TIme to grow-up, Mr. Bay

Rating: 3/10 (18 February 1999)

"I make movies for 15-year-old boys? What a crime!" -Michael Bay You know what, Mike? I was 15 when I saw this movie back in the summer of 1996 and I wasn't too impressed, so maybe you ought to take back that ludicrous comment. As a matter of fact I went to see it twice (June and July 1996), just to make sure my judgement was honest and correct.
Since debuting with Bad Boys in 1995, Bay has averaged about one movie every two years. But I think that it's quite sad and pathetic that in 16 years and nine movies he has not matured as a filmmaker in the slightest. If anything he's regressed.
The Rock has characters with just a touch more depth than we're used to in Bay films. It's not necessarily a big story but he seems to stretch it out over two hours with heinously over-cut action scenes and extraneous sub-plotting.
General Francis Xavier Hummel (Ed Harris) takes over Alcatraz with some poisonous gas rockets and aims them at San Francisco with the intention of vaporising everyone unless the families of each member of his dead team is paid $1,000,000. A nerdy and heavily bored FBI agent, named Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), is called to San Francisco from Washington to observe and instruct the inevitable SEAL operation to overthrow the Marines on Alcatraz. But wait, there's more. Alcatraz is a maze of twisted metal and broken walls. They won't stand a chance without someone who has knowledge of how to break out. Or break in.
And so enters the philosophizing and lanky-haired John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery) at about 45 minutes into the movie. He's been in jail for 30 years and doesn't appear to be annoyed at having to work for the very people who have held him without trial for so long. There is an utterly pointless and indulgent car chase before he actually gets down to business.
Once on the island, the SEALS, as predicted, are crap and get killed instantly. So, basically, Hummel wants to honor his fallen comrades by killing more American soldiers. How absurd, but not much in this film makes sense. Plus these SEALS have thoroughly extensive training and, in real life, there is NO WAY they'd end up being so useless.
Goodspeed and Mason are not a great pairing. I don't know what the deal is with Nic Cage, when he's good he's great, but more often than not he's so unbelievably awful I wonder how he manages to get work. Goodspeed isn't very appealing. He's annoying, not funny, and little of his dialogue sounds natural coming from his mouth. When he tries to be tough, he just seems ridiculous. Mason is just an old James Bond. Hell, he's even a British Secret Agent. The role was written with Connery in mind, so don't expect anything but his elite brand of OAP smart-ass cool.
Coherent editing is not this movie's strength. In fact, coherence is hardly something one would associate with The Rock. There are so many distractions and superfluous plot points that the only way Bay can compensate is to turn every scene into a epileptic blur. The target audience is familiar with this kind of film-making anyway, and it has sadly become the accepted norm for action movies.
The Rock is inferior and less engaging than a similar movie that came out the month before its release. Executive Decision attempts the same theme and an identical form of tension. In 135 minutes, it wastes no time on sub-plotting, develops far more likable characters and is way more exciting.
Exec Dec is played straight. The Rock is played to look cool and hip. It's not. And apart from Zimmer's entertaining score, there's not much to recommend. This rock could have skipped along the surface, but merely sinks to the bottom under its over-written, over-wrought, over-directed weight.
Oh, and if Mason is supposed to have a major beef with Womack then perhaps they should have cast someone older than John Spencer who would have been 19/20-years-old when his character first crossed Mason.