Con Air
Let’s retire the phrase, “guilty pleasure.” Should we really feel guilty about enjoying something? Instead, let’s refer to such films as “entertaining as Hell in spite of themselves.” That is Simon West’s “Con Air” to the letter. It was in 1997, it is in 2020. What a lot of people see in “Bad Boys II,” I see in this movie. I don’t think West grasps cinematic language and the ability to stage a cogent action scene the way Michael Bay does at his best, but the screenplay by Scott Rosesberg is so nasty, and the performances so ridiculously over-the-top, that you can’t help but appreciate so straight-faced seriousness with which everyone took this film, right down to the triumphant guitar riffs of Mark Mancina and Trevor Rabin’s score.
1997 was when I first really started to hone my critical eye when it comes to movies, and when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution began publishing my words on them in their “You Be the Critic” section. There was a point during that year when, I think I began to just get bogged down by the movies I was watching. I didn’t seem to be enjoying them the way I did at the start of the year. Looking at it now, it was more the movies than me. “Con Air” got me out of the rut with profound glee. I felt that again watching it with my wife on the day I am writing these words. This movie hits that absurd point of moviewatching bliss that a lot of escapism is not really capable of, even though it’s filled with racist, sexist homophobic, and straight-up perverse content. I didn’t say it was good for you.
Nicolas Cage’s long hair, in the breeze, with his eyes closed is the meme that most came out of “Con Air” now. In a way, it’s the start of the formation of Cage as a performer who wouldn’t shy away from a junkie action movie for a buck, but it’s also the ramping up of his go-for-broke onscreen personality that most people associate with him, even though that was always present. Here, it really went mainstream, with John Woo’s “Face/Off” (which came out three weeks after “Con Air” did that summer) helping cement it into our consciousness. As Cameron Poe, a US Ranger who’s getting out of prison after 8 years for manslaughter, and looking forward to finally meeting the daughter, Casey, he has with his wife, Tricia (Monica Potter). Unfortunately, he and his buddie, “Baby-O” (Mykelti Williamson, who had a thing for being cast opposite actors playing slow-drawl Alabama boys, at this time of his career), are on a convict plane transporting “the worst of the worst” that gets hijacked by the worst of them all, Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom (John Malkovich), leaving Poe to “save the fucking day” for US Marshall Vince Larkin (John Cusack). And boy, does he.
By this point, both Cage and Cusack were already on my radar, and they remain two of my favorite actors to watch. This was a good early exposure to them- Cage had shown he could do action the year before in “The Rock,” and I was already salivating over him being directed by Woo in “Face/Off,” while Cusack had just had “Grosse Point Blank,” which I immediately loved. You will never hear me say no to these two being in a movie, and even when Cusack is playing a straight good guy, there’s a weird vibe he emits that fits in perfectly with the insanity of this movie, and the scene in the middle of this one between he and Cage is a highlight before the madness really goes off the rails. Of course, he probably did this, in part, so Disney would put the money up for “Grosse Point Blank,” but it’s worth it to see him play the straight man in a Jerry Bruckheimer action movie. (It’s worth noting that this was his first produced solo after Don Simpson’s death in 1996. You can definitely tell a shift in sensibilities and style after this. It’s also one of his most stacked casts, adding Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Danny Trejo, Dave Chappelle and Rachel Ticotin.)
It’s the last 50 minutes or so that turns this film into something transcendentally loopy, and worthy of many revisits. That’s where the battle in the “Boneyard” takes place- with one of the funniest heroic moments a character has ever had in an action film- and the Las Vegas plane crash, and firetruck chase, take place. At this moment, we should have probably known that West was not going to be a Bay, or Tony Scott, like technician as an action director (something that was abundantly clear with his next two films), but the way he and cinematographer David Tattersall put images and moves on screen (especially during the “Boneyard” sequence) is so insanely fun to watch in its chaos, the film entertains the Hell out of you…in spite of itself. Buckle up.
