Then last night came around and I found myself frantically channel-hopping to escape the creeping menace of something or other about Canterbury Cathedral. As I scrolled down the listings, I noticed Con Air and I thought well, why not? I'd seen it once before at Mr. Beaupepys' request, and he was right - it really had been a surprisingly good time.
I should explain: I don't really do action movies, and most particularly not late 90s action movies. Let us not forget, this was the era of Armageddon, and the time before Michael Bay's name was the punchline to a joke nobody wanted to hear. There was a lot of overly violent, overly macho dreck being made, and at the time I was stuck living with a charmless oaf who wanted to watch it all. Con Air had managed to slip under my radar thanks, if I recall correctly, to no small amount of effort on my part, and I spent a decade and a half perfectly happy about this state of affairs.
Until Mr. Beaupepys managed to sell it to me as Steve Buscemi's finest hour, at which point, feeble-minded fangirl that I am, I did a U-turn faster than your political or sexual simile of choice.
The story isn't anything particularly novel: Nic Cage plays Cameron Poe, a basically decent sort of guy who accidentally kills a man whilst trying to defend his pregnant wife. Sent to prison, he spends his considerable amounts of free time working on his body and mind, and writing letters to the daughter he's never had the chance to meet. Time passes montage-style (inevitably) and eventually he finds himself on a plane that will bring him home just in time for the little girl's birthday. Poe is a parolee and considered low risk, but he's surrounded by rapists and multiple murderers.
Do I really have to tell you what happens next? Probably not, but I will anyway. The prisoners get loose, mayhem ensues and it's up to Poe to try and save the day and get home with his daughter's birthday present intact.
The good
Damned if all popcorn flicks shouldn't be like this. Con Air is big, brash and utterly unafraid of ticking every single box in The Big Book Of Action Movie Clichés. There's something joyous in its total lack of pretension; it knows it caters to a demographic that wants explosions, one-liners and sweaty men in white vests, and it delivers all of these in abundance with a side order of extra gusto.And that cast! Look at it! We have Nic Cage from before he became a walking talking self-parody, and John Malkovich from shortly before his disappearance into his own head. John Cusack and Colm Meaney provide able ground support as a State Trooper and FBI man respectively, while Steve Buscemi, as mentioned before, steals the film and runs away with it, giggling hysterically, as Garland Greene, a bona fide psycho killer with an unexpectedly sociable side.
There's a lot of shifting allegiances and motivations at play here; it's not exactly David Mamet, but a certain level attention is required if you want to keep track of everything. If you do. This isn't a film that makes petulant demands on your concentration, and it's happy to keep you secure in your warm and snuggly testosterone coccoon if you just want to sit back and enjoy the explosions, one-liners and vests. It's not overly serious, it's not overly meaningful, and it's just forgettable enough to be a pleasant surprise if you re-watch once every couple of years.
All of which is great, but not completely unexpected. The thing that struck me on re-watching Con Air with my critic's head on, however, is how incredibly right-minded it is. The good guys and the bad guys both come in various colours, and sometimes they're even the same people; midway through the film the plane picks up a trans character, and nobody seems to give it a second thought. Movies of this genre tend to use stereotypes as shorthand, making it really refreshing to find one that treats all its characters as people rather than placeholders.
The bad
Just a couple of minor gripes here - this is another one of these ones that's so much fun that I don't particularly want to nitpick. There's a chase sequence in the last act that feels extraneous, though, just tipping the movie over the edge of popcorn perfection towards being too long and too loud.More female roles would have been nice, too - all Poe's wife and daughter get to do is stand around like a pair of startled blonde deer, and we never get any real sense of who they are or why he's fighting for them. That said, Rachel Ticotin's prison guard Sally Bishop is one of the film's more subtly-written characters; she's tough but not invulnerable, and her scenes with Danny Trejo's rapist Johnny 23 are some of the most tense in the film. They culminate in a victory that offers genuine emotional satisfaction.
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