Exhilarating action.

Rating: 8/10 (29 January 2005)

The Rock is an exceptionally well put-together action film that leaves you completely breathless. It's not high art, but it may be one of the more evolved examples of the 80s/90s action blockbuster, and it's certainly a lot of fun.
The whole plot is merely a mechanism to buddy up Sean Connery as a grizzled but still tough ex-antiterrorist operative and Nicholas Cage who plays (tongue in cheek) a lab-bound FBI agent. Ed Harris makes a terrific bad guy as the mad general armed with some really icky chemicals. Why does he choose to take over a prison instead of, for example, hide a VX rocket under a populated street and threaten to trigger it by remote control? Well, because it's in the script! Now carefully add the set pieces. A crumbling old fortress full of lots of pieces of twisted metal where bad guys can impale themselves on. A mine car run obviously designed by the same LSD-tripping mining engineer who designed the one in Indiana Jones. A furnace that belches flame and swishes various sharp metal implements at you every few seconds. (This is the most fun!) If The Rock was a video game it'd be Doom II. Still, it's very exciting to see Connery back in his old form, and Cage bringing up the rear. Every scene crackles with tension and suspense, but you get the feeling it's not totally serious, as there's a comic edge to a lot of the film, especially the dialogue.
This movie could only be made in the Clinton era. It disdains politicians in that oh-so-familiar Hollywood way, but it carries a certain amount of venom toward the military mindset as well, portraying Marines as homicidal testosterone-flushed automatons. I can't see a Hollywood producer getting near a script with that kind of subtext today. But, overall, The Rock is a good time, cheap harmless fun.