The Travolta/Cage Project #47: The Rock (1996)
When Sean Connery died on Halloween this year the world mourned a legend. It mourned an icon. It mourned an Academy Award winner. It mourned People’s sexiest man of the century. It mourned a terribly problematic proud chauvinist who said some truly terrible things about women. But more than anything it mourned James Bond.
Sean Connery embodied the essence of Ian Fleming’s womanizing secret agent so purely that he didn’t play James Bond: he was James Bond. That became his existential identity the moment he signed on to play 007 and it remains his identity, even in death.
When people refer to actors by the iconic characters that played, it can seem a little mocking, almost as if they don’t exist independently from the immortal icons that will forever define their legacy. That is certainly not the case with Connery. If given a choice between being Sean Connery’s James Bond or literally anyone else in the history of civilization, nearly everyone would choose being Bond.
Connery was James Bond to such a profound and lasting degree that even when he wasn’t playing James Bond he nevertheless seemed to be playing James Bond. When he played Indiana Jones’ dad, for example, I thought, “Oh, Indiana Jones’ dad is an impeccably preserved older James Bond. That checks out.”
When you paid Connery the big bucks (and he was nothing if not an in-demand and highly compensated movie star) you were paying for a world-famous top box office attraction but you were also shelling out top dollar for James Bond and the James Bond vibe Connery brought to your film just by being in it.
Michael Bay’s wonderfully entertaining (goodness, those are not words I have ever written before, and may never write again!) 1996 action comedy The Rock leans in so hard on the idea that no matter who Connery is playing, he’s always playing James Bond on some level to such an extent that I would not be surprised if there was at least one draft of the script in which his character is actually named James Bond or it was otherwise strongly inferred that he was the spy who launched Connery to international super-stardom.
In The Rock Connery essentially plays James Bond by a different name. Connery’s roguish hero John Patrick Mason is the world’s greatest escape artist, as well as the only man to ever successfully escape Alcatraz. He’s also a top agent who stole J. Edgar Hoover’s most valuable secrets and paid a stiff price for it in lengthy prison stays.
In a delightfully ironic development, James Bond, I mean, a shaggy-haired John Mason, receives his greatest desire and escapes endless confinement so that he can risk life and limb traveling to a prison, namely Alcatraz, which has been taken over by disillusioned Marines in search of justice and a huge payday.
Connery brings to his MTV Movie Award-winning performance (best onscreen duo with Nicolas Cage, baby!) an effervescent lightness and an innate joyfulness appropriate for a man who has suffered in godforsaken jails for decades before being sprung from jail for a mission of historic importance and significance.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Sean Connery movie. I’d forgotten what a goddamn movie star he was, how he lights up the screen. Watching Connery here served as a reminder that the Goldfinger star brought a winking, self-aware, tongue-in-cheek quality to James Bond and his other roles that’s closer to the campiness of Roger Moore than the glowering seriousness of Daniel Craig and Timothy Dalton.
Connery doesn’t even show up until nearly a half hour into what I can assure you is not, in fact, the tightest 137 minutes in the business. Instead we open on our unusually sympathetic villain Brigadier General Francis X. 'Frank' Hummel (Ed Harris), a sort of MTV Movie Award version of Mishima we are told is such a peerless military genius and hero he makes General Patton look like Gomer Pyle by comparison.
Once upon a time this steely-eyed man of honor was our country’s finest, most skilled and fearless soldier but he grew disillusioned after watching his country callously abandon the families of the men who fought and died with him on super-secret missions. So he decides to do something about it: commandeer a fuck-ton of deadly gas rockets, take over Alcatraz and demand 100 million dollars from a sketchy government slush fund to give to the children and wives of his fallen comrades.
If I were the government, I’d respond to this threat with, “100 million? You got it! That’s a steal for what you’re threatening. Hell, taking over Alcatraz is probably going to cost so much you’ll barely even make a profit! For PR alone, let’s get you set up with the money and just pretend this never happened!”
But there would be no movie if the bad guys got what they wanted immediately so of course the government instead chooses options that involve the possible deaths of millions rather than fork over an eminently reasonable amount of cash.
The Rock seems to subscribe to the curious strain of Conservative/Libertarian thought that holds that the most patriotic and noble thing a citizen can do is to take arms against the United States in violent defiance if the government behaves in ways they personally find illegitimate or immoral. In a related development, these “patriots” also tend to be big fans of symbols of the Confederacy, who really ran with the idea that it’s totally cool to rebel against the US government if you disagree with them.
Bay’s movie is largely of the opinion that Hummel is right. His intentions are noble. He just has a very unfortunate way of going about trying to achieve them. Honestly, if he wasn’t threatening to kill millions of people with a terrifying nerve gas he’d be a heck of a guy in addition to the perfect soldier.
Nicolas Cage costars as Dr. Stanley Goodspeed, the FBI’s top expert on chemical and biological weapons, a uniquely Nicolas Cage combination of genius, weirdo, overgrown Boy Scout and unlikely man of action. The Rock made Cage a mainstream superstar of high concept blockbusters but it’s effective precisely because he’s such an unlikely action star.
When Hummel takes Alcatraz hostage in an exceedingly dignified, professional, honorable fashion it falls upon John Patrick Mason, with his intimate knowledge of the prison and its underground tunnels and Dr. Goodspeed, with his knowledge of chemical weapons, to infiltrate Alcatraz with the help of a crack military squad that is pretty much all massacred early on.
That means it falls upon a man in his sixties who has spent the last few decades in jail and a Poindexter more comfortable with a microscope than a machine gun to single-handedly defeat a group of highly trained Marines.
Dr. Goodspeed then makes an astonishing, and, frankly, hard to believe transformation from nerdy scientist to Jason Bourne-like super soldier while Connery turns into a 25 year old James Bond the first chance he gets.
Needless to say, The Rock is not big on verisimilitude. Judging from the way the film is shot, Cage and Connery are the antithesis of Jackie Chan/Tom Cruise types who do their own stunts in movies shot specifically to highlight their real-life derring-do. No, Cage and Connery seem more inclined to bow out at the first sign of danger and take a nap or have a cocktail in their trailers while stunt men and body doubles make them seem impossibly heroic and fearless.
On the contrary, The Rock is enjoyably, thoroughly preposterous. It feels at times like a Cannon b-movie that somehow lucked into a Jerry Bruckheimer/Don Simpson budget.
Get ‘em, Candy!
The Rock benefits tremendously from perfect casting not just in its three leads but in its supporting cast as well. Bay has filled the cast with ringers who make everything they appear in automatically better through their presence alone. I’m talking about David Morse as Harris’ second-in-command, Philip Baker Hall as a government suit, the great Bokeem Woodbine as a young mercenary and Tony Todd, who is mesmerizing and sinister as a hired gun who’s in the Alcatraz misadventure mainly for the money but also for the treason and the opportunity to kill innocent people.
Like John Travolta in Broken Arrow, Candyman (Connery is not the only actor so identified with a single iconic role you can usefully refer to them by it regardless of context) gets the ultimate send-off: getting killed when a fucking missile is fired directly at him.
God help me, I sincerely enjoyed this Michael Bay movie. True, The Rock does not need to be 137 minutes long but I was thoroughly engaged most of the time.
Connery and Cage play off each other so beautifully and have such great, goofy, unforced chemistry that it’s a goddamned shame that they never made another movie together. Then again, Connery got out of the motion picture business not long after The Rock became the fourth top grossing hit of 1996.
True movie stars like Connery, Cage and Harris are not like you and me. They exist on a higher plane of existence. They are capable of magical, miraculous feats, like making a Michael Bay movie good instead of a headache-inducing waste of resources and everyone’s energy and time.
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