Michael Bay's best...

Rating: 10/10 (1 October 2005)

To sum up the Rock succinctly is fairly easy: it is a buddy film. This is a movie that brings all sorts of clichés together, but achieves the difficult success of making them seem like they're original and apt.
In short, The Rock doesn't have an original bone in its body, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Michael Bay, the film's director who is somewhat notorious due to his penchant for mindless action, clearly hadn't learnt many of the bad tricks he's picked up in more recent offerings.
Most impressively, for Bay, rather than spending genuine hours with over the top car chases, helicopter action, foot chases and just about everything else we've all come to loathe in 'A Michael Bay Film' the director succeeds in turning in an extremely tight, well paced movie which thrusts you into the top notch action almost immediately, but doesn't fail to show you the human side of the protagonists.
Nicolas Cage is excellent as the lab rat, Stanley Goodspeed, a man who would probably call himself a geek. He's happy, drives the epitome of dull vehicles, has a gorgeous girlfriend and usually lives a very boring life. However work in any department of the FBI during a Michael Bay film is seldom going to be prosaic and it's not long before good old Stanley is disarming bombs, getting sprayed with poisonous gas and finding out unfortunate, ill timed, wonderful news...
But that's all in a day's work. What is unusual is when Ed Harris, wonderfully straight laced and sincere, steals a number of rockets armed with a chemical capable of eradicating an entire city in the time it takes to breath in the gas... Harris', or General Hummel's, choice of target is San Francisco and what better choice of venue to launch a battery of VX poison gas, a compound that exists and is genuinely as horrible as described, than Cisco's most famous penitentiary?
Hummel turns up with a bunch of 'can do' type marines who all agree that America, particularly the Pentagon, has been screwing the Special Forces for too long... it must stop! Naturally, as a bona fide patriot and all round good army guy, Hummel reckons the best way to achieve this is to take several dozen tourists hostage on Alcatraz, aka the Rock, ring up the director of the FBI and demand $100 million dollars, most of which will be given away in a fairly hefty act of altruism.
The fact that none of this rings untrue is the central tenet of the movie and is all down to Harris, whose lined, worried face manages, with almost no overacting, to portray a wide range of emotions. These vary from impassioned orator to reluctant villain and he does it with a wit and skill that Michael Bay might well not have asked for. Regardless, having such an excellent central bad guy is what pulls The Rock away from the pack.
It's also helped by Cage's comedic foil in all this, Sean Connery clearly relishing the part he receives and probably amazed that someone decided that he could genuinely be Scottish in at least one major role! With a mixture of twinkly eyes, physical brawn and his typical slurred delivery, big Sean comes away with the lion's share of the good lines and the humour, his best moments coming when he's face to face with Harris or nattering with Cage.
The two leads work very well together, the hyperactive, fidgety Cage inhabiting Stanley with just the right mixture of nervous fear and 'let's do it!' attitude. Connery smirks his way through the entire piece, loving every wet, dark, dank moment while Harris is clearly on another plane of acting, imagining himself as the devil's advocate rather than another, bad as sin, Michael Bay villain.
All in all, the film cannot be faulted for its three principles, the pacing, the script, the one liners, the quality of acting, the suspension of disbelief or any of the things that have grated, on me at least, with films like Bad Boys (1 and 2), Pearl Harbour, The Island and so forth. This is a tightly wound action thriller that achieves both goals handsomely, throwing in the comedy and happy ending without detracting from anything.
That is not to say there aren't faults. One personal bugbear is Hanz Zimmer's awful use of panpipes to indicate moments of emotional growth. There are occasions when Cage's wide eyed mania gets a little annoying and the standard continuity problems are present... how does Connery's John Mason get from hanging upside down on a wrecked mining cart to poised delicately above a pair of marines who are travelling on an entirely separate vehicle?
However, these problems are usually over before they've started and seldom detract from the feeling of fun and excitement. Other standouts are the supporting cast, John Spencer on fine, waspy form for example, the limited, well crafted car chase (not chases), including one of the most legendary lines ever committed to film from Cage and the rest.
In short, this is as perfect an action film as you're ever likely to see, creating an overall product certainly the equal of, if not superior to, the sum of its parts. I'd advise any fan of action flicks who hasn't seen this movie to buy it, not just see it, at the first possibility. However, there's unlikely to be that many of you!