The Rock
After spending decades proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was far more than just James Bond, seven-time 007 Sean Connery decided it was safe to dust off the persona for The Rock (1996), playing former Special Air Service spy John Mason. This brilliantly batshit Michael Bay action adventure extravaganza, which has aged like a fine Coppola wine, also made a Hollywood superstar out of Nicolas Cage, then a recent Oscar darling known more for offbeat character work than beating up baddies.
In the grand 1990s tradition, this riveting testosterone fest basically boils down to “Die Hard on Alcatraz.” And there’s nothing wrong with that. Deranged three-time Purple Heart winning Brigadier General Frank Hummel (Ed Harris) leads a cadre of his fellow special ops marines-turned-terrorists in stealing an arsenal of 50 VX poison gas rocket warheads and, from a perch at de-commissioned military prison Alcatraz, threatening the city of San Francisco (and 81 unlucky penitentiary tourists) with a really hot day. Hummel wants reparations paid from a US government slush fund to the families of 83 black ops marines who died in combat under Hummel’s command. Due to the secret nature of these missions, no compensation was proffered to the deceased marines’ next of kin.
The FBI opts to put a team together to break into the island prison and save the day. Newly-engaged Beatlemaniac and possible cat killer Dr. Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), the best chemical biological expert in the FBI, is brought in to join a team of foolhardy Navy SEALs under the leadership of Commander Charles Anderson (Michael Biehn). Commissioned to help the team navigate through Alcatraz is 60-year-old hyper-literate badass John Mason, a covert British air force operative who’s been imprisoned for 30 years by FBI Director James Womack (John Spencer) for withholding stolen government secrets.
Soon it falls to Goodspeed, a self-professed “chemical superfreak” with limited field experience who forgets his gun in his sock drawer before reporting for duty, and Mason, the only prisoner to ever successfully escape Alcatraz, to prevent a fiery leveling of one of the biggest cities in the nation. As Goodspeed and Mason move within the tunnels of Alcatraz, conflict bubbles up among Hummel’s group of terrorist mercenaries.
The playful comic chemistry between Connery, as the unbreakable British spy, and Cage, as the inexperienced lab rat, is something to behold. Armed with crackling dialogue, the duo sizzles across a seemingly never-ending array of challenges, from gunfights to tunnel bombs to fisticuffs in mine carts to eventually striving to neutralize the terrifying VX gas, whose skin-melting lethality once airborne can only be countered by a Pulp Fiction-esque syringe injection of atropine into the heart. Cage is hardly a boilerplate badass here. Instead, his Stanley Goodspeed is a bundle of anxious energy, replete with an aversion to swearing (he offers several TBS-friendly curses in lieu of expletives until the finale when he lets the language loose) and a weird affinity for beige Volvos. It’s clear that these two actors liked each other: Cage grew up on James Bond, and Connery ultimately agreed to make the movie because he wanted to collaborate with Cage.
Harris turns in a reserved, steely performance as the conflicted lunatic Hummel, whose righteous mission adds texture and nuance to his villainy. “Ed had a lot of problems with the character,” Bay notes on the film’s Criterion Collection commentary track. Bay concedes that “there was a lot of grey area” to the character he acknowledges may not have been “fully explored in the movie.” Harris himself notes that “I didn’t want to play him like a raving lunatic.” What Harris gives us is ultimately more poignant and affecting than the typical mustache-twirling Hans Gruber photocopies audiences tended to be treated to in this era.
The special makeup effects for those cursed souls who fall prey to the gas, credited to Tony Gardner, Chet Zar and Steven E. Anderson, temporarily plunges the flick into horror territory. It’s gruesomely effective, and reminiscent of the toxically mutated Emil Antonowsky at the climax of Robocop (1987).
Casting directors Billy Hopkins and Heidi Levitt deserve all the flowers for putting together an insane team of character actors to compliment Connery, Cage and Harris. These include the aforementioned Biehn and Spencer, plus Vanessa Marcil as the high-strung future Mrs. Godspeed, Philip Baker Hall as a crusty Bureau vet, Claire Forlani as Mason’s alienated daughter, William Forsythe as the FBI point man running the operation for Womack, Luenell as a captive tourist, and Xander Berkeley as one of Cage’s fellow Bureau chemist. Hummel’s disciples are also portrayed by a murderer’s row of great action vets, including David Morse, John C. McGinley, Bokeem Woodbine, Tony Todd, Gregory Sporleder, Steve Harris and Raymond Cruz.
Rewatching this blockbuster in its deluxe Criterion packaging, this critic was struck anew by how brilliant the script, credited to David Weisberg, Douglas Cook and Mark Rosner, and cinematography are. Jonathan Hensleigh and Aaron Sorkin contributed uncredited rewrites, and Robert Towne apparently offered his two cents to Bruckheimer as well, according to Cage on the film’s Criterion commentary track. A lot of the movie’s efficacy as a matinee marvel comes from its high-speed character-based comedy, which never slows down the intensity of its incredible action. There’s a reason the flick has aged like a fine Coppola wine, and it’s not just because the movie stars Francis’s nephew or was filmed by director of photography John Schwartzman, Francis’s step-nephew.
In terms of said screenplay, the film was significantly revised during production. Bay notes on the informative Criterion Collection commentary that the movie was actually green-lit before its script was finished. Technical advisor Harry Humphries, a former Navy SEAL, and Ed Harris reworked much of Hummel’s military jargon-heavy dialogue to imbue it with improved “rhythm and [a] more natural kind of voice,” per Harris on the commentary. Elsewhere on the track, Cage notes that he added character touches to Goodspeed, including his appreciation for vinyl over CDs, his rabid Beatlemania, his mid-coitus pillow talk, his discussion of the Franciscan monks’ accidental discovery of champagne, and even his first name (Cage claims the character was originally Bill Goodspeed).
“The Rock was not a finished script when I came on board, and if anything I think Jerry welcomed my ideas,” Cage says. “I don’t think anybody knew that I was going to revamp the entire character. I don’t think people knew that I was comfortable writing.” Cage’s intrepidness in character-building apparently had its limits, however: the star comments that he hoped to wear a purple speedo and nothing else during an early domestic scene with his fiancee Carla (Marcil), but Bay talked him down. Bruckheimer notes that he and Jonathan Hensleigh flew to London to build out the Mason character with Connery to ensure his commitment. Mason’s entire backstory, the reason behind his imprisonment, was in fact a Connery invention. Bay, meanwhile, helped supply a lot of the imprisoned tourist hostages’ frustrated banter.
A note to Cage-heads out there: the commentary offers a delightful look into Nic’s character designing approach. “It begins with the research,” where “I sometimes find clues that really help me shape the character,” he notes. “On top of that, I’ll start to get into movements and vocal inflections and rhythms and it really becomes more or less musical for me,” Cage continues. “I can find rhythms and really hit the notes, which are the words, in ways that I think will have a certain panache.” The commentary is full of nuggets like this.
Schwartzman’s camera is in a state of constant swooping motion, steeped in atmospheric smoke and fog, taking tactical pains to approach sequences from unique angles while being sure to ground us with a foundational sense of geography. We are treated to plenty of fire and bluster, but we are never disoriented — we can track all the impressive action effectively. It’s a neat trick, and one it would behoove contemporary action moviemakers to learn. This critic’s favorite Schwartzman moment is the way the camera tracks the movement of a quarter during an early Mason interrogation scene. The journey of the quarter stands as a terrific achievement in tension-building by way of cinematography and the dexterous editing of Richard Francis-Bruce.
Bay has always been a master visual stylist, and his sophomore directorial effort, The Rock, sees him coming to his own on the big screen stage after cutting his teeth on the first Bad Boys (1995) for blockbuster producing duo Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson. We are treated to signature Bay-isms like reverent low angle slow-motion appreciations of Old Glory, panning spotlights, unnecessarily cool architectural flourishes, adorable bulldogs, kinetic camerawork, and lots and lots of golden hour photography.
The film was also a swan song for Bruckheimer and Simpson, the latter of whose wild partying ways led him to an early end prior to the movie’s release. The dynamic duo had also spearheaded such terrific action extravaganzas as Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Top Gun (1986), and Crimson Tide (1995). Bruckheimer and Bay would go on to collaborate several more lucrative times, most notably with the delightfully dumb disaster epic Armageddon (1998).
Mention must be made of the movie’s magisterial soundtrack, from Nick Glennie-Smith and Hans Zimmer, is so metal that Finnish melodeath masters Children of Bodom would go on to lift the film’s main theme for the bridge of “Bodom After Midnight”, off of their genre-defining masterpiece Follow The Reaper (2000).
There’s a pretty good reason The Rock merits Criterion inclusion: it is a fantastic movie. Like its successor, Armageddon, it is a terrific slice of pop art. Yes, it’s a big, loud, silly summer action movie. But it was clearly developed by a variety of dialed-in artists with plenty of love and care. That it was designed for bloodthirsty action fiends does not change or in any way dilute its achievement as an exemplary exploration of the blockbuster format.
Connery, who passed away at age 90 last Saturday after a brief battle with dementia, taps into all his movie star charisma here as John Mason. Though he was 65 years old during the film’s production, you absolutely believe he could kick the asses of several marines in their athletic primes because damn it, he was Connery. Sean Connery.