A Zany Laff Riot

Rating: Null/10 (25 January 2003)

SPOILERS. Aboard a cargo plane filled with madmen and hostages and under fire from Army helicopters, Malkovitch, known as "Cyrus the Virus" (cf., "Hannibal the Cannibal"), grabs a filthy stuffed bunne and holds a pistol against it and shouts, "Anybody tries anything and the bunny gets it." A skinheaded convict, Malkovitch is given the only lines in the movie that sound amusing -- or even meaningful. "My proclivities are well known and often lamented in legal lore." Well, I suppose others have one or two good lines. A huge airplane takes off towing a new car in the air behind it. A passenger stares at the flopping thing for a moment and remarks, "Under other circumstances this might be considered unusual."
The rest of the dialogue can be thrown out. The film jumps from one action scene to another. The proclivities of the writers for one-line wisecracks are as intense as the effects people's (there must be a hundred listed in the credits) proclivities for producing exploding fireballs, usually with someone in the foreground trying to outrun the ballooning flame. I have a proclivity for turning these kind of flicks off but also a penchant for hanging on in order to see just how vulgar the whole thing can become. It ends with a wingless airplane landing amidst cars (don't worry; no bystanders are killed) on the Las Vegas strip. Vulgarity piled upon vulgarity.
But watching this thing also gave me a chance to try to figure out what makes Steve Buscemi what he is. It's his high, deceptively harmelss-sounding voice, combined with a set of blue eyeballs like a child's agates, and flabby lips behind which there lurks one of the white plastic Dracula false teeth with prominent incisors that belong with a Halloween constume. Every time he smiles, the viewer shudders. He's supposed to be some sort of child killer but while his inmade buddies are demolishing hordes of junked cars and offing soldiers, he's sitting at a play table singing hyms with a little girl who somehow manages to survive the party. The director does his best to make us fear for the helpless lamb's welfare, since there are multiple shots of Buscemi leering at her, but nothing happens. It's as if Frankenstein's monster never threw his playmate into the lake.
Then there is Nick Cage. He has long convict-type hair in this one, and he's all bulked up and muscular. Why do actors show such proclivities these days? In addition to Cage we've seen Charlie Sheen, John Travolta, and of course Sylvester Stallone. And who knows how many actors tried and gave up out of boredom. I mean -- can you imagine Jimmy Stewart bulked up? Or Gary Cooper with Schwarzenegger's physique?
John Cusack has a thankless role. He is to Nick Cage's ex-Ranger inmate as, say, Alec Baldwin was to Sean Connery's Russian submarine skipper in "The Hunt for Red October." The succulent Monica Potter might as well be elsewhere. Rachel Ticotin is one of the good people, locked in a cage aboard the hijacked aircraft, constantly in jeopardy. Rape always lurks ominously in the background when your captors are a bunch of dim-witted libidinous thugs -- except for one Hispanic transvestite who, come to think of it, doesn't look too bad in short skirts. At any rate, he looks better as a woman than Hillary Swank looked as a man.
The editing is so poor that the action during the action scenes, meaning almost the entire movie, can't really be followed. We lose track of who's where, of who's doing what to whom, of what machine that particular chunk of falling metal belongs to, of where the smoke is coming from, of what the hell is going on.
Not that it matters much. The violence is a Ding an Sich. The plot is too full of holes to really bother describing. I'll mention one puzzler. The huge cargo plane lands at a deserted airport but the pilot loses control and the monstrous cumbersome thing plows off the runway through mountains of desert sand and decapitates a couple of shacks along the way. How are you going to get it to fly again? You get the convicts together tugging on ropes, pull the airplane out of the hole it's dug for itself, start it up and fly it away, that's how.
It's impossible to take this in the least bit seriously without doing yourself a big disfavor. It's the kind of movie in which, when the airplane is finally finished careering down the strip, demolishing every grotesque neon sign in sight and smashing into one of the casinos, it comes to rest with its radar bulb just barely nudging a slot machine, which then rings up 3 sevens and ejaculates a bucketfull of coins. It's amusing at that level all the way through, beginning with the punny title. I can't honestly say this movie is enjoyable, but it's fascinating, watching things sink as low as they possibly can.