A large part of the idea and appeal of Batman in the early days was that he was a sort of Dracula, the crime fighter. After all, if Dracula was so powerful, think what a crime-fighter he would make. These days action films seem to be about terrorist plots and the kind of monster that scares people is the psychological kind like Hannibal Lector, and so is born a plot where someone with the deductive power of a Hannibal Lector is an anti-terrorist. (Okay, he is not exactly Lector, just like Batman was not exactly Dracula, but Lector clearly is much of the inspiration for the character.)
General Francis X. Hummel (played by Ed Harris) is one of the most respected and highly-decorated Marines this country has, but he also has seen the government betray some of his closest comrades in arms. Now he has planned and is executing a grandiose extortion scheme to see justice done and to make a tidy profit for himself. He is going to grab some tourists visiting Alcatraz Island and hold them for ransom. But that is just a part of the plot. Just to sweeten the kitty, if he and his men are paid nicely and on time they will refrain from shooting some of the world's most deadly chemical agent over San Francisco, thereby horribly killing everybody within the city limits. A crack FBI team is to be sent to Alcatraz to release the hostages and to nullify the chemical weapon. Chosen for the assignment is an FBI field agent and chemical expert, the wise-cracking Stanley Goodspeed (Nicholas Cage). The team also needs to send an expert on the interior of Alcatraz. And, yes, it turns out they have one, but they do not want anybody to know about him. He is not an FBI agent; he is a prisoner and the only man ever to have escaped from Alcatraz, lived, and gone free. But he has never had a trial and the government wants nobody even to know that he exists. Just the knowledge of why he is imprisoned could have serious political implications. His name is Patrick Mason and if he does not already sound formidable enough, he is played by Sean Connery! (Oh, incidentally, as for escaping from the Rock, there was someone who did escape from Alcatraz and made it to shore alive. He was, however, immediately arrested and at least reportedly he is the only man to have ever made it to shore.) If this illegally imprisoned man Mason can be made to help the team that will go to the island and try to disarm the missiles, they might have a chance to succeed. The problem is that Mason is himself a dangerous weapon and who he really hates is the FBI.
Nicholas Cage has a unique acting style. It is hard to mistake him for any other actor. He seems to go back and forth between small independent films and majors, letting the major films finance him while he goes back and tries something a little different, like LEAVING LAS VEGAS which netted him an Oscar. I am unconvinced that he has real acting range and most of the characters he plays seems to have the same schmaltzy, half-awake feel. Here he is playing an action hero, sort of, and he brings to it much the same feel as his Ben from LEAVING LAS VEGAS. Connery is always fun to watch (dragonized or not) and so is Ed Harris. There is little in the roles here that any of them gives us that we have not seen from him before with the exception that Cage has not play this physical a role before. This seems to be very much a by-the-numbers sort of film. This is Michael Bay's second major film as director, the previous being BAD BOYS.
The score is very, very Hans Zimmer, even for a Hans Zimmer score. Zimmer is joined by Nick Glennie-Smith, but the style is all Zimmer. If you have heard the music from BACKDRAFT and CRIMSON TIDE, you know the score. The pacing of THE ROCK is a little odd. Not that there is not always some action either going on or about to happen, but there is a long section in the first half of the film that seems to forget about Hummel's plot altogether and concentrate on whether the FBI can deal with Mason or not. Yes, there is action going on, but what is on the mind of the viewer is the main threat from Hummel, and diverting to long action scenes built around Mason seems a bad plot choice. Now I could be wrong about this, but I doubt that Alcatraz has somewhere in its bowels a mine train and something else that looks like an amusement park sky-ride. And this strange furnace with the flame and the stamping metal did not make a whole lot of sense to me either. It was a plot device needed to provide some suspense, but I for one would like to know a little more about what the intended purpose of this contraption was. Alcatraz seems to have more weird rooms in its lower levels than the Paris Opera House has in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. John Schwartzman's photography is heavy on colored filters and a smoky look.
In short, this is a summer action film that entertains for an afternoon and then fades away. Rate it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
For those who were wondering after the film who is this Don Simpson for whose memory THE ROCK is dedicated, he is the producer of the film. According to the Internet Movie Database he produced FLASHDANCE (1983), THIEF OF HEARTS (1984), BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984), TOP GUN (1986), BEVERLY HILLS COP II (1987), DAYS OF THUNDER (1990), THE REF (1994), DANGEROUS MINDS (1995), CRIMSON TIDE (1995), BAD BOYS (1995), and THE ROCK (1996).
There is much toward the end of the film that leaves a sour taste in one's mouth. There were contrivances in the plot that just work too blatantly to smooth off rough edges. General Hummel was doing what he thought was right and there certainly were those in the audience who would probably have agreed. He was certainly risking his life for a principle. The film would have taken some risks by having an idealistic villain who was not just a fanatic and it would have been a nice touch to leave the character that way. But this was not a script to take any such risks. The script had to turn him around and make him change sides at the end so that there was no chance that anybody would be rooting for the bad guys. The script had to make sure that by the end of the film everyone the heroes were fighting were unquestionably bad. That makes the ending just a little too neat. Having Goodspeed stab himself in the heart (thank you, Mr. Tarantino), roll on the floor, then drag himself up in a dramatic pose to wave flares at the approaching planes was just a bit more overripe a climax than the film needed. All that was needed at that point was for a Great White Shark to jump out of the water and start nipping at his toes while a tidal wave bore down on him from the right. And does anybody have any idea how an injection in the heart can stop someone's skin from boiling off???
Oh, and by the way, Alcatraz was closed as a prison in 1963 so if Mason had spent so long in there it would have had to have been well prior to 1963. Now for what was he imprisoned and what were the last words of the film?
By : Mark R. Leeper
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 4
Now *this* is more like it. Soaked in testosterone, star-powered by a trio of A-list actors, and stylish steered by 24-year-old BAD BOYS director Michael Bay, THE ROCK delivers the sort of all-out sensory assault that this year's summer season has been in dire need of. Producers Don Simpson-- who died this spring and to whom the film is dedicated to-- and Jerry Bruckheimer (TOP GUN, BEVERLY HILL COP) know that nothing succeeds like excess. They've pushed THE ROCK to be their hardest, fastest, and loudest blockbuster yet. The results are just that: big, bold, immensely entertaining, *and* of surprising depth. A canny combination of popular genres, THE ROCK is equal parts caper flick and buddy pic, mixed with bits and pieces of political conspiracy and secret-agent stuff. All shaken, not stirred, of course. (Imagine an Oliver Stone-scripted DIE HARD sequel starring James Bond and you're halfway there.)
The plot introduces a disgruntled Marine general (Ed Harris) who has devised an elaborate hostage scheme for getting money to the families of servicemen who were disowned by the government after certain secret missions. He and a crack group of soldiers steal a set of gas-filled rockets, infiltrate Alcatraz island in the San Francisco Bay, and threaten mass death and destruction if their demands are not met. The feds respond by sending in a SEAL team accompanied by two peculiar characters: an FBI chemical weapons specialist (Nicholas Cage) who has more experience with a guitar than a gun and a former Alcatraz inmate (Sean Connery) with a rather unusual history. One knows about rockets; the other knows about "the Rock." (Connery's character is a former British intelligence agent, wink wink, who stole some of J. Edgar Hoover's secrets and has since been held, without trial, in various maximum- security prisons for the last thirty years.)
Before they land on the island-- via underwater transport in a nod to THUNDERBALL-- both Cage and Connery get their fair share of horseplay. Cage is at the center of a nifty bomb diffusion/poison gas sequence near the beginning of the film, while Connery later performs an ingenious escape from a high-rise penthouse. (Oh, if only Pierce Brosnan were so dashing.) Both Cage and Connery end up in a spectacular car chase, with one in a "borrowed" Ferrari and the other driving a civilian (!) Humvie. The director films much of the chase in close-up, which allows us to see such dizzying details as a row of parking meters that disintegrates into a cloud of coins. (He also knows when to pull back the camera. Like when a trolley car goes airborne.) By the time Cage and Connery get to the island-- to play cat-and-mouse with the bad guys-- the more faint-hearted viewers may find themselves already exhausted!
The strengths of THE ROCK are many: the contrast between Cage's mild-mannered intensity and Connery's quicker, more-unpredictable wit; Ed Harris barking orders in his customarily clipped and no- nonsense fashion; the furrowed brows of David Morse, Michael Biehn, and William Forsythe as supporting players in the best boys-club cast since CRIMSON TIDE; cinematographer John Schwartzman's gorgeous bronze and blue hues; and, of course, director Michael Bay's remarkable use of quick-cutting. (You can probably count on two hands the number of shots that last longer than five seconds.) The film's flashy, in-your-face-and-you-better-pay-attention style of narrative may turn off some viewers. Those who can't see the subtle differences between "10" and "11" on a volume dial, for example, may wish to skip this one. THE ROCK roars and for obvious reasons. Just as we need the juice to gloss over the various preposterous plot points, we also need the juice to ensure that *this* summer's thrill ride is more exciting than last summer's. And the summer before. And the summer before that one...
