Con Air

Con Air, the latest hyperbolic video game passing itself off as a movie, plays as though it started out as a smarter, more parodic script — an action flick subverting action flicks. Well, we’ll have none of that postmodern stuff, not in a Jerry Bruckheimer production. Con Air is sometimes exciting in a brutish, stupid way, and it isn’t as flamboyantly inept as last summer’s The Rock — produced by Bruckheimer and his late partner Don Simpson (Bruckheimer flies solo here). Still, on some level, the movie doesn’t seem to be in on its own jokes.

You’d think that the Die Hard rip-off school of action films had played itself out, but this genre apparently does die hard. Here, the Bruce Willis figure is Nicolas Cage as Cameron Poe, a paroled convict who finds himself on the same flight as a dozen rabid prisoners who are plotting an escape. Poe, a former Army ranger, inadvertently killed a scuzball in a fight and got eight years in jail. Now he just wants to get home to his wife and meet his little daughter, born during his prison stay. He even has a birthday gift for the girl: a stuffed bunny.

The bunny is a good indication that the script, by Scott Rosenberg, was intended as a deadpan goof on stupid action flicks. Rosenberg wrote two of the wittier films of recent years, Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead and Beautiful Girls, and Con Air may have been his backhanded salute to frat-boy cinema. But Jerry Bruckheimer and rookie director Simon West (he did Budweiser’s talking frogs) aren’t on the same page as Rosenberg. They treat Con Air as a serious stupid action flick.

The quirky cast is meant to attract moviegoers who wouldn’t usually bother with this stuff, but the brightest lights here — John Malkovich as the lead psycho, John Cusack as a determined marshal, Steve Buscemi as a quiet, contemplative serial killer — are merely competent, doing things you’ve already seen them do expertly elsewhere. In an interview for US magazine, Malkovich admitted he did Con Air for the money and marquee value that might help bankroll the projects he wants to make, and that seems to be why everyone else is slumming here.

Everyone, that is, but Nicolas Cage. It may actually be easier to be great in Leaving Las Vegas than to be good in this empty spectacle; Cage throws himself into his character the way he always does, and his lack of irony is refreshing. He believes in Poe’s gallantry and chivalry, and he makes you believe in Poe’s simple-hearted need to see his little girl and give her that bunny. With anyone else in the role, the movie would be even more ridiculous than it already is.

After a while, the plane makes a forced landing in Las Vegas, the capitol of excess — a satirical point that loses its punch in a movie whose excesses make Vegas look like a monastery. We get the whole macho dictionary: explosions, gory deaths, car crashes, and a swishy convict who exists only for a few cheap homophobic laughs. Not much of Con Air is actually fun — just frantic and oddly insecure, as if the ghost of Don Simpson had haunted the set, demanding more noise and less brains. Or maybe that ghost is the mass audience. Hard to tell, these days.

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