Effective OTT action caper

Rating: 8/10 (19 August 2007)

"Con Air" is a film that inhabits the alternative universe where everything is highly combustible, bad guys are always larger-than-life and have a talent for quips, heroes can defy the laws of gravity and probability, and vehicles of all shapes and sizes have a tendency to crash spectacularly. There is nothing ostensibly wrong with this kind of film, but it is not for everyone, and some may be annoyed with the lack of reality as the stunts and improbable events pile up higher and higher.
The movie is one of the better specimens of the over-the-top sub-genre of action movies, mainly due to an excellent cast list and a very fluid sense of direction. The editing hardly puts a scene wrong, and the plot holds the attention for a good two-thirds before it slides into ludicrous, badly-orchestrated overdrive at the end. One of the biggest bugbears is that some major plot points are overlooked along the way, such as who helped the bad guys obtain materials like plans of the plane, etc.
Nicolas Cage does reasonably well in a role that is effectively a rewritten John McClane, but the clothes do not quite fit him right, and neither does the Deep South accent. While it would be very easy to see Bruce Willis romping around the plane if this were another "Die Hard" sequel, there is something just a little off-key with Cage's character, an Army Ranger who is being paroled after seven years of a ten-year sentence for killing a man in a bar-room fight. This may partly be due to the over-emphasis on sugary romance featuring his wife and the daughter he has never met. It's possible to get behind Cage as he takes on the bad guys, but he just isn't as likable as McClane.
On the other side of the cast, Malkovich and Buscemi both play very effective, believable psychopaths, and a scene of Buscemi's freed character stalking a little girl is among the most tension-filled in the film. The rest of the cast largely play their parts effectively.
If you are willing to delve deep enough  and you do not need to examine the movie too closely to spot them  the flaws are there, as the goofs section indicates. Depending on your tolerance for a film to deliver an entertaining story over being entirely realistic or accurate, this may or may not be a problem. Most things considered, "Con Air" has a lot going for it, the least of which being that it is neither "Air Force One" or "Executive Decision" to name but two fellow (and inferior) high-octane action movies featuring airplanes.