By Robert Scucci
| Published
If you need a good reason to call out of work this week, nobody’s going to blame you for faking a fever so you can stay home and watch The Rock. In fact, you may not even be lying when you tell your boss that you’re unfit to work after watching Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage kick ass for 136 minutes because The Rock will probably knock the fillings right out of your teeth if you’ve got a good enough sound system at home. It goes without question that we all love to occasionally rail on Michael Bay for relying on explosions to tell a story, but the reason we keep giving him second chances is because The Rock is one of the greatest action movies of all time, and we’re holding out hope that one day he’ll strike gold like this again.
An Unbelievable Chain Of Events, But Who Cares?
Time to give you the basic outline of The Rock so we can talk about how insane this movie actually is.
United States Marine Corp Brigadier General Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris) seizes Alcatraz Island because after years of loyal service to his country, his men that were lost during his tours in Vietnam never received proper compensation for their families. After taking 81 tourists hostage, Hummel contacts the FBI, explaining his plans to launch rockets full of nerve gas that would cause irreparable damage to the San Francisco Bay area if detonated. The Rock introduces the “zero hour” trope we’re all familiar with when Hummel gives the US government a deadline to deliver a ransom of $100 million, meaning that they have to act fast and either pay up or neutralize the threat.
The Dream Team
How does the FBI plan to intervene, you ask?
Nicolas Cage.
Dr. Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage) is a chemical weapons expert who has had no field experience or gun training outside of his academy days, and knows that he’s a “lab rat” who’s probably unfit to raid a fortified prison compound full of angry Marines with an axe to grind. By the same token, he’s the only person qualified to disarm the rockets that Hummel has in his possession, and he needs to do it in person, not remotely, because it’s 1996.
“But wait, nobody has ever successfully escaped Alcatraz in the fiction that The Rock has established, so this is an impossible mission, right?”
Wrong!
We have James Bond … well, sorta.
Goodspeed is informed of the existence of John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery), a disgraced British Special Air Service (SAS) Captain who hasn’t seen the light of day for 30 years because he stole and hid microfilm from J. Edgar Hoover that lays out all of the US government’s darkest and dirtiest secrets. Mason is also the only man to ever have escaped Alcatraz, but he’s naturally reluctant to help the FBI on a need-to-know basis – especially after being locked up like an animal for a majority of his adult life.
After some convincing, and a high-speed chase that results in the destruction of half the city (you know, the thing that everybody’s trying to prevent), Mason agrees to take on the mission with Goodspeed, and signs a document that offers him a full pardon upon completion of the mission … or so he thinks.
At this point, I need to remind you that The Rock takes about an hour of runtime to even get to the titular island prison and there have already been more explosions than you could ever possibly dream of.
Every Single Action Movie Trope Done To Perfection
In order to fully enjoy The Rock, you need to suspend any and all disbelief because each scene is more over-the-top than the last. Remember, Goodspeed has no field experience, but when he needs to track down Mason (who’s driving at breakneck speeds in a stolen Humvee), he commandeers a Ferrari and tears through San Francisco without even thinking twice.
When Goodspeed and Mason finally get to Alcatraz, it doesn’t take any time at all for an epic shootout to wipe out the accompanying Navy SEALs who were supposed to do all of the heavy lifting. That’s okay though, because Goodspeed, who didn’t even have his own gun on his person before agreeing to become an action hero, suddenly knows what’s up and grows a pair so he can save the city from certain destruction in a nick of time between bickering matches with Mason, who’s gearing up to escape Alcatraz (again) after successfully getting the SEAL team into the compound.
Every single scene in The Rock is an exercise in escalation that culminates in a showdown that will simultaneously have you saying “no way,” and “let’s effing go!,” and there’s something beautiful about a movie that’s paced so relentlessly that you never have enough time to critically analyze just how unrealistic everything about it is.
Marking the height of ‘90s action movie excess, The Rock is one of those movies that I can watch once a year and never get sick of. If you’re looking to witness the reason that Michael Bay keeps getting second chances, especially after Pearl Harbor, then you can watch the greatest action movie of all time right now on Hulu.
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