"Con Air" won't let you take it too seriously

Rating: 7/10 (6 August 2012)

In the era of the gritty blockbuster actioner, tongue in cheek action has become a lost art in Hollywood. 1997's "Con Air" resides between the tongue-in-cheek heyday of the '80s and the explosive realism of today, but it certainly leans toward the former.
Nicolas Cage stars as Cameron Poe, an Army Ranger who immediately after returning home to Alabama gets in a brawl with some drunks that turns deadly. He lands in prison, having to wait eight years to finally see his wife and the daughter he's never met. But when parole day finally arrives, his lift home comes in the form of a U.S. marshal max-security aircraft transporting the country's most dangerous criminals. When they manage to overtake the plane, Cameron proves to be the only one capable of thwarting them.
"Con Air" takes much delight in its concept. Screenwriter Scott Rosenberg gleefully crafts an array of criminal characters that are absolute freaks, but not without a large degree of self- awareness as to their rotten nature. Equipped with absurd nicknames such as Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom and Johnny-23 (23 being the number of women he's been convicted of raping), these villains strike a balance between formidable and not to be taken too seriously.
John Malkovich leads the way as Cyrus, a "learned" convict who educated himself in prison. Malkovich has fun with his typical over-enunciation and patented snide tone, making him the ideal cliché mastermind. Ving Rhames plays his right hand and physical compliment, Diamond Dog, a black supremacist of sorts. The other convicts receive boatloads of personality and the script hypes them up ahead of time. Steve Buscemi's Garland "The Marietta Mangler" Greene even gets the Hannibal Lecter treatment ... yup, Steve Buscemi.
These nut jobs actually make a lion-mained Cage speaking in an awful Southern accent seem totally normal. As ripped as he's ever been in his career, Cage makes for a convincing action hero, though his real strength turns out to be how flips countless one-liners into enjoyable movie quotes. Cage seems to know exactly what kind of a movie he's in and never flinches. Few actors can say the line "put the bunny back in the box" with a straight face and get away with it. Cage has always had that gift.
Director Simon West keeps the tone light, but that doesn't mean he also eases up the on the action. "Con Air" has a pretty relentless motor and all of its major sequences feel as though they could be the climactic showdown. It could've ended an hour in and been effectively entertaining, so everything in the final hour feels like a bonus. The degree of explosions does get to an absurd level by the end, but that's part of the film's charm.
To some extent, there does feel like a wasted opportunity to create an intense self-contained action thriller aboard the plane. One man trying to stop a plane hijacked by horrific convicts has plenty of potential, but the plane lands three times in the movie, plus John Cusack's character, Larkin, plays the U.S. marshal trying to rectify the disaster and keep an over- zealous DEA agent (Colm Meaney) from jeopardizing his plan.
Helping us stay invested in the outcome is the desire to see Cameron and his daughter meet for the first time. The film spends not 10 minutes setting up the "relationship" between the two (Cameron's lone motivation) in hopes we'll care and somehow we do. Care too much, however, and you start to wonder how a guy on parole gets stuck taking a plane full of the worst of the worst and why at one point he elects not to take an easy out. Those are not questions worth wondering.
A lot of action films struggle to cross the border from ridiculous and stupid to tongue in cheek and facetious, but "Con Air" is one of them. From the story to West down to the actors, there's an unspoken acknowledgement of exactly what kind of a movie this is and together they churn out one of the '90s finest guilty pleasure action films.
~Steven C
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