|
|
| Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup | | Rating: 0
| Okay, here's the deal. 'Member back in kidhood when you saw an ad during Saturday cartoons for some fab-o new toy? This fill-in-the-blank, whatever it was, had the right-on dig-o-rama. It was flashy, shiny, cool. It did backflips, shot sparks, spun like a top, made rattatat noises, had kung fu grip. The fresh-scrubbed kids in the commercial -- all freckly-faced and chipper -- looked like they were having the time of their lives playing with it. The announcer was all frothy and screamin', "Be sure to get the fill-in-the-blank today!"
Well, you'd go absolutely batcrap to get that dang fill-in-the-blank. You'd whine and carry on, pitch a peemortal fit or three. You'd drop oh-so-subtle hints to your parents, like, "Momma, I just GOTTA have a fill-in-the-blank!" You'd drag her through the store like a wrecker pullin' a Taurus, 'til you could plop her in front of the shelf, so she could see exactly what the box looked like and its exact location on the shelf. And, she'd try to put you off with, A) "Save your allowance..." B) "Maybe for your birthday," or , C) "We'll see...." (I always detested, "We'll see....)
Then finally, some interminable eon later, you got it! The fill-in-the-blank! After all the hullabaloo, the fill-in-the-blank was finally in your hands! And you played with it. And, without fail, the fill-in-the-blank turned out to be a big gyp. It broke, it didn't fly, it didn't make the same sounds it made on TV. You didn't have freckles and you weren't all that chipper. And, now, you were stuck with it.
My dear patients, that's exactly how I felt last night when I left the theater after seeing Con Air, Paramount's float in the summer blockbuster parade. I'd seen trailer after trailer for the thing, not realizing I was being duped with the same marketing finesse that made the fill-in-the-blank so appealing years ago. And, by criminy, all I was left with was a box of 180 dB explosions and an empty shell of a movie. No spinnin' tops, no shootin' sparks, no kung fu grip. Batteries not included.
Nicolas Cage stars as Cameron Poe, a prison parolee being transported with a batch of the most heinous criminals on Planet Reebok. The nare-do-wells (surprise!) hijack the plane to escape. And the only way Poe can prove he's not a heinous criminal himself is to stop this merry band of goons. Simple, huh?
We get the standard creepy turn from John Malkovich, this time as criminal mastermind Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom. If you saw In The Line Of Fire, you've caught Cyrus the Virus. His name was different in that film, but it's the same person. Super-cool Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction, Mission:Impossible) is second-in-command Nathan "Diamond Dog" Jones. And, oh, yes, Steve "Where's the Orthodontist" Buscemi plays Garland "The Marietta Mangler" Greene, a Lecter-wannabe (whose character never kills anyone in this movie, by the way....). I love how movie prisoners always have a nickname that ends up in quotations; even when it's spoken, you just want to do that arms-up-two-fingers-of-each- hand-scratchin'-in-mid-air-universal-symbol-for- quotations-sort-of-dealie.
Add to this mishmash one John Cusack, as U.S. Marshall Vince Larkin, and you've got a very promising action thriller, bigger and better than The Fugitive or The Rock. Right?
Wrong. In fact, this drivel should not even be within spittin' distance of the moviehouse. The Nickster, doing some funky Elvis-Rosco P. Coltrain-Dukes-of-Hazzard voice, is buffed up and oily, he sports a nice long hair weave, and has the most consistent T-shirt sweat-stains since Bruce Willis in Die Hard. But, despite his Nickness, which is always so fun to watch, he does not make this movie great. In fact, he's merely the man that keeps this cinematic upchuck from getting my dreaded DEAD ON ARRIVAL rating.
You pull Cage out of the pot, and you've got a relentless storm of car wrecks, plane wrecks, and other gas-induced explosions, peppered with silly murders and absolutely the lamest dialogue this side of Godzilla 1985. This is producer Jerry Bruckheimer's first film without his late partner and friend of the working girl Don Simpson, and it really makes one wonder exactly who the brains of that twosome really was. Bruck-man can go over the top with the best of them (and here, WAY over the top), but it's simply mindless violence for the sake of the legendary "Summer Slam Action Flick." Unlike his last year winner, The Rock, there's no attempt to balance the gunpowder with a little wit, thought, and common sense story structure.
And, while we're raking over Bruck-man, let's point out something else here. Con Air marks his pattern of pulling directors from the ranks of TV commercials. (The Rock's Michael Bay, Top Gun's Tony Scott, Flashdance's Adrian Lyne all got their start puking out small-screen harpies for Madison Avenue.) I have no doubt that this man Simon West could direct a feature movie, but, somehow, I get the feeling that West was only doing what he was told to do instead of putting his own stamp on the movie. I find it hard to believe that a first-time director chose to not tell any sort of story. No, gentle readers, this thing smells of Bruck-man telling West, "I said EXPLOSION, not EXPOSITION."
Sorry, West and Bruck. You let your testosterone get the better of you this time. You'll probably make a small mint from the Bang Junkies who get off seeing Las Vegas blow up, but, as for making a good movie, you missed the trick completely. C'mon guys, don't forget: some assembly required.
Get "reel" soon,
Doc
By : V. B. Daniel
|
| | Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup | | Rating: 0
| As I staggered from the excesses of "Con Air" into the daylight, I thought that the category this and many other pictures belong to is "Traction Movies," short for Trash and Action. What sets "Con Air" in a niche within Traction films, seems to be that no other film I remember has had such a colossal number of camera shots.
This is done by keeping them brief and keeping them coming at you at an average rate of about one shot per second. Since, minus final credits, this movie runs about 112 minutes, times 60 this makes it a total of 6720 seconds or 6720 images. If I am wrong, it still feels that way.
Thanks to a cast of able actors ( Cage, Cusack, Malkovich, Buscemi, others) the film survives. The performers, given a lot to do physically and very little thespianly are caricatural, one-dimensional cliches, yet each does the most with what he has. The good guys (plus Guard Rachel Ticotin) though not always pleasant, are in law enforcement. The much-worse-than-bad, arch-criminal guys are convicts.
The real hero, however, is Cameron Poe whom Nicholas Cage plays with a drawl and with what might just be a certain amount of boredom. As a just discharged ace Army Ranger, he meets his pretty (blonde, of course) waitress wife who is pregnant. Defending her against some drunken scum, he accidentally kills one of them.
This involuntary manslaughter sends Cage to the pen for eight years in an unlikely miscarriage of justice. The man is a model prisoner. He keeps fit, betters himself, reads constantly, does origami, corresponds sweetly with wife and daughter -- and in case you missed that fleeting shot, also has a lithograph of Jesus on his wall.
Paroled, Cage is improbably put on a special plane, a flying high-security jail, along with a bunch of the worst serial killers, serial rapists and serial you-name-it imaginable. Not merely The Dirty Dozen but the Amazingly Filthy And Then Some Dozen. In ways that stun one's imagination, the cons, though thoroughly searched, carry the means to take over the plane. They do just that, triggering the Law's search for and duels with, the beastly hijackers.
Their leader is Cyrus the Virus (Malkovich) whose viciousness is matched by his amazingly high I.Q. and who initially wears an absurd Hannibal Lecter mask. The smartest lawman is John Cusack, whose efforts are complicated by Agent Colm Meaney, here a sort of meanie, but familiar as a wonderfully warm Irish dad in "The Snapper," and warm too in the lesser "The Van."
Cage is, of course, The Man Who Will Save the Situation. A Great Guy through and through, at times almost saintly, he must vanquish the criminals if he wants to see his family, also to save Guard Ticotin from rape and to get insulin for his best buddy who is also in the plane.
The machine-gun-fast succession of events or fractions of events becomes from the start such overkill (in all senses) that you can't really keep up with details. The facts are impossible to describe, remember, or to make any sense of. It's an orgy of plot-holes, contradictions and impossibilities. The audience sits there with eyes and brains numbed. By the time the may try to formulate an objection or ask a neighbors "what happened?" a new situation is already on the screen, then another, then another. (Among the myriad question marks is why Buscemi is given such slick aphorisms and why he does not assassinate a little girl).
The movie is as understanding-proof as it is critic-proof, meaning that it will make money even if all the reviews are bad. And bad they should be, except that "Con Air," no matter how insane or guilty of esthetic, moral and cinematic crimes, is not boring. It keep going and it keeps you going.
"Con Air" climaxes with a preposterous destruction of much of Las Vegas as the airplane, piloted by convict "Swamp Thing" plows through the city, then a fire engine, driven by the same man keeps up the mayhem. The immense absurdity is campily comical. It makes you wonder if Swamp Thing should not get a medal.
By : Edwin Jahiel
| more Con Air reviews:
<<prev 1 2 3 next>>
|
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
