Why is this rated so highly?

Rating: 4/10 (10 October 2016)

I don't look at IMDb until after I've seen a movie, but it's pretty rare that the IMDb rating is far off from what I would rate (or at least in the same general goodness or badness range). This is apparently one of those rare cases, though. I had to double check that I pulled up the right title when I saw a rating of 7.4 (at least at the time of this writing).
I honestly can't understand what people see here. It's over 2 hours long, and I was watching the clock after the first hour, hoping it was getting near the end. I mean, it's a light enough action ride - I was leaning towards rating it a "5", but then the number of things that bothered me just kept mounting, and I finally decided "4" was more appropriate. Here's some of those things (I don't intend any significant spoilers, but clicked the spoiler alert just in case):

The movie couldn't seem to decide whether it was a gritty war drama (lots of scowling, shooting, and F-bombs), or a slightly tongue-in-cheek action movie (comic relief characters, trying-to-be-witty dialogue). Heck, it even seemed like Nicolas Cage couldn't decide either, because he bounced back and forth between the two.

Similarly, a fair amount of carnage during the shooting scenes, but Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery dove, walked, or swam away from everything, no matter how many people were shooting, or how big the explosive device, or how far their bodies were thrown.

The characters were wooden and stereotypical. A flamboyant gay hair stylist? Some "Sir, yes sir!" Marines, the wronged ex-con, the never-been-in-the-field agent, the trolley driver, ...

The plot was predictable and cliché

The drawn out shoot-em-up, crash-em-up sequences. I haven't seen so many cars trashed in a chase scene since the Blues Brothers. And geez, that Humvee didn't even get a broken headlight.

In short, it was just one cliché scene after another, strung together over a tired and predictable story line. OK, I watched it in 2016. Maybe it was fresh in 1996 when it came out, but I find that hard to believe.