Rockin'

Rating: 6/10 (23 September 2003)

Slam-bang high-tech action-thriller stuff. Ed Harris, as a much-decorated combat commander of legendary status, deploys a hand-picked squadron of elite renegade Marines to take over Alcatraz. He holds hostage not only a civilian tour group, but the entire city of San Fran, at which he's aimed 15 tactical missiles armed with the nastiest nerve gas in the universe. His goal? To get the US government to acknowledge, with posthumous honors and compensation to family members, about 100 men lost -- and unacknowledged -- in covert operations ranging from Vietnam to Desert Storm.
Here come the Feds: they send in a team of SEALs led by Michael Biehn (in a reprise, basically, of his role in "Aliens"). Their ringers: Nicolas Cage, in a rather John Cusackish performance as a lab-wonk toxic-weapons expert, hilariously short of combat experience; and Sean Connery, as a long-held secret prisoner of the US, a Brit agent who has all the dirt on the FBI. He knows all the secrets from Roswell (!) to the JFK assassination, and he's the only man ever to escape from Alcatraz.
The scripter's inclusion of the presence in San Fran of people who are near and dear to both these characters is more than a little contrived. It has MOTIVATION written all over it in the case of Connery's character, and UP THE ANTE in the case of Cage's. But what the hell: this isn't drama, but melodrama, essentially an hyperbolic mismatched-buddy-cop movie, and the pace, the action, and the stars' charisma are equal to it. An enjoyable cliffhanger, if wildly improbable.