has to go wrong, of course, and it does. Bigtime. The plane that Poe's being put on is also being used to transport a gang of brutally hard-core lifers and death-row criminals to a newly-built max-security prison. One of them, the charmingly named "Cyrus the Virus" (played by John Malkovitch with the sleazy charm of a mass murderer turned talk show host), has hatched a plan that involves clockwork timing, the help of several other inmates, and hostage-taking. On top of *that*, one of the other prisoners is a plant -- a DEA agent with a hideout gun who's been put on board to get information from one of the conspirators about a Central American drug lord.
Everything goes wrong at once. I will not spoil too many of the details, because part of the fun of the movie is watching how the well-oiled machine of the prisoner transport goes horribly wrong. Ultimately, Poe is put into a very sticky situation -- a whole web of them, in fact, where he has to try to survive as well as help out a newly-made friend or three. Poe, muscular and graceful, looks both very in and out of place amongst the neo-Nazis and mass murderers that make up the rest of the crew, and he does everything he can to distance himself from them. The criminals themselves are not too smart, but the Virus is clever and resourceful, and makes up for it. They supply the deadly, anarchic energy that the crazy plan he's dreamed up needs to succeed, and there's a weird, perverse pleasure in seeing them get away with so much of what they do.
Also in the bubbling pot of the plot are John Cusack, as the supervisor of the flight, who startles everyone around him by whipping out one piece of remarkable improvisation after another. He locks horns hard with the DEA man (a very enjoyable Colm Meaney), and takes a peculiarly delicious form of revenge on the man -- and his sports car.
The movie doesn't stop once it gets into high gear. I've hardly seen another movie that creates the level of non-stop tension and forward motion that this one does. It also sustains it against all odds -- logical, intellectual, whatever. The movie just doesn't look back, and when the audience walked out, they were drained and exhilarated. Not one single believable thing had happened, but the movie creates such a strong sense of personalities and character, that we ignore the silliness of it all and have a great time watching things blow up. And that happens *in extremis*. There is one stunt that, even if it was faked, had most of the audience on the floor -- involving the plane, its mooring line, gunfire, a shed, a control tower and a car. You'll see what I mean.
All the actors do a fine job: Malkovitch is disturbing and twisted; Cage is solemn and also with a twinkle of smarts in his eye; Cusack is irrepressible; Meaney is hilarious. Steve Buscemi also pokes his head in, as a disturbed serial killer, although his role feels as though it should either have been cut out completely or expanded on further. I love him as an actor, but he needed to have his material brought to fruition for his role to really work here.
CON AIR will no doubt live on in the hearts of action/stunt/explosion fans everywhere, and is destined to be a fratboy action favorite alongside HARD BOILED, LETHAL WEAPON and DIE HARD. I suspect a sequel won't be long in coming; any bets?
Three out of four restraint suits.
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