If you take cinema seriously, there’s one certainty: Michael Bay is the enemy. Loud, brash and without an engaging character in sight, Bay’s films are held up time and again as shameless and deplorable. They take place in an unreconstructed adolescent dreamworld where men are toughened warriors and women are an eye-candy bettered only by an exploding public transport vehicle. Hackneyed stereotypes are as commonplace as they are offensive. He is to vulgarity as a fish is to water – a living, breathing, profiteering manifestation of all that’s wrong with Hollywood today.
The Rock, a Bay-helmed actioner from 1996, emphatically ticks all its director’s boxes. And yet no film has brought me anywhere near as much joy.
The premise is pure high-concept popcorn: two reluctant heroes – Nicolas Cage, a gun-shy FBI chemist; Sean Connery, riffing nicely on his Bond persona, a haggard ex-spy – are tasked with breaking into Alcatraz, where Ed Harris’s disenchanted war hero is threatening to turn San Francisco into a latter-day Pompeii.
To clarify, The Rock is not a highbrow affair. If Dan Brown were to script an edition of WrestleMania it might have more subtlety, and would probably be a lot more profound. But as a piece of simple entertainment, The Rock is the Beatles’ rooftop gig and Oasis at Knebworth all rolled into one.
There is not an original idea in the entire film. The central mismatched partnership, the car chase around San Francisco’s bumpy streets, the Alcatraz-based prison break: all are lifted from other, better, movies. And yet for its sheer sense of reckless fun I’ll take The Rock over Lethal Weapon or Bullitt every time.
Looking back, the mid-90s now seem a golden age for the action genre. Along with the likes of Con Air and Face/Off, The Rock took a cheerfully ludicrous central conceit and ran with it, with just the right level of seriousness. It treads a delicate middle ground between the utter cartoonishness of the previous decade’s low-grade Rambo-spawned fare and the joyless solemnity of today’s Gerard Butler-led rampages.
It’s no coincidence that Cage starred in these minor masterpieces, doing so with that distinctive ability to perform with obvious, playful knowingness, yet without madly winking at his audience to prove that he’s above all this, really. Regrettably, he’s long since lurched headlong into bear-suited self-parody, to the point where “Nicolas Cage” now seems to exist less as an actor in films and more of a semi-fictionalised figure of internet-based mockery.
But The Rock came before all that, and at the film’s heart is Cage doing what he does best: responding to the threat of imminent death by cocking his handgun and boasting about bedding the high-school prom queen.
In 2014, Michael Bay may quite rightly be regarded as cinema’s Ronald McDonald, serving up garbage in the name of corporate profit, but in 1996 he hit upon a truly brilliant recipe. Just leave your pretentions at the door.
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