D: Simon West
S: Nicholas Cage, John Cusack, John Malkovich
Jerry Bruckheimer's determination to continue making movies of the kind
he and his late business partner Don Simpson used to make millions from
would be touching in a bizarre capitalist sort of way if his first solo
outing as producer hadn't been quite so bad. As is, he has cast Oscar-winner
Nicholas Cage in one of the most bland and unchallenging roles of his career
(equalled only by the previous Simpson/Bruckheimer/Cage film, The Rock).
Adding insult to injury, he has assembled a crack team of actors in support,
including John Malkovich, John Cusack, Ving Rhames, Steven Buscemi and Colm
Meaney, spent a fortune on special effects from Dream Quest Images and cranked
up the soundtrack with plenty of hard and heavy popular musicians to sell
the tie-in album. He has also commissioned a perfectly workmanlike script,
dumb to the max with plenty of predictable conflicts and crises between
men and machines and bullets and biceps.
But what he has forgotten to do is hire a director with some kind of experience
or at least common sense. Tony Scott, for all his flaws, has rendered some
convincing action pics in his time for Bruckheimer, including Top Gun,
Days of Thunder and Crimson Tide. His sleek visuals and fascination
with falling rain can become irritating, but he never, to his credit, destroys
the execution of an action scene with unnecessary cutting, and tends to
let the tension of the moment build before flying off the handle with cutaways
and slow motion. In Scott's hands, Con Air might have worked. But
in the hands of debuting helmer Simon West, it stinks of capital investment
and doesn't really give the audience a chance for a good time.
It's a dim story of everyday, average, occasionally violent nice guy airborne
ranger Cameron Poe (Cage) who kills a redneck in a barroom brawl to protect
his pregnant wife and does seven to ten in San Quentin for his heroism.
On the day he's released, he is taken aboard the U.S. Marshall Service's
special plane for convict transport along with a variety of star hoods and
psychos. But evil murderer Cyrus 'The Virus' Grissom (Malkovich) has plans
to hijack the aircraft and join with a South American drug lord, avenging
himself on the U.S. Penal System in the process. Poe finds himself caught
up in the crisis, and must protect female guard Sarah Bishop (Rachel Ticotin)
from a fate worse than death at the hands of a multiple rapist and keep
his trusted friend and cellmate from going into diabetic shock while trying
to foil the baddies' plans and bring down the aircraft safely.
It's all pretty much an excuse to have plenty of muscled, sweaty men go
hand to hand against each other in an enclosed space, with a beefed-up Cage
leading the pack with his long hair and outrageously deadpan Southern accent.
Everyone has a good time, and there is plenty of testosterone and profanity
going around, plus one or two good explosions and some throwaway humour.
But it's a far from perfect script, with niggling moral questions which
are never confronted and a curiously underdeveloped lampoon of Hannibal
Lecter in the character of a cool serial killer played by Buscemi.
It takes a competent director to circumvent such problems. Unfortunately,
the real problem is West himself, whose MTV-style overdirection makes it
an exhausting but not exhilarating action spectacular. With his camera in
perpetual motion, and restlessly cutting from close up to mid shot to cutaway,
from detail to wide shot, eyeballs to explosions, he never lets the film
sit still for a minute even as the characters rush about in frantic eagerness
to beat the stuffing out of one another. The result is an excess of visual
excitement that never lets the viewer settle in to what's going on (let
alone see it properly) and ends up alienating them entirely.
John Ford was the cinema's foremost proponent of the 'wide shot, mid shot,
close up' rule, with no time for fancy camera movements or frantic editing.
By no co-incidence, he was also a director of some of the forerunners of
the modern action picture; adventures and westerns with larger than life
heroes saving the world from itself. The lessons he taught have informed
a generation of young directors from Spielberg to Tarantino whose roots
have been defined in studying the cinema.
West seems to have learned his trade from watching television commercials,
and feels it necessary to include as many shots of the product as possible
in the shortest possible time (in fact, West's career to date has been as
a TV commercial director). The film suffers as a result and if the actors
are subtly sending up their one-dimensional caricatures of masculinity,
it's difficult to tell given the lack of time to study their faces and bodies
in detail.
Not that most people will notice the particulars. Depending of their level
of expectation, Con Air might well pass the time amicably. Those
more interested in a sociable evening at the pictures with either a large
group of cheerful compatriots or a single intimate friend might find it
the sort of mindless eye candy to keep them amused in between bursts of
hysterical communal laughter or passionate snogging, but anyone compelled
to watch the movie on its own terms as a piece of Hollywood entertainment
could only find themselves wondering why they bothered.
It plays more like a parody of itself and its ilk without really possessing
the irony it even takes time out to discuss (Buscemi lectures Cage on various
philosophical questions about our society: quotes from Dostoevsky get dropped
with apparent concern for their relevance to the situation: there seems
to be a debate on the pros and cons of the penal system in there somewhere
(no pun intended), but it's difficult to tell). It is neither as straight
out stupid as previous Simpson/Bruckheimer outings nor as entertaining,
and the result is a low-octane, high volume adventure which will please
only the most undemanding action fan with nothing better to watch on video.
Review by Harvey O'Brien copyright
1997.