The Rock

John Chard 5/16/2024 3:22:23 PM 8.4

Welcome to The Rock. The Rock is directed by Michael Bay and written by David Weisberg, Douglas Cook & Mark Rosner. It stars Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, Ed Harris, David Morse, William Forsythe & Michael Biehn. When a highly decorated army general (Harris) decides that he's had enough of his men dying and not getting the credit they deserve, he commandeers Alcatraz prison with a crack unit of Mercs. The plan is to hold the government to ransom or he will unleash from the prison biological rockets to bring Armageddon down upon America. Enter chemical weapons expert Dr. Stanley Goodspeed (Cage), who is forced to team up with the only man ever to escape Alcatraz - the mysteriously incarcerated in secret John Patrick Mason (Connery) - to break into the Rock and thwart the plans of the Mercs. So Cage as a chemistry expert who possible holds the fate of the world in his shaky hands? Connery, aged 66, as a tough prison escapee sporting a "Grunge" haircut? And Ed Harris, surely a bastion of patriotic Americana, turning bad and wanting to unleash hell on the Stars & Stripes? To expect nothing else but a berserker Michael Bayhem picture based on these facts is surely folly. He certainly has a varied CV does Bay, as do the leading actors on show here, but when on form, with writers prepared to put blood into the characters, Bay can deliver high octane entertainment if coupled with a cast clearly in tune with the material. Such is the case here. It's no award winner, naturally, but it does have some political smarts within the script. And if you want explosions, shoot outs and quips aplenty? Then this really will serve you well for a couple of hours. 7.5/10

Gimly 6/23/2021 3:58:41 PM 8.4

The two lead characters' impact on the events of the move are pretty negligible, everyone and everything in it is laughably stupid, and you can see here begin to blossom the stereotypes that Michael Bay would go on you ruin everything he ever touched with, but I still kind of like _The Rock_. Maybe it's just in comparison to all of Bay's other films, or maybe it's because it's the only one of his works I saw when I was still single-digit aged, but I do enjoy it. I'm not willing to defend it, just to re-watch it once a decade or so. _Final rating:★★★ - I liked it. Would personally recommend you give it a go. _

CinemaSerf 8/27/2023 9:14:41 AM 8.4

Right, first things first - turn your brain down to simmer for a couple of hours before you watch this and just remember it is meant to be a far-fetched action film. Once in that gear, it's not actually that bad once it eventually gets going. Rogue general "Hummel" (Ed Harris) steals some highly potent chemical weapons, takes some hostages on Alcatraz and points his weapons at San Francisco. It falls to FBI biochemist "Goodspeed" (Nicolas Cage) and the even more rogue prisoner "Mason" (Sean Connery) to take some marines and thwart this lethal attack. None of the acting here is any good - they are all pretty shocking, but once everyone is entrenched on the island, there are plenty of pyrotechnics, the pace picks up and this becomes mildly entertaining for the last half hour. The dialogue is full of typical ye-ha nonsense, and that grates after a while, and there is precisely no jeopardy at any point. Whatever you do, don't have any epidermal exposure... or cerebral expectations.