Review: The Rock

Yeah, he's pretty cool.   His front teeth look kinda weird though, but whatever.  Straight teeth are for nerds. 10/10

Wait, is there another one???

As a matter of fact, there is.  And unlike professional wrestler/actor Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, this The Rock is not a human being, but a motion picture from 1995, starring Nic Cage and Sean Connery, directed by Michael Bay.

And it's actually good.

The Rock, 1995

Michael Bay is a filmmaker whose name ranks right up there with M. Night Shyamalan in terms of being a fucking joke.  Bay likely doesn't care about this reputation, as unlike Shyamalan his movies actually make money, but it's a reputation he possesses nonetheless: Michael Bay does not make good movies.  From the offensively ahistorical Pearl Harbor to the wretched blight on human memory that is his Transformer's movies, Michael Bay films are loud, crass, bombastic affairs, often riddled with outrageous sexism, racism, or both, and always unwatchable due to his tripartite obsession of explosions, cuts every two seconds, and squeezing as many American flags in a shot as humanly possible.  Finding out about this film was an emotional roller-coaster: I was thrilled that perfect human Nic Cage was in an explosion-based movie alongside Sean "I'm cool as long as you don't watch that Barbara Walters interview" Connery, but my excitement plunged when I learned who directed it.  Well, I thought to myself, time for some unwatchable garbage.

Then I watched the movie, and it blew up my expectations almost as thoroughly as it blew up this trolley car.

The Rock is about General Ed Harris (no, I'm not going to pretend these characters exist beyond their actors), tired of his soldiers getting shat on by the pentagon, taking Alcatraz Island and eighty-one tourists hostage and threatening to blow up San Francisco with missiles full of green, poisonous wart gas.  The FBI, desperate for a solution, sends in awkward but brilliant chemist Nic Cage and weathered badass spy Sean Connery, along with a full squad of Navy Seals, to defuse the missiles and defeat the insurgents.  But wait! The plot thickens, as not only is a city with hundreds of thousands of people in danger, but Sean Connery's daughter lives there! Also, Nic Cage's pregnant girlfriend is visiting! Oh no!

Aside from justifying a few awesome car chases down San Francisco's ridiculously steep streets, the plot to The Rock is completely unimportant, which is one of its greatest strengths.  Other Michael Bay films take what could be perfectly serviceable plots and ruin them with gratuitous low-brow humor and shockingly consistent racism and sexism (seriously, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has two illiterate gangsta robots with big ears and gold teeth), but The Rock avoids this with a mostly tolerable cast of side characters and the inevitable sense of goofiness that comes from having Nic Cage as a lead.  In my mind, there is no other living actor that could scream "ZEUS'S BUTTHOLE" and have that line work.

But the most important thing The Rock has going for it is the fact that I can actually tell what's happening.  If you'd told me this was the same Michael Bay that directed the unwatchable mess that is the opening Hong Kong sequence in Revenge of the Fallen, I wouldn't have believed you, because The Rock is fucking beautiful.  Every action beat, from Sean Connery rolling through the Galaxy Quest-esque inciner-grinders that power Alcatraz (yes, really) to Nic Cage cowering in a mine cart at the end of the Alcatraz mine system as a US Marine burns to death before falling in the underground Alcatraz Grotto (yes, really) to Nic Cage firing a wart-gas missile at one of the marines, launching him out the window, and fucking impaling him on a metal pole wrapped in barbed wire for no reason, is coherent and easy to watch.  More than that--it's fun to watch.  I liked watching Sean Connery drive a humvee through downtown San Francisco and break just in time to avoid hitting an old lady.  I liked watching Nic Cage dodge bullets while cradling the massive, anal bead-esque green heart of the missiles.  I even liked watching the cuts back to the side characters in mission control, because I could see what was going on and none of them were wearing the special-effects equivalent of blackface.  Granted, not a lot of the movie made sense (seriously, Alcatraz is apparently powered by an alternating series of grinder blades and flamethrowers), but when you've got Sean Connery Scottishing it up and Nic Cage doing a nerd impression, combined with explosions I can actually watch, that's merely a minor gripe.

The Rock did two impossible things: it made me enjoy a product created by Michael Bay, and it made me hate his other movies even more by showing me what he was actually capable of.  No movie since Event Horizon has given me such simultaneous admiration and disgust for someone I used to simply loathe on reflex.  If you want to see dumb, cliché, explosion-driven action done right, give this one a watch.  Or, at least, watch the trolley car get fucked up again.  That shit is fucking radical.

SO GOOD!!!!!!!