And, like Con Air, everyone-to borrow the phrase of the week-understands the assignment. That’s enough top-tier character actors to fill at least one cell block-and a similar strategy producer Jerry Bruckheimer would take the following year as he and Cage reunited for Con Air. McGinley and the FBI team of John Spencer and William Forsythe.
It’s the inspired work of three smaller ensembles that hold things together: Cage and Connery Ed Harris’ terrorist General Hummel and his main military subordinates, including David Morse, Tony Todd, Bokeem Woodbine and John C. While differing slightly in tone from these examples, The Rock’s use of its cast hits the sweet spot many of these films are missing when aiming for an R-rated Saturday morning cartoon. Extrapolated out to the modern-day action hero, this is just like how The Rock (a confusing person to bring into a discussion of The Rock, I know) and Jason Statham are contractually protected from losing an on-screen fight. Disney’s so precious about its MCU heroes that it didn’t want them to be shown getting beaten up in fighting video games. Some characters have plot armor some have capitalism armor. It’s one of the reasons why most of the action storytelling in the MCU fails to satisfy: Aside from the subpar filmmaking (choreography, color, editing/camera placement choices), you are always aware that rather than watching fallible characters fight, you’re watching unstoppable brands bump into each other in marketable poses. To take it back to the action figure analogy, an imaginative playtime session becomes imbalanced if every figure is vying for the spotlight. If Bay was simply smashing a bunch of Expendables together, meaty A-listers ricocheting off each other’s clashing star personas, the film wouldn’t work. Teaming up Sean Connery’s swaggering escape artist John Mason and Nicolas Cage’s manic chemical weapons specialist Stanley Goodspeed to infiltrate the island prison is already a match made in charisma heaven, but how they’re deployed alongside the rest of the cast makes all the difference. 25 years after its release, Bay’s takedown of bombastic patriots and the country that grooms them-his trip through the Temple of Doom that (apparently) lurks under Alcatraz-still hits the spot like amaretto cream and peach sorbet.īefore understanding how the interlocking, over-the-top, contradictory elements of this film work together to create a morally greyscale, macho action figure bonanza, you have to understand the action figures themselves. It is Bay at his most unintentionally insightful, where his restless leg syndrome shooting style and machismo-laden humor poke fun at (and even critique) a military-industrial toy box that he’d spend most of his career happily tumping over.
#Winnners go home and fuck the prom queen movie#
The prison break film (going in the reverse direction of most entries in its subgenre) is perhaps the only movie where Bay’s sensibilities have been reined in by his writers rather than the other way around. But maybe that’s why The Rock, the 1996 film that struggles most openly with its director, is his still best. The jock rock filmmaker’s explosion-heavy and quick-cut style has been parodied more often than his terrible, usually offensive sense of humor, but he’s one of few modern filmmakers where general audiences know what his name implies about the film.
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