I have yet to see a more recent film that is better than The Rock.

Rating: 10/10 (17 December 2009)

To describe The Rock in the most reassuring terms: Almost as sensational as Die Hard. That is the calibre of action movie we are looking at here. The production of The Rock was blessed with a $75 million budget, a hard R rating and a veteran movie producer and director Michael Bay has utilised those three assets to their full potential. The Rock is one of the wildest, most breathtaking action movies you will ever see.
The Rock shows us the two most beautifully established characters in an action movie since Lethal Weapon. Of course, being an action film The Rock has less dialogue driven scenes than your average movie but that doesn't even matter because the dialogue is so truthful about the characters. The movie also puts a very original spin on the Hollywood terrorist plot. In the end, the main bad guy turns out not be to half as crazy or hypocritical as it first seems and his vicious Cronies turn out be the only real bad guys.
So, the plot of the movie: General Francis Hummel (Ed Harris) is angry at the government for their disrespectful treatment of combat veterans who fell in battle and their families. He doesn't like the fact that their families are not compensated and are told lies about what happened to them. He and his Platoon of Marines seize control of a Naval weapons Depot and steal a cache of rockets full of extremely deadly poison gas. Hummel and his Marines then seize control of the former prison island of Alcatraz, take 81 hostages and place the rockets there, pointing them towards San Fransisco. He phones the head of the FBI and tells him that if the US government does not give him $100 million dollars within 24 hours to disperse among the families of all the Marines that he commanded who died in battle and his own men who he brought with him on the mission, he will fire the poison gas missiles at San Fransisco, killing millions of people. The leaders of America's armed forces meet to discuss how to confront the problem. They decide to send in a Navy Seal team to infiltrate the prison. Along with the Seal team they send in the FBI's best chemical weapons expert, Stanley Goodspeed (Nicholas Cage) who knows how to disarm the rockets and imprisoned British SAS agent John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery), who was held for some time in Alcatraz for stealing a top secret FBI microfilm and not giving up its location and is the only man to have ever escaped. He logically knows how to break into the prison. The team of Navy Seals barely make it inside the prison when things take a dramatic turn for the worse. They are surrounded by General Hummel's Marines in the prison's shower room and mercilessly massacred, but Connery and Cage survive the encounter by staying hidden in the tunnel below. They have less than 15 hours to disarm all the rockets and set up green flares to signal for evacuation before the US Airforce bombs the Island into oblivion.
With the exception of a fairly routine car chase, the action scenes in The Rock are all inventive and unique. One of my favourites is when the rogue marines corner Connery and Cage at the end of a mine cart track and they must use all their wits and limited resources to defeat their deadly pursuers. The movie's last handful of bad guys are taken to hell in a spectacular fashion involving such methods as a sphere of poison gas and a rocket. The movie climaxes with what has become one of the most iconic scenes of 1990s action cinema, as our hero played by Nicholas Cage, races out of the lighthouse with his two green flares in a desperate attempt to save himself and the hostages from being blasted into oblivion by an imminent air force carpet bombing.
While not achieving the classic status of Die Hard, The Rock is still remembered and respected 13 years on as an elite action movie, one of the finest examples of great action cinema. Coming from someone who has seen plenty of highly praised, "Important","classic" movies from Citizen Kane to Pulp Fiction, let me say that The Rock is one of the best damn movies ever made.