A film review by Jesse Hassenger - Copyright © 2003 Filmcritic.com
It wasn't necessarily obvious (or even possible to know) at the time of its 1997 release, but Jerry Bruckheimer's Con Air would represent his finest hour. Bruckheimer isn't the director, of course, but rather the rare movie producer who would claim possessive credit on almost any of his projects. Bruckheimer branches into cheesy thrillers, cheesy inspirational dramas, cheesy inspirational sports dramas, and cheesy television procedurals, but Con Air finds the super-producer munching on his bread and butter: a loaf of action movie, with melted cheese on top.
Not only that, but it's assembled using all of Bruckheimer's tried and tested techniques: Mix movie stars and indie heroes into an eclectic, slumming cast and have them act in a ludicrously high-concept scenario. (Here it is: The worst criminals in the country team up to hijack their prison transport plane! And it's up to one man to stop them!) Then spend lots of money but indulge in a cynical jokiness, and hire a director who will shoot the whole thing like it's a music video or a commercial (preferably for itself).
In the case of Con Air, the director is Simon West. He's not as successful, stylish, or instantly recognizable as Michael Bay, and that may be why the film works so well; it turns out that no Michael Bay knockoff can screw it up quite like the real thing. If Bay and West are just two of many workers on the Bruckheimer assembly line, Bay is the showiest and West is the most efficient, and guess whose product works better?
So, yes, West's direction is full of gratuitous slow-mo and fast cuts, but just enough to goose Con Air's ridiculous premise and talented cast - not enough to work the movie into frenzied, atonal overdrive.
Even so, some might carp that a movie like this wastes nigh a dozen good actors on an expensive game of cops 'n' (mostly) crooks. But plenty of award-winning films have employed equally great ensembles to lesser effect than Con Air. First and foremost is Nicolas Cage as (of course) the wrongfully imprisoned hero just trying to get home to his wife and kid. Cage takes this '80s-style role someplace not so far removed from a Coen Brothers movie, a land of stone-faced cornpone camp. When a fellow prisoner menaces a stuffed toy intended for his daughter, and Cage warns him to "put the bunny back in the box," you believe he'll do something about it - not because the script demands it, but because Cage so convincingly flirts with nuttiness. It takes a planeload of miscreants to make him look like the all-American hero.
Bruckheimer deploys the rest of the cast with strategic obviousness: John Malkovich is the intelligently psychotic ringleader; John Cusack is the smart, fast-talking U.S. Marshal; Dave Chapelle is a wiseass; Steve Buscemi is a serial killer. Only Ving Rhames gets a slight short shrift; they should've thrown him a monologue or something.
The patented Bruckheimer casting works especially well because of Con Air's frankly antisocial sense of humor. Despite the heroics of Cage and Cusack, this variety pack of action-picture villains eventually comes across as weirdly lovable (Malkovich has to make some grimy threats to the safety of Cage's family toward the end, presumably to remind us that, oh yeah, these guys are dangerous). Buscemi's quiet celebrity murderer gets the most perversely respectful treatment, even including his extraneous scenes with a little girl that gleefully balance on an intersection of suspense, humor, and tastelessness.
The whole movie is like that, balancing spectacle and self-parody, unreasonably entertaining and surprisingly difficult to replicate. A more ambitious director might have toppled the whole thing; witness the consistency with which Bay's directorial preening renders his films useless. But with West's confidence competence, and Bruckheimer's reliable slickness, Con Air gets out of its own way and becomes a trash classic.
+
Con Air, producer Jerry Bruckheimer's generic follow-up to 1996's blockbuster, The Rock, is the kind of motion picture that critics refer to when they moan about the "dumbing down" of American cinema. This movie is a perfect example of what's wrong with many big-budget films today: no characters, no intelligence, and, worst of all, little fun. Although director Simon West intends for Con Air to be a comic book come to life, it lacks the visual flair and imagination of all but the most trite comics. The film relies on impressive pyrotechnic displays, but it has been a long time since a well-executed explosion enraptured an audience. Con Air is noisy and flashy, but that can be said about any of the numerous, same-genre pictures that reach screens every year. What the movie lacks are tension and excitement to go along with all the bangs. The action sequences are presented in a pedestrian fashion, and there are too few instances when we feel that the protagonist is in any real danger.
Our hero is Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage), an ex-Army Ranger and Desert Storm veteran who has spent the last eight years in prison serving a sentence for manslaughter (he accidentally killed a man who was threatening his pregnant wife). Now, he has been paroled, and he's on his way home to be reunited with his wife and meet his daughter for the first time. One problem: the flight he's on is carrying a load of vicious criminals bound for detention at a new prison in Alabama. They get loose and take over the plane, and suddenly Cameron finds himself taking orders from Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom (John Malkovich), the self-proclaimed "poster child for the criminally insane." Meanwhile, on the ground, a U.S. Marshal named Vince Larkin (John Cusack) is trying to bring the situation to a peaceful conclusion, despite interference from a Federal agent (Colm Meaney), who wants to shoot down the plane.
At least Con Air isn't as obviously bad as Turbulence. For starters, this film has a couple of assets that the earlier "terror in the sky" film lacked: Nicolas Cage and John Cusack. While the actors are far from their career best here (in fact, Cage often looks bored), mediocre acting from these two is preferable to what we got from Ray Liotta and Lauren Holly. Actually, the really colorful performances belong to the actors playing the criminals. In addition to Malkovich's predatory Cyrus (a role he could probably do in his sleep), Ving Rhames gives us a nasty black militant named Diamond Dog Jones, Steve Buscemi is at his creepy best as The Marietta Mangler, and Danny Trejo is a serial rapist with a tattoo on his arm for each of his victims. (Incidentally, the movie's ambiguous attitude towards Buscemi's character, a child murderer, is disturbing.)
Con Air divides the characters into clearly-defined groups of good and bad (with the members of the latter category vastly outnumbering those of the former). Predictably, with no shades of gray, there isn't one interesting character. Cameron, a candidate for sainthood, has a spotless record -- even the murder that sent him to prison was justifiable. He's too clean to be anything but bland, and, worse still, Scott Rosenberg's script doesn't give him any of the one-liners that we've come to expect from action heroes in this sort of movie. He's like John McLane of Die Hard without the wisecracking charisma.
Another thing that's noteworthy about Con Air is how poorly it's patched together. In his recent review of the movie Rough Magic, film critic Roger Ebert made the observation that "It's a clich้ to talk about great visuals, since if you point a camera in the right direction you can make almost anything look good." Somehow, the cinematographer of Con Air (with an assist from the editor) manages to disprove this theory. With the exception of a few nicely composed shots, the film's look is uniformly stale.
Action movies are typically lauded for their tremendous special effects and their ability to keep viewers on the edge of their seats. Con Air falls short in both categories. In fact, beyond some scenery-chewing by several over-the-top actors and a couple of mildly engaging chase sequences, there's little here to justify the seemingly endless two hour length. Sitting through this movie is like watching a dog running in circles chasing its tail -- the amusement factor dies quickly as the situation become repetitive. Unless you're desperate for a way to kill time, Con Air is one flight you can afford to miss.
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