The Rock (1996, Michael Bay) (Patreon)

43/100

Second viewing, last seen during its original theatrical release. To say that I did not care for Mr. Bay's formal approach would be an understatement, and my disdain is reflected in the brief, deliberately semi-coherent review that I wrote back then (which I still find funny):

—ssible that any of this year's summer blockbusters could be any worse than Twister, but The Rock gives it the old colleg—. —f the most excruciating action films I've seen in severa—. —dious pyrotechnics, hamhanded 'macho' dialogue, and a stale plot involv—. —pson/Bruckheimer film, it's true, but I was fooled by the relative competence of their last project, the surprisingly watchable Crim—. —olas Cage, whose unpredictable line readings and goofy demeanor are the only sign of life in this otherw—. —rection by Michael Bay, who is apparently so terrified of boring his target audience that he feels the need t—. —enetic editing makes it utterly impossible to determine what is happening, or who is where, or even wheth—. —ngle shot in the entire movie that lasts any longer than about six sec—. —nd this review irritating to read, well, that's a rough approximation of how I felt throughout this terrib—.

In the years since, of course, big-budget Hollywood filmmaking has largely followed Bay's lead, such that what I found obnoxious in 1996 now looks pretty run-of-the-mill. Doesn't mean that I like it any better, mind you, but it does mean that I was able to watch The Rock this time without constantly feeling as if I were witnessing the death of cinema. (Though I still wanted to claw my eyes out during the car chase, during which Bay keeps zooming in and out to signify chaos even when "holding"—relatively speaking—on Connery in close-up as he speaks on the phone. ) On the flip side, I'm not nearly as besotted with Cage as I then was, and his efforts at making Goodspeed less generic look a whole lot like the desperate shouting and grimacing he tosses into various little-seen action films nowadays. Connery (R.I.P.), likewise, barely has a character to work with, forcing the writers to pull out the ol’ estranged-daughter bit (which then immediately gets forgotten). What's surprisingly compelling here is the moral dilemma that Ed Harris' rogue Brigadier General ultimately faces...or, rather (since he never had any intention of murdering countless civilians), the plot's acknowledgement that feigning your willingness to do something evil may inadvertently result in said evil being done, or at least genuinely contemplated. Maybe there's some extratextual reason why that strikes me as a particularly chilling notion, here in the immediate aftermath of a Presidential election that most Republicans still insist remains undecided, as our Secretary of State "jokes" about a smooth transition to the loser's second term. Ha. Ha. In any case, I got significantly more invested in the story following the bad-guy schism/mutiny, and perhaps that in turn made me more receptive to Bay's dopey excesses, so that I was grinning and possibly even clapping as Goodspeed lights the green flares and runs out in frantic slo-mo to head off the bombing. In short: still not a convert (or even close), but in hindsight this looks like mediocrity, not an abomination.