Who was dill enough to hand such good material to Michael Bay?

Rating: 6/10 (2 May 2000)

I won't say the script is perfect. Some of the dialogue clunks - that corny speech the president gives! I mean, really: `How does one weigh eighty lives against five million?' One counts. -Or my favourite (no doubt I paraphrase a little): `We can't risk letting him loose. He's an escape artist.' It's funnier than `You can't fight in here, it's the war room,' but I suspect the humour was unintentional. And however over the top the action may have been, it all seems much sillier when we're casually informed that John Mason knows all of the FBI's secrets: `The alien ship at Roswell, who really shot J.F.K. ...'; I was surprised they didn't add, `... and the truth about the Cottingley fairies.' These clunky lines eat away at the script's solid foundation like acid. It's particularly bad to watch how keen the film seems to be to undermine its two main characters, Mason and Goodspeed. Sean Connery (Mason), and to an even greater extent, Nicholas Cage (Goodspeed) are frequently called upon to drop out of character in order to deliver some tough-guy sarcastic comment; it's never worth it. The most jarring moment comes when Connery says, `Your BEST? Losers always whine about doing their best. Winners go home and hump the prom queen.' (Actually, he used a different verb; but - and I strongly disapprove of this censorship regulation - the IMDb won't permit me to reproduce it here.) Not only is this not the kind of thing Mason would say; nobody from outside the United States would ever, in any context, utter the phrase `prom queen'.
But these departures from character at least show us that Mason and Goodspeed had characters to depart FROM. This is something, surely. In fact it's a good deal. The characters actually survive the corrosive process the writers have put them through. There are a lot of ideas - plot and character ideas, I mean - in `The Rock', and they're mostly rather good ideas. (Okay, ONE of the ideas is, `terrorist threatens to destroy city unless his rather silly demands are met' - an oldie, but a goodie.) The story is well built and it feels satisfying however much the fascist military sentimentalism sours the palate, however many of Michael Bay's damned music video montages we have to sit through, however the rapid cutting tends to confuse rather than enlighten us as to exactly what's going on during the action sequences. A good story triumphs - at least to some degree - over poor execution.
NB: Not once but twice a character sticks a syringe into his own heart. I find this kind of thing MUCH more disturbing to watch than most of the things people complain about seeing in the cinema; I suspect I'm not alone, and I feel it's my duty to warn others. Notwithstanding this, or anything else I've said, it's an enjoyable movie.