Thirty years is a long time to let a movie sit before you decide to revisit it, and I do not think I realized how much I had undervalued The Rock until I went back and actually watched the thing from start to finish and remembered that Michael Bay was once capable of making a movie that had an actual human heart beating underneath all the explosions and chaos. This is the same guy who gave us robot carnage for a decade and somehow thought that watching skyscrapers collapse in slow motion with a Linkin Park song playing was a substitute for storytelling, and going back to The Rock now makes it painfully obvious that he peaked right here and spent the rest of his career chasing the budget without ever again finding the script. The movie builds the story of Stanley Goodspeed, a total lab rat who knows everything about chemical weapons and absolutely nothing about field work and John Mason this former British operative who escaped Alcatraz decades ago and has been decomposing in a government cell ever since without a single day in court, and the pairing works because it is two completely mismatched people being thrown into an impossible situation together where neither one can survive it without the other.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/
- Platform: PRIME VIDEO
[Source](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/0J3SKUFIFQ5JMGKTN56SO5WPSN/ref=atv_dp)
General Hummel played by Ed Harris is the person who really carries the whole weight of why this movie is not just a standard action product, because he is an antagonist who has a legitimate walking grief and the movie never pretends otherwise, this is a man who watched soldiers die in classified missions the government refused to acknowledge and decided enough was enough, he is not trying to rule anything or blow up the world for sport, he just wants the families of those dead men to get what they are owed. That shower room sequence early on is where you figure out how serious this movie is willing to get, the Navy SEALs make it through the tunnels onto the island thinking they have the upper hand and then Captains Frye and Darrow ignite a massacre on the balconies above that wipes out the entire team in maybe two minutes flat, it is the kind of scene that tells you right away that nobody is protected by the story, that the script is not going to keep people alive just because you expected them to make it. Later there is this moment where Mason gets brought face to face with Hummel and they sit there across from each other trading lines about patriotism being a virtue of the vicious and the tree of liberty getting watered with blood, two great actors in a room doing actual work, and I remember watching that scene as a teenager and not fully getting it but now in my forties it hits completely differently because you understand both sides of that conversation in a way you simply cannot at fifteen. The Hans Zimmer score underneath everything adds to the pressure in a way you feel in your chest before you even consciously register the music is doing anything, and the sound design gives every explosion and gunshot a physical weight that makes even the smaller moments feel like they matter.
Everything about the first half felt a bit rushed though because Bay cannot help himself, and what should have been a tense extraction of Stanley from his normal life turns into a San Francisco car chase that goes about four times longer than it needed to, cars flipping every ten seconds for no reason except that it looks cool on camera and you could see where things were heading with the action running past the point where it was earning its runtime. Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery just weirdly work together and that chemistry is the thing that saves you from losing patience, because Cage is doing something legitimately funny and strange as Goodspeed, this is a guy who does not even like guns and would rather talk about his Beatles records and his pregnant girlfriend back home, his reaction to a VX canister getting loose in the lab is pure panic but he still manages to jam an atropine needle into his own chest to save everyone in the room because there was no other option left, its just science over drama when needed. Then you have Connery who is just effortlessly cool even after decades in a government hole, the way he gets out of the hotel using a fire cord and then just steals a vehicle to go find his daughter is the kind of thing only Connery could pull off without it looking ridiculous, it is a bit much that the man can still fight and drive like he is forty after thirty years of captivity but you go with it because watching him do it is so damn entertaining in a way that a lot of action movies never manage to be even when they are trying twice as hard.
The actual mission on Alcatraz is where the movie finds the rhythm it had been building toward, with Mason and Goodspeed completely on their own against a full marine force, moving through the old tunnels and service passages one rocket at a time, pulling guidance chips and VX canisters while getting hunted through the morgue and the rest of the other rooms in the building and the practical effects give every stunt a real weight that doesnt make this look like a video game cut scene it just look very 90s as it should, pure gold. There is a trolley cart explosion that nearly takes Goodspeed out and just looks like pure chaos, and the moment where he corners Frye in one of the buildings and has to force one of those little green VX pearls into his mouth is disgusting and stressful and satisfying all at once, the movie is not full gore but does shows bits of what happens to a human body after that, and then Goodspeed has to immediately push an antidote into himself just to stay standing, it is a hell of a sequence that shows Bay could pace an action scene with real consequences when somebody made him slow down long enough to let the stakes breathe. There is this scene close to the end at the lower lighthouse platform with the jets already in the air coming in hot to bomb the island is where the clock really becomes suffocating and believe me they were always against time during this movie, and Goodspeed running out into the open to light those green flares while a plasma bomb drops and barely misses before Mason pulls him out of the water is the kind of ending that earns everything, from start to finish because the movie had actually made you care about whether these two guys made it out.
This remains a legit solid action movie that I would give an 7.5 out of 10 because it actually has a soul under all the noise, and the chemistry between Cage and Connery is gold even when the script gives Bay an excuse to blow up something that did not need blowing up, just saying not everything has to be an explosion but hey those were the 90s too. The part that stuck with me going back to it now is the ending, Mason finally getting his freedom and leaving Goodspeed a note pointing to where the secret microfilm is buried, the whole thing hinting that the JFK assassination might have been an inside job and tying back to why Mason was locked away without a trial in the first place, it is a quiet and smart finish for a movie that spent two hours being a full on dopamine rush. This movie makes it very clear that Bay never found this level again once he disappeared into the world of giant robots and city block explosions that mean nothing to most people, this one had sharp lines and actual people you actually care or give a sht what was on the line, very Die Hard like, and that is the difference between a movie that holds up across thirty years and everything else he made after it. Those little green glass balls still look legitimately terrifying to anyone who has seen The Rock, the idea of something that turns your insides to liquid while you are still awake and trying to breathe is a hell of a way to make a threat feel real, and The Rock never lets you forget what is actually on the line the whole time you are watching it, which is why it earns every single minute it asks from you.
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