Summer of '96: Breaking back into 'The Rock'
Let's talk about Michael Bay's good movie.
As I’ve written before, the summer of 1996 was crucial in my development as a movie lover. It was the summer I turned 17, which meant it was my first summer with a car and the first one in which I could see R-rated movies. I wasn’t constrained by my parents’ schedules or by age restrictions; whatever I wanted to see, I saw. Whenever I wanted to go, I went. And if I wanted to see the same movie over and over, I did.
The summer of 1996 is best-known for its megahits. Twister, Mission: Impossible, Independence Day (we’ll get there). But it was Michael Bay’s The Rock that blew me out of my chair and brought me back to the theaters to see it four more times. It’s quite possible that it was the rare R-rated movie I snuck into, as I would have still been a month shy of turning 17 when it was released (I know I saw it opening night).
I had trepidation revisiting it. Bay’s post-Rock career has not, to put it delicately, wowed me. After hitting it big, the budgets got larger, the explosions got louder, the characters got more shrill and the plots became more incoherent. My dislike of much of Bay’s output is so strong that even though I watched The Rock constantly in the year or two after its release, I didn’t go revisit for at least a decade.
I was pleasantly surprised, then, to find that it still largely holds up. For the uninitiated, it’s another of the Die Hard clones that were popular throughout the ‘90s. A disgruntled Army General (Ed Harris) takes possession of chemical weapons and holds a group of tourists hostage on Alcatraz. A Navy SEAL team plans an incursion, accompanied by a chemical weapons specialist (Nicolas Cage) and the only man to ever escape prison, an imprisoned British spy named John Mason (Sean Connery).
The reason The Rock works so well is not because it’s objectively good but because it’s better than it needs to be. The formula is simple: bad guy breaks into a place, takes hostages, and the good guys go in and kill the bad guys. But The Rock elevates the material through its characters. From Michael Biehn to John C. McGinley to David Morse to John Spencer to Tony Todd, the supporting cast in this movie flat-out kills (this was common with Simpson/Bruckhemier productions; check out the supporting cast of Crimson Tide). And they support a main cast that gives their all in every scene, no matter how ludicrous.
I still think the brief era of Nicolas Cage Action Hero is one of the weirdest in blockbuster history. Here, Cage was just a few months off his Oscar win for Leaving Las Vegas. I assume his agents were trying to turn him into a leading man, and action star seemed a good venue. What I appreciate is that Cage always seemed to know that he never quite fit into that mold, and all of his action vehicles lean into his eccentricities (Con Air and Face/Off probably being the best examples). Stanley Goodspeed is a more recognizable human that Cameron Poe or Castor Troy, but Cage still gives him little quirks that let us know he’s in on the joke. The choice to have Stanley never swear leads to some of the film’s funniest lines, and there’s an uneasy heroism Cage supplies that tweaks the tension. Cage gets a lot of flack for taking paycheck roles. While it’s been awhile since I’ve seen one of his films, I’ve always thought it less that he’s undiscriminating and more that he knows when to be in on the joke. He’s a canny actor, and I think the fact that every few years he knocks out another homerun performance is proof that we underestimate him.
Sean Connery is not quirky. He’s all cool and swagger. By the time he made The Rock, he was in his mid-sixties and he’s still the most badass person on the screen. The role was originally offered to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who turned it down, and I think it would have been the wrong take. There’s a wryness and cool that Connery brings that Arnold lacks. The shorthand of Connery’s Bond days helps inform the character. Mason might be an old man, but we’ve seen what Connery was capable of when he was a young one; it adds shading that isn’t necessarily in the script. It’s not hard to imagine this as a decades-later Bond sequel; in fact, that makes me like it more.
But the performance that truly makes The Rock stand out is Ed Harris as Gen. Hummel. Rather than be a scheming antagonist intent on getting money or a mad man eager to wreak havoc, he’s a man of convictions, anger and love for his country. His plan is cruel, but his intentions are understandable; Hummel is tired of seeing men who died for their country forgotten by their government. It lends a tragic dimension to the character, even more so when we realize Hummel was bluffing and had no intention of launching the weapons. Harris is all cool conviction and resolve. It’s one of the great villain performances of the ‘90s.
Whatever I can say about Bay (and I’ve said plenty), few directors are as adept at capturing mayhem. The Rock is a concussive experience, with every chase and shootout amped up and over the top; I can understand why my teenage self went so wild for it. Bay understands how important aesthetics are to action filmmaking. There’s a car chase through San Francisco that has a Hummer crashing through so many fruit carts and water trucks that it flirts with self-parody. Every explosion (and there are a lot) is blistering. All of the gunfights make use of slow motion and crank up the volume. Hans Zimmer’s score pulses under everything. And Bay hasn’t yet given into his worst instincts and started cutting every scene to death; shots actually last long enough for us to understand what’s going on. Everything in this movie looks like the coolest thing ever.
Which is good, because it really distracts from the fact that this is one of the most incoherent scripts in a Hollywood blockbuster (until Bay helmed Armageddon two years later). Very few things in the movie make any rational sense. Why would Goodspeed, a man who is terrified of action, quickly engage in a dangerous chase across San Francisco? Why does Goodspeed have to be on site anyway; couldn’t he just walk the SEAL team through it by video? If Mason last saw his daughter when she was 10 and has had no contact with her (and her mother is dead), how does he know how to contact her? And if he was taken to jail shortly after he impregnated her mother, how does he have any relationship at all? Using Mason to get in is totally dependent on the idea that a 66-year-old man can remember accurate, intricate details from three decades later. And while watching Connery roll through a flaming boiler is cool, it makes no logical sense when you consider that he’s doing it to open a door to let people in...coming out, wouldn’t he have just gone through the door?
None of it matters. It’s all there so Bay can say “look how badass this is.” And we don’t question it because, yes, it indeed is badass.
Some of Bay’s other bad instincts are also on display. He thinks it’s hilarious to lean into stereotypes, cutting away several times to reactions of imprisoned tourists who lean hard into the image of shrill, angry Black men and women. A sequence with a hair stylist places all its humor on the man’s flamboyant mannerisms. And Bay’s fetishization of the military is full borne here. With the film’s slow-motion shots of waving flags and ogling of every gun, bomb and jet, it borders on Red State porn in places.
And yet -- it all looks so cool, and it’s so fun to watch that I really didn’t think about much of that until it was over. Is The Rock objectively good? Probably not. Is it every bit as exciting, badass and stylish as Bay wants it to be? Absolutely. It’s the closest thing Michael Bay has made to a good movie (I see you Pain and Gain fans out there getting ready to protest; please sit down). We never did get a sequel to this. But we did get that glorious, brief period where Nicolas Cage was a bigger action star than Bruce Willis. And that is something to be thankful for.
The Digest
Where you can find me online this week
The Jesus Junkyard Podcast -- As my Patheos blog went into its third week, I launched the audio element. And yes, The Jesus Junkyard Podcast is just a rebranded version of Cross.Culture.Critic., the show I’ve been doing with Joe Yerke for four years. But, as I explain in this week’s show, I never liked that name, and given that their origins had the same roots, it made sense to tie them together. This week, we talk a bit about that rebranding, discuss my anxieties about the end of the pandemic, and talk about my recent realization that my 20-year-old self probably thinks my 42-year-old self is going to Hell. Subscribe on iTunes, Spotify or listen on Patheos.
5 Great Christian Cereal Ideas -- This is, quite simply, the dumbest idea I’ve ever had, and I’m inordinately proud of it. I haven’t written a lot of humor in the past (and your mileage on whether this counts may vary), But I had a good time writing this, and I’m looking forward to doing more of these.
7 Classic CCM Albums Still Worth a Listen -- I’ve said it before, but I was a fan of Christian music growing up. Over time, I’ve come to see that some of the music I loved is just a trite, watered-down version of more mainstream radio. But there’s still a lot I keep returning to. And in this post, I pick seven albums you can still find in my Spotify.
Chrisicisms
The Pop Culture I’m Consuming This Week
Loki (Disney+) -- I’m hesitant to say too much this soon into Loki’s six-episode run. I was cool on WandaVision when it started, but came to love it. I liked Falcon and the Winter Soldier when I saw the first episode, but getting through the rest was a slog. So time will tell whether my thoughts on Marvel’s latest Disney series change over time. But overall, I like it. Tom Hiddleston has long been one of the best additions to the MCU, and he continues to make Loki both an enigmatic trickster and a tragic villain. I’m always happy to see Owen Wilson show up in anything, and his grizzled time cop makes for a great foil with the demigod. Mostly, I just love that this leans hard into the weird side of Marvel, which is when I like this stuff the most. There’s mumbo-jumbo about timelines, multiple identities, secret lizard people who run the universe, and a collection of Infinity Stones used as paperweights. The Disney+ shows haven’t been uniformly great, but they’ve adeptly shown how much potential there is to exploring this diverse universe. I’m curious to see where this heads.
The Bible Tells Me So by Pete Enns -- I’m mixed on this book. Enns definitely has a more liberal take on the Bible and theology than I grew up with, but sometimes he helps put some of the Bible’s more problematic aspects into an intriguing light. Very little of what he says here about God letting His people write their own story is something I haven’t heard before, often better, by people like Rob Bell or Rachel Held Evans. But he has a casual way of discussing it that helps make complex matters easy to digest (although sometimes that casual touch just results in humor I found a bit patronizing). I don’t know if Enns’ internal logic always holds up. He seems very intent on explaining away any of the Bible’s supernatural aspects, until we get to the resurrection, which he apparently believes without hesitation. And he makes no allowance in his discussion of the New Testament for the work of the Spirit and the possibility that maybe the Bible was guided by forces other than human imagination. Enns big-picture thesis, that the Bible doesn’t play by our rules and behave like we expect is part of what makes it so fascinating, is solid. But I don’t know how well his ideas hold up to scrutiny.
Next week: Our Summer of 1996 revisit continues with a look at two big star vehicles, The Nutty Professor and The Cable Guy.