One of the top ten worst big-budget films (possibly the worst) ever! POS!

Rating: 1/10 (5 March 2006)

Con Air is the type of movie that separates film-goers into 2 distinct camps: Those who think or dare to say aloud, "this film has it ALL" and those who feel as if a chunk of their "life force" has been forever stolen. The latter leaves the TV room or, worse, the theatre weak, angry, and sad for the state of cinematic art in the western world. Expertly ruined by director, Simon West, Con Air at first glance has the look and feel of a crummy, jingoistic Michael Bay film, crammed with slo-mo, gratuitous violence, testosterone, low-rent style, and zero substance. We watch, uncaring, as sell-out actor Nick Cage struggles to stay alive in an airborne turbo-prop chock full of prison socio-pathology. He's a former bad boy who's trying to pay his dues in a world that's "totally out of his control!" If I had to single out only one defect in this abortion of entertainment, it would be the unnecessarily-large ensemble of otherwise accomplished actors. This is a recent trend in Hollywood: Get a separate actor to over-play each separate emotion in the colorful rainbow of human experience, like in that rocket-powered reel of pure excrement, Armageddon. In Con Air, it's the "criminal" version of the trend. One guy is the genius psychopath (the worst on record), another eats faces (the fastest eater of faces around), and so on. In summation, this whole miasma of poorly-conceived, infantile ideas is an insult to a thinking person's intelligence. And, anybody who likes it or had anything to do with its creation should be bashed squarely in the teeth. Insert sound effect of crunching bone here.