Look. Is The Rock a perfect movie? No. But is it a perfect movie? Maybe!
Just describing the plot of The Rock is a lush, lip-smacking thrill, like a piece of bacon that is all fatty rind, like a bowl of Lucky Charms that is all marshmallows—so many elements that could each, alone, be too much, here combined into one film that somehow works, one great, baroque cinnamon roll that is all the middle of the cinnamon roll, The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, a duck-billed platypus, a place beyond decadence, foie gras on your burger, everything you want and nothing you don’t and then some more. Nicolas Cage, an unchained freak; Sean Connery, virtuosically hammy; Ed Harris, a haunted prince going down with his ship; antihero vs. antihero vs. antihero vs. the president; and gruesome chemical weapons and a heist and a mutiny and a double mutiny and family drama and Alcatraz and mine carts and fighter jets and flames and a rock, stalwart against the sea.
All that, but with none of the septic irony, the relentless self-conscious hedging, that infects so much of our lives these days. The Rock does not take one single moment to look you in the eye and say, yes, we know this is a little silly, we are sorry, please know we are cool—there’s no need! The Rock believes in itself, it commits, it is happy to be fun. Coolness is a deadly neurotoxin. Inject The Rock into your heart.
In The Rock, Nicolas Cage is some kind of…gas expert? (same, LOL) who works for the FBI…de-gasifying…stuff…that the FBI finds that has gas on it. We meet him in an underground gas lab where he is examining a plastic baby. Suddenly, the baby starts leaking gas, which really surprises everyone, though you’d assume they expected something like that since they’re having a gas scientist dissect the baby inside an airtight glass cube? Oops, the gassy baby is also a bomb. Nic Cage, rapidly corroding, sums up the situation efficiently: “Okay, I’ve got some bad news and some really bad news. The bad news is that the gas is corrosive and it’s eating our suits. The really bad news is that there’s enough C-4 explosive and poison gas to blow the whole chamber and kill everybody in the building.”
Like, I just, I’m so grateful for this movie.
Later that night, finally relaxing at home with his hot woman, having narrowly escaped being melted at work, Nicolas Cage finds out his girlfriend is pregnant and demanding marriage. It’s a lot for one day! That’s why I forgive him for saying, “Whoa, okay, marriage police, pull over!”
Meanwhile, Ed Harris and his friends are on a tour of Alcatraz, probably just having fun, right? NEGATORY. GET READY. Ed Harris is a retired general in the Marines, maybe the best general ever, who’s fed up because his boys didn’t get any recognition or military pensions after they died doing clandestine black ops. “These men died for their country, and they weren’t even given a goddamn military burial!” Yeah, man, that’s fucked up! Ed Harris wants their sacrifices publicly acknowledged by the US government, and he wants each of their families to get $1 million. Seems reasonable!
And the ONLY WAY TO DO THAT, obviously, is to steal some rockets armed with deadly VX poison gas, take over the prison-turned-tourist-island Alcatraz with a band of rude, crude mercenary dudes, and threaten to vaporize San Francisco unless you receive $100 million out of a secret government slush fund within three days! TRULY THE ONLY POSSIBLE WAY TO GET UNCLE SAM’S ATTENTION, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU ARE A FAMOUS GENERAL WHO LITERALLY KNOWS THE PRESIDENT. Toxic friends will say, “Call a newspaper maybe,” but it’s Scorpio season, okay? Cut unsupportive snakes from your life, honey!
Ed and friends set up shop in the ’Traz. They lock all the tourists into the cells as hostages, install “anti-motion trembler device[s]” so nobody can sneak up on them from the basement, and rally around Ed for a little pep talk. “Couple hundred years ago,” Ed tells them, “a couple guys named Washington, Jefferson, and Adams were branded as traitors by the British. Now they’re called patriots.” Wow, man, makes u think.
Then Ed sends a Zoom invite to the US government (triggering, TBH) and relays his demands via video chat: “I have choked on these lies for my entire career. But here and now, THE LIES STOP.”
(Seriously, though, what was this crystal-clear 1996 video phone? The closest thing to an actual video call in 1996 would have been for Ed Harris to take a bunch of pictures of his Nokia screen while he was playing snake, develop the film at the mall, staple the pics into a flip-book, and mail it to the Capitol in an envelope that he licked with his mouth because they didn’t even have the peel-off kind yet. Give The Rock a freaking retroactive Nobel for future-predicting already!!!)
The government officials are not sure what to do here. On the one hand, Ed Harris is a famous hero, and they agree that he does make a good point about how much they blow. On the other hand, he is doing a very bad terrorism right now, and they are against that except when it’s them doing it in other countries.
Ed makes it real simple: “You alert the media, I launch the gas. You refuse payment, I launch the gas. You send payment, I launch the gas. You launch the gas, I launch the gas. You pay the gas, I launch the pay. You gas the gas, I am the gas.”
VX gas is really bad, it turns out—“one teaspoon of this hits the floor, it’s lethal to one hundred feet”—and, bad news, Ed has a BUNCH of teaspoons. The VX gas comes in these lime-green bath beads and you know as soon as you see them that someone is getting FUCKED UP by one later. There’s only one weapon that burns hot enough to destroy VX: “Thermite plasma…but it’s still in the test phase.” Well, great.
YOU KNOW WHAT, I’D SAY JUST GIVE HIM THE $100 MILLION, BUDDIES. I’D DO THAT OVER POTENTIALLY LIQUEFYING SAN FRANCISCO. He doesn’t even want the money from the taxpayers—he wants it from the slush fund! That’s what a slush fund is for! It’s literally where the term came from: if Ed Harris comes and says he’s gonna turn all the people into slush, then you fund him!
Instead, though, the government decides to give it one college try to stop Ed Harris’s chemicals: “Who is your best chemical/biological man?”
Well, he’s fucking.
Nicolas Cage and his girlfriend are having sex among one thousand burning candles in his extremely flammable rooftop shack to celebrate their pregnancy. She has put her hair in pigtails for the occasion, so Nicolas Cage says, “Oh yeah, pigtails are naughty. Naw-tayyy!!!”
Have either of these people had sex before?
His phone rings, and he picks up.
I feel like in the ’90s people were always answering the phone while they were having sex. I remember watching movies as a kid and thinking, like, three out of four adults were probably secretly having sex when you talked to them on the phone! Honestly, I’m still not sure this isn’t true! It puts me constantly on edge! This is why I only text!
Nic’s boss tells him he has to come in for an emergency gas assignment, so he’s like, “I gotta go!” and runs off the edge of the roof. (I mean, you could just finish having sex—it’ll take like two minutes.)
Back at the government, the government is trying to figure out how exactly they’re supposed to break into Alcatraz when, famously, no one has ever broken out.
Unless…maybe someone HAS! Wow, this is the best plot of any movie!
FBI director James Womack (John Spencer! My president!) is like, “No no no no no no no no no no no no no, HE DOES NOT EXIST!” and the other government guys are like, “Bad news, we know he does exist, and his name is Sean Connery, and he escaped from Alcatraz and he alone knows its secrets, and we know you know he’s moldering in a secret prison right now, James Womack! Go get him!” And James Womack is like, “We can’t risk letting him out. He’s a professional escape artist!” which, respectfully, is kind of the point, sir?
Sean Connery was a British spy who got put in Alcatraz for stealing a microfilm with all of the US government’s dirtiest secrets, such as who shot JFK and what aliens’ butts look like, which is why they hated it so much when he escaped. As soon as they caught him again, they put him in a secret dungeon and pretended he never existed—“This man has no identity, not in the United States or Great Britain, he does not exist”—so he could never tell anyone about the aliens’ butts ever again!!! But now they need him to team up with Nicolas Cage and break INTO Azkaban and save San Francisco. Tell me another way! There isn’t one! Experts say!
They bring Nicolas Cage in to see if he’s the gas king of their dreams, and quiz him on VX gas: “It’s very, very horrible, sir. It’s one of those things we wish we could disinvent.” (That’s what I say about my husband’s socks, right, ladies?) Nic passes the test, so they take him to the interrogation room, where they’re trying to convince Sean Connery to join the team in exchange for a pardon.
Unfortunately, the FBI sent some bozo agent in to persuade Connery, but when Connery tries to tell him a sly fable about why he doesn’t trust the FBI, this guy doesn’t even know who Archimedes is! Dumbass! But Nicolas Cage knows about Archimedes! Behind the one-way glass, in the other room, he starts yelling out the answers like Hermione in Potions. The king put Archimedes in prison! James the First! James the First! Essence of Myrtlap!
Womack perks up, like, “Whoa, this guy does chemical weapons AND he watches the History Channel?!? A double threat!” On a hunch, he sends Cage in there to finish the negotiation. On his way out, the bozo agent tosses Sean Connery a quarter, sarcastically, breaking the first rule of FBI: Never give Sean Connery a quarter! You’ll see why! (It doesn’t really go anywhere, though!)
Connery can sense that Cage is not a bozo, but also not a very good FBI agent. He tells Cage that he will consider the FBI’s offer, but in exchange he wants a schower, a schave, the feel of a schuit, and a schwuite at the Fairmont Hotel Schan Franchishco. Cage says okay, and Connery signs the contract without reading it or even asking what the mission is (DUDE).
When Cage leaves the room, Connery uses his spy skills to quickly turn the quarter into a knife. A GLASS-CUTTING KNIFE! He cuts through the window and scares the shit out of Womack, his nemesis. This does not seem to effect anyone’s enthusiasm about the plan. Let’s go!
Cage is not a field agent—he is more of a laboratory nerd who mostly works with evil dolls—so Womack tells one of the real agents to give Cage his gun. (Really? You couldn’t go back to HQ and get one from the closet?) That agent is like, “A gun? For what? You’re a chemical freak!” which seems like wildly bad teamwork, and Cage goes, “I’m a chemical super-freak, actually,” so credit to that guy for the assist.
We’re at the Fairmont Hotel Schan Franchishco in the penthouse schwuite. Connery is getting a haircut from a gay schtereotype on the balcony while the FBI guys are inside going to town on some room schervisch schandwichesh that Connery ordered to dischtract them.1 Connery seizes the moment to tie a clothesline around Womack’s wrist and dangle him off the balcony, then escape while everyone else is busy rescuing him. Connery’s on the run!
Hairdresser, cowering in terror on the elevator: Okay, I don’t want to know nothin’, I didn’t see you throw that man off the balcony, all I want to know is are you happy with your haircut!
Classic gay person!
Now there’s a car chase. Connery and Cage and the entire FBI absolutely pulverize San Francisco, which they are specifically in town to save. It seems like if you’re Sean Connery, and your whole thing is insisting that you’ve been wrongfully imprisoned by the US government, maybe you should not commit many guilty vehicular homicides the second you have the chance? Or maybe it doesn’t count because nobody seems to be that mad about it. “Damn! This sucks!”—streetcar conductor whose streetcar (i.e., job) just exploded. (Many of these quotes are fake, but this one is real!)
In my memory, this entire movie takes place on Alcatraz.
Counterintuitively, even though he just burned and maimed many, Connery is actually tender. He only ripped Womack’s arm out of its socket and ran away from the FBI so that he could go see his daughter for the first time in twenty years and try to make amends. “I’m not an evil man,” he tells her. She’s skeptical, and just then every cop in San Francisco drives up. Cage, intuiting the sitch, swoops in with the big save: “He’s working with us.”
This is a soft, healthy masculinity of which I approve! Men deserve perceptive, caring friendships with other men!
As they sketch out a plan, the FBI tries to get Connery to tell them the way into Alcatraz, but he just says he’ll know it when he gets there: “My blueprint was in my head! I was underground for three days in the dark.” Everybody’s just gonna have to trust him.
Then, unfortunately, Connery says this: “Womack, you’re between the Rock and a hard case.” Somebody is still rich from writing this line! And, what the hay, I support it!
A Navy SEAL team is assigned to accompany Cage and Connery into the Rock, and buon giorno, look who it is! Fabrizio! Fabrizio promises Cage that he will protect him like he would protect his nonna’s gabagool. Cage feels a little bit better.
They all get suited up in scuba gear—“In my day, we did it all with a schnorkel and a pair of flippersh”—and swim in through a hole in Alcatraz (that was easy). They’re in!
The only way out of this room is through a big tube that is regularly blasted with a jet of flame (what is that for?). Sean Connery offers to roll through the flame tube and unlock the door for everyone, and it’s okay because he “memorized it” sixty years ago. As soon as he rolls through the tube, the Navy SEALs start bitching, “Looks like he fucked us, Commander.” “That son of a bitch jumped ship.”
HOW??? EVEN IF HE DID, HE’S NOW INSIDE ALCATRAZ. HE ESCAPED YOU BY…BREAKING INTO PRISON?????????????
He didn’t, though. He opens up the door and is like, “Welcome to the Rock.”
OPENING CREDITS. (JK.)
It rapidly becomes clear that Nicolas Cage sucks at breaking into the Rock. He is not good at guns, or climbing, or walking, or being quiet, or being fast, or having a good attitude. And yeah, of course he’s not! He’s not trained!!!! He shouldn’t be there!!!!! It’s like having a basketball player on your team because he’s good at repairing basketball hoops!!!!!
They creep up to a manhole that will take them to the next level of the Rock. They just have to neutralize the security system first. The Navy SEAL commander successfully tricks the laser prism, but he doesn’t know it’s also got a wiggle detector! They’re caught! Now they are completely surrounded by Ed Harris’s boys. It’s Marines vs. SEALs.
The Navy SEAL commander tries to reason with Ed Harris: “Sir, we know why you’re out here. God knows I agree with you. But like you, sir, I agreed to defend this country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Wow, what a morally complex situation, almost as though this movie deserves every Oscar, foreign and domestic!
MEN YELLING MEN YELLING MEN YELLING.
Right in the tensest moment, some bonehead accidentally kicks a rock and everyone flips out and shoots each other until literally all of the Navy SEALs are dead, even Fabrizio. Mamma mia. Ed Harris is sad. Nobody heard him yell, “Cease fire.” He didn’t come here to kill SEALs! He came here to give Marines $1 million! This sucks!
Nobody knows that Cage and Connery are still down there in the sewer tubes, a significant advantage for their mission, but unfortunately they start chitchatting so loud that the mercenaries immediately find them: “We have a rodent problem.” “Flush the pipes.” They start dropping bombs down there, and not the fun kind of bombs (shits).
Cage and Connery narrowly escape, then sneak into the morgue (which seems to still be fully functional and packed with vats of corpse chemicals, even though this has not been a functioning prison since 1963?) where the first three VX rockets are hidden. Sean Connery throws a knife through a Marine’s neck and advises Cage, “You must never hesitate.” If you see a neck, you have to throw a knife through it.
Connery covers Cage while he goes to disarm the rockets. “You’re shooting too close to the rockets!” Sean Connery will not stop shooting close to the rockets. He’s a maverick like that. A Marine is about to pull the pin on a grenade near the rockets, so Connery shoots an air-conditioning unit and it falls on the guy, squishing him, and yet nobody wrote or ad-libbed the line, “Why don’t you COOL OFF?” Rude! Maybe I don’t like this movie!
This is so stressful that Nicolas Cage finally snaps (YESSSSSSS): “Look, I’m just a biochemist. Most of the time, I work in a glass jar and lead a very uneventful life. I drive a Volvo. A beige one. But what I’m dealing with here is one of the most deadly substances the earth has ever known, so what say you cut me some FRIGGIN’ SLACK?”
They escape and/or fall (I forget) into a hole and now somehow they are riding around on a mine cart in a subterranean cavern. Quick Q: Why is that in Alcatraz?
Ed Harris starts threatening to shoot civilian hostages if Connery and Cage don’t stop riding around in the mine carts and messing with his rockets. Connery is like, “Okay, lemme hop out of this rolly coaster and just go talk to him.” He climbs(?) up there and lays a PHAT guilt trip: “I can’t see how you honor the memory of the dead by killing another million…This is not combat, it’s an act of lunacy, General, sir. Personally, I think you’re a fuckin’ idiot.” Oooooooooooooo!!!!!!
It was a great plan, but now Connery and Cage are both locked up in the cells of Alcatraz. If only they knew someone who knew how to escape! Only fifty-one minutes until the vaporization of San Fran! Meanwhile, back in Washington, DC, the thermal plasma is ready. The president is going to plasma Alcatraz!
Sean Connery escapes from his cell, duh, and understandably tries to bail on the whole thing, but comes back at the last second to rescue Nic Cage (cute!) and also San Francisco, I guess. It’s not soon enough, though—the time runs out and Ed Harris fires the first rocket! Holy shit!
Everyone braces for San Francisco to disappear, but at the last second Ed Harris changes the coordinates and makes the rocket fire into the ocean because King Triton didn’t pay him one hundred million seashells.
Unfortunately, he still has one rocket left, and the mercenaries are going batshit. Ed Harris is like, “Look, it’s over, they’re not paying us, they’re shooting us with thermal plasma, we should probably just bail.” And Tony Todd is like, “The day we took hostages we became mercenaries, and mercenaries get paid,” and Ed Harris is like, WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO, MAN? Then the mercenaries shoot Ed Harris. It’s mean!
Nic Cage and Sean Connery battle it out with the last few most evil mercenaries, who—to be clear—COULD have just escaped at this point and gone back to their regular lives but instead are determined to fire off that last rocket. They’re like, “No, if I can’t get a million dollars, I at least want to kill all of San Francisco!” WHY, THOUGH? What’s the benefit? The whole point is that you are mercenaries driven by self-interest above all!
Cage faces off against Tony Todd.
Cage: Do you like the Elton John song “Rocket Man”?
Todd: I don’t like soft shit.
Cage: Well, I only bring it up because it’s you. You’re the rocket man. [shoots Tony Todd with rocket]
If you’ve been on the fence about this movie so far, how about now?
There’s only one mercenary left. He and Cage grapple over the last rocket’s guidance chip and—crap! The deadly VX balls spill out and start rolling everywhere. It’s Michael Bay’s big hot potato moment. Cage finally gets the upper hand and stuffs one of the balls into the mercenary’s mouth: “EAT THAT, YOU FUCK!!!”
HOW ABOUT NOW?
With his last breath, as the VX gas leaks around him, Cage stabs himself in the heart with a special anti-chemical weapons potion that makes you immune to all chemical weapons. Sure! He sets off the green signal flare of victory, but before they see it, the Blue Angels have already dropped the first thermal plasma bomb! It’s okay, though, because Nic Cage jumps in the water, and thermal plasma isn’t hot enough to burn water.
Connery rescues him one last time, and they have a tender moment of nontoxic masculine best friendship. Cage knows that Connery’s pardon was a sham and Womack is planning to throw him back in secret prison, so he sends him on his way: “If you can get to the Pan Pacific Hotel, there’s clothes in my closet, $200 in the Bible.”
Connery tells Cage to go to Fort Walton, Kansas, and he’ll find a little treat hidden in the leg of a church pew.
They part.
Cage assures Womack that Connery was obliterated in the plasma explosion. Then he goes to Kansas. He finds the church. He finds the pew. He breaks open the leg. He opens the package.
It’s the microfilm. Now he knows who shot JFK!
WAIT
YOU GUYS
WAIT
HOLY SHIT
IT’S LITERALLY THE PRESIDENT’S BOOK OF SECRETS.
HOW ABOUT NOW?????????????????????????????????????????????
RATING: 9/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
1 It feels very Jay Leno, or something, to lean in this hard on the Sean Connery accent joke, but let me tell you, when I finally rewatched The Rock, I was POSITIVELY HORIZONTAL over how much it is not even an exaggeration! I had forgotten! Sean Connery is so utterly incapable of making the alveolar sibilant [s] sound, it is possible that his name has actually been Sawn Connery this whole time! There is no way of knowing!