Actioner, efficient and predictable.

Rating: 5/10 (11 April 2004)

If you're in the mood for an implausible but reassuringly familiar action flick, this should do the job. I don't know that there is a single original thought in this flick. It's all been done before in one guise or another, but it's done about as well here as anywhere else.
Car chases of course are de rigueur. This one involves a Ferarri and a dozen cop cars chasing a Humvee up and down the steep hills of San Francisco. There are multiple smash-ups with flying glass everywhere. The Ferarri knocks down a row of parking meters, spilling thousands of pennies. A telephone pole collapses across the street. Cars do one-and-a-half gainers in midair. A streetcar is blown straight up and comes straight down. And so forth. The chase itself is without point.
I lost count of the number of bodies that crashed through glass windows in slow motion, or the number of deaths by slow-motion exploding squib charges. Bodies fall through glass ceilings or are impaled on some kind of pointed spikes. Is all this beginning to sound familiar?
There is one novel note -- the labyrinthine underground of Alcatraz. Who really knows or remembers what's down there? What we see is a jungle of twisted and rusting iron, crusty gratings, burnt orange bursts of flame that come out of nowhere and accomplish nothing, over-sized rotating cogs, small railroad tracks with small carts on them, caverns, sewers, lots of water, pipes emitting plumes of steam (where is the steam coming from and where is it going?). But -- well, why not? Nobody knows or cares what's really down there. It could be the hanging gardens of Babylon for all anyone knows.
That's about it for originality. Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage and Ed Harris are good, as usual. The production values are high (all those smashed cars). The script is sprinkled with wisecracks, like a Schwarzenegger movie, in order to warn us against taking all this too seriously, as if warnings were necessary. The car chase is punctuated by the expectable imprecations -- "Hope you have insurance!" and "Sorry about that!"
It must have been a bad idea to turn the Marines into heavies, so in the finale, the movie makes General Harris the only man of principle, however misguided that principle may be, and turns the others into nothing more than money-hungry mercenaries. The plot is so disarticulated that after Ed Harris is offed, another Marine has to become the chief heavy and he has a jaw like King Kong and a haircut like Hugh Grant or Hugh Jackman or whoever it is that has his long hair parted in the middle. You can tell all the bad guys anyway because they have bulging eyeballs that glow with lunacy, or they have sneers that radiate contempt for all the good things God has blessed us with in modern life, like Brittny Spears. Ed Harris, the Marine of principle, had to die a noble death. His evil successor has to be made to swallow a poison pill the size of a tennis ball and then melt on screen.
The others, the "phony soldiers", to borrow a phrase, are just in it for the blackmail money. This is a common device used to avoid offending anyone in the audience. It can't be the REAL Marine Corps, so it has to be a loony splinter group of thieves. In "Patriot Games", it's not the real IRA but a splinter group. In "Air Force One", it's not the real Russians but a splinter group. In Clint Eastwood's "The Enforcer," it's not even the real "People's Army" because the "people" in the audience might take it personally, so it's a phony band of greedy gangsters posing as a populist army.
Yes. If you like to see cars doing grand jetes and exploding fireballs and ugly guns, this is your movie. Cage and Connery work very well with one another and seem to be having a lot of fun. They have just solved the problem and ended the threat, but can they call off the air strike that is seconds away from being unleashed on them? Guess.
My biology is long behind me and I know nothing of VX, but if it is a cholinesterase inhibitor, isn't it similar to, or the same thing, as black widow spider venom? And if so, what does it have to do with melting your skin?