Hot "Air" by Kristian Lin
There's a detail near the end of "Con Air" that epitomizes everything that's right and wrong with the movie. The bad guys have crash landed their plane on the Las Vegas Strip, and some of them commandeer a fire truck to make good their escape. U.S. Marshal Vince Larkin (John Cusack) chases after them on a police motorcycle. He shoots at them with his gun until he runs out of bullets, upon which he, like many other action heroes, throws his gun away. He then catches up to the truck, leaps aboard, grabs a hatchet, chops a hole in the roof of the cab and tells the driver, a convict named Swamp Thing (M.C. Gainey) to pull over. Swamp Thing just laughs at him.
Now, if Larkin had been thinking like a regular person, he would have held on to his empty gun and pointed it at Swamp Thing to get him to pull over. But this being an action movie, that wouldn't have been any fun. So, without his gun, Larkin has to grab a fire hose, poke it through the hole in the roof and blast Swamp Thing into oblivion with it. You have to admit it's a nice visual.
"Con Air" begins when Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage), who killed a man trying to rape his wife, receives his parole from prison. He hitches a ride aboard a plane loaded with insanely violent criminals. Of course, the criminals take over the plane, and Poe does his best to thwart their plans. Meanwhile, on the ground, Larkin figures out that Poe's a good guy and tries to convince his colleagues of that before they blow the plane out of the sky.
It's easy to point out "Con Air's" many flaws. Director Simon West stuffs action into every frame until the movie wears on you. Scott Rosenberg's script tries way too hard to be hip and funny ("If you say anything, the next wings you see will be on the flies buzzing around your rotting corpse," a villain says rather tortuously). The movie spends too much time building up its bad guys, and there's so many of them that they create a nightmare of loose ends. The hero's got a family to come home to, but he stays on the plane to keep the male guards from being killed, the female guard from being raped, and a diabetic convict friend of his from dying. All this raises the film's B.S. quotient sky high.
Still, I enjoyed this picture more than I expected to, and it has a lot to do with the cast. Cage once again manages to play a virtuous paragon without cloying. Better still is John Malkovich as Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom, who becomes the prisoners' ringleader. This movie shakes Malkovich out of his recent torpor (see "Mary Reilly" or "The Portrait of a Lady") and lets him unleash his ferocious side.
On the downside, the brilliant Cusack in a cliched role becomes a self-righteous bore (a quality he displayed, and sent up, in "Bullets Over Broadway"). Steve Buscemi is all wrong as a psycho killer - his criminal characters (in "Reservoir Dogs" and "Fargo," among others) are so memorable because they try so hard to make sense out of everything. This actor shouldn't be unhinged.
Anyway, it isn't likely that you'll go into "Con Air" with too many illusions. It's an action flick that fulfills one's modest expectations.
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