Best pure cheese movie after Top Gun

Rating: 10/10 (26 August 2018)

The whole point of this movie is to enjoy over the top dialogue and situations. I watched this movie originally in 97 and it is still my pick me up movie next to Top Gun when I want to enjoy pure Hollywood cheesy drama/comedy.
If you want top notch effects and subtle drama this is not your movie. Here Nicolas Cage and John Cusack are the perfect heroic figures you dream when you are 13 years old and somebody gives you a budget to create a movie. From this view the movie is pure genius.
Cage plays the role of the good guy caugth in bad situations that land him in jail and in the Con Air flight that is supposed to move the worst criminals of the nation to a new supermax. All the story details of the movie pretty much do not make any sense in reality, but as movie tropes they are very entertaining.
This movie has all the movie tropes you can pack: from Cage writing love letters to his daugther explainig to an innocent mind how in jail you don't have playtime, to a prisoner that has to be transported Hannibal Lecter style but turns out to be a sweet philosophical guy. Malkovitch is the perfect mastermind sicopath criminal that has to be witty to boot. Many of the characters are overacted in a very effective way to make the movie hilarious even when you know that they are doing it intentionally.
There is plenty of action, physical comedy, puns all over, innocent people being as pure as the criminals being cheesily bad to make this a very entertaining movie. The ending could not be better with the non sequitur landing on Vegas strip. You know this scene does not make any sense, but it is part of the over the topness of the movie and therefore is a perfect fit for all the other exagerations. The villain -Cirus the Virus- is so evil that he has to go over several painful ways to kill him when you know that only one of them was necessary, but he is close to immortal so he needs to be killed several times.
And to top the cheesines Cage has to rescue a dirty bunny from the sewer to have a proper birthday present to his daughter. The scene where Cirus makes a threat to the bunny has to be one of the most hilarious things ever if you buy into the overly theatricness of the movie.
To me the greatness of the film resides on the playful way it uses a lot of classic cliches in an intentional way to push your buttons without insulting you as a viewer as you are into the joke all the time. This is not a movie to be taken seriously and at the same time it can be very smart when you notice how all the details are shown to maximize the epicness of the story. So please if you haven't watch this give it a chance, all the sillyness and outragoeusness is played masterfully and you will have a good time.