I Like to Watch: The Rock (1996)
With the slowly creeping reality that Hollywood isn’t making a lot of new movies just lately and having already watched fucking everything out there twice, the re-watching of those films you remember from decades prior to pandemic is exactly what streaming provides.
Back in the days of Chicago, at one of the many BUGHOUSE! shows, Joe Janes and Brian Sweeney debated on the topic “Michael Bay: Hack or Genius?” This is not to re-litigate that debate but I highly recommend you listen if you’re so inclined. It’s flat-out hysterical.
I’m not what you’d call the biggest fan of Bay’s oeuvre but when Bay is at his most Bayness, he can create some truly remarkable cinema.
The Transformers was a blast up until the Shia LaBouf character was aged out. Giant robots fighting over dominion of the Earth? That magically turn into vehicles created by humans? From outer space? C’mon!
The Bad Boys trilogy was an exercise in the chemistry between two incredibly charismatic actors with some of the most badass car chases and explosions known to film. Scorsese might have cornered the market on brilliant storytelling, amazing and creative camera work, and the best use of scoring in history but you aren’t gonna find a single Humvee chase in Cuba that destroys an entire five blocks of buildings while the leads trade comic quips throughout in Age of Innocence.
I loved The Island just because the whole thing was so completely ridiculous and fun.
Bruce Willis playing hardcore driller-dad to Ben Affleck? Billy Bob Thornton as a crippled NASA scientist? Steve Buscemi doing a callback to Dr. Strangelove? Strippers, outer space Evel Knievel, and blue-collar morons saving the planet? Huge destruction of Paris, Hong Kong, and Wall Street by asteroids? Few hunks of cheesecake laden with sugary strawberries and rich chocolate sauce covered in Reese’s Pieces chased by a Peanut Butter Chocolate shake couldn’t top Armageddon.
But the sheer out-of-body beauty and over-the-top ridiculousness of 1996’s Nicholas Cage/Sean Connery spectacle The Rock is the pinnacle of machismo Michael Bay genius.
I’m from the eighties. While not nostalgic for those myriad badass men kicking ass and making jokes about it films, I still grew up with them and can’t help but love them in some way. Explosions and cars and impossible accuracy with weapons that are huge and stupid are quintessentially juvenile joy. The tale that spins the hero saving the world (in whatever parameters the tale decides is “the world” — destroying a globally killing asteroid or saving 70,000 people or taking out the vicious bad guys) is all myth but they’re myths that posit that we sacks of meat and nerves have some control of the events that surround us.
There is a moral code in these things. Sure, lots of killing but in an almost Looney Tunes sort of video game death. Plenty of shit blowing up. Amid the controlled chaos is a code of good guys and bad guys. Extremely binary. Simple. Good guys do all the same things as bad guys do but for the right reasons. Good guys gun people down for love or freedom, they sacrifice themselves for a greater good even when it does not serve their best interests. Bad guys do it for filthy lucre. Bad guys kill for selfish reasons. Monetary gain.
The truth is that we humans are far more like Woody Allen (for the intellectual class) or the idiots from Dodgeball than John Rambo or John McClain. We are beset by complexity, bills, random injuries, and anxiety. Rarely are we challenged in that do or die scenario except for when we pay for it (no one is required to do the Tough Mudder or go skydiving). In the life of the real, there are no genuine action film bad guys or good guys. So we live vicariously by watching them.
In The Rock Ed Harris plays a general in the special forces whose motivation for stealing biochemical weapons and rockets, infiltrating and taking hostages at Alcatraz (by now a tourist attraction), and threatening to murder San Francisco is all about the military’s blatant covering up of covert deaths of American soldiers. His methods are that of a villain but his intentions are honorable.
Sean Connery is John Mason (a character that is no less James Bond if he had been captured in the sixties and imprisoned for 35 years). Mason is a criminal. An escape artist. An enemy of the state whose only motivation for the first half of the movie is get free and create a relationship with a daughter he had with a one-night stand because “she is the only evidence he ever lived.”
Then there is nineties Nick Cage. His character is named Stanley Goodspeed. Stanley Goodspeed. Despite his ability to drive a Lamborghini like an adrenaline junkie on meth and shoot with deadly accuracy when necessary, he is a nerd. A scientist. Awkward and goofy. Despite his girlfriend being super hot and, unlike any nerd in the history of geekdom, his propensity to sit shirtless on his couch, drinking wine and playing the guitar and looking good doing it, Goodspeed is a nerd because Bay tells us he is. And because he tells us he is repeatedly.
Throw in some extraordinary character actors and go to action stars — Michael Biehn, William Forsythe, David Morse, Tony Todd, John Spencer, John C. McGinley — and there’s enough goddamned testosterone in this thing to melt your fucking face.
Three scenes. Twenty minutes to set up General Hummel’s plan (with an incredible action sequence of him stealing the weapons and the obligatory fuck up that lets us see how horrifying the chemical is), Goodspeed’s nerd status combined with his almost godlike ability to handle the pressure of diffusing a bomb in a container while having poison gas shoot all around him, and Mason’s backstory as the British Intelligence guy captured and then the one guy in history to escape Alcatraz (the rock of the title).
From that point, every scene is a ridiculous, masterfully executed action sequence. Non-stop action. I remember reading a blurb about Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple on Broadway that boasted ”a laugh every six seconds.” This film can boast a giant action boner every two minutes.
A haircut turns into hanging John Spencer from a clothesline over a building which turns into a massive car chase in San Francisco (like 30 cars are destroyed in this thing), which turns into the Navy Seals dropping out of a plane into the waters surrounding Alcatraz. Then we have Mason navigate the Galaxy Quest back entrance to Alcatraz (Best Moment: Connery opens the door and says, in all his Scottishness “Gentlemen, welcome to The Rock.”) followed by the bad guys slo-mo gunning down the good guys from an elevated position in a prison shower.
All the while one sits in amazement at the glorious weirdness of Nicholas Cage. I wonder what Harris and Connery thought about after each bizarre line reading of lines like:
"I’d take pleasure in guttin’ you, boy. I’d take pleasure in guttin’ you... boy.” What is wrong with these people, huh? Mason? Don’t you think there’s a lot of, uh, a lot of anger flowing around this island? Kind of a pubescent volatility? Don’t you think? A lotta angst, a lot of “I’m sixteen, I’m angry at my father” syndrome? I mean grow up! We’re stuck on an island with a bunch of violence-for-pleasure-seeking psycophatic marines, SHAME-ON-THEM!
and
“What do you say we cut the chit-chat, A-HOLE? You almost got me killed twice! And my jaw hurts like hell.”
and
”How, in the name of Zeus's butthole, did you get out of your cell?”
Once everyone is killed and then only two of the good guys left are Connery and Cage, we are treated to lots of showpieces — a gun battle that ends with a bad guy getting his head crushed by a hanging air conditioner, an improbable ride in metal hanging buckets, a show down between Hummel, now reluctant to actually kill 70,000 people and mercenaries he hired (see? Filthy lucre).
Of course, the two of the really bad guys get respectively shot in the chest with a rocket and one of the biochemical pearls shoved in his mouth and everyone wins.
Michael Bay might be a hack. He might be a genius. All I know is that The Rock is the Citizen Kane of a very specific genre of film and it will remain in my movie collection right next to Goodfellas, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Breathless, and Vertigo.
