A government plane filled with America's most dangerous and entertaining federal prisoners gets hijacked by its passengers in "Con Air," a slick action movie where Nicolas Cage's good-guy ex-con has to save his best friend, the prison guards, a stuffed pink bunny rabbit and, well, the day.
Cage plays Cameron Poe, who finishes serving as an Army Ranger, dances with his pregnant wife, gets in a fight defending her honor, kills a knife-wielding drunk and gets sentenced to seven years in prison all before the opening credits.
"Con Air," like other Jerry Bruckheimer productions ("The Rock," "Bad Boys," "Top Gun"), wastes little time on scenes which don't involve gunplay or witty repartee, though many of its best lines are lost in the thunderous sounds of explosions.
The movie never takes itself too seriously, since it was written by Scott Rosenberg, who also wrote the nostalgic comedy "Beautiful Girls" and the dark gangster redemption film "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead."
Though Bruckheimer and Rosenberg both have track records, director Simon West is new to film. His prior directing experience comes from television commercials for Budweiser. While the acting is directed well enough, the action itself leaves a bit to be desired. The fight scenes where Poe beats up his wife's attackers and wards off a drug kingpin's henchmen are clumsy at best, while the film's finale in Las Vegas is filmed almost incomprehensibly in a shower of neon and fire that makes it impossible to tell what's going on.
Poe makes parole after eight years of writing letters to his daugh- ter from jail. On the way home to give a stuffed bunny to the daughter he's never seen, he hitches a ride on the prison transfer plane. Unfortunately, criminal genius Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom (John Malkovich) takes over the plane, ruining Poe's plans.
Although many action movies would stop there, "Con Air" also throws in a flashy DEA agent (Colm Meaney) and intellectually overstimulated U.S. Marshal (John Cusack) who clash while trying to catch the bad guys.
If anything, "Con Air" is too full of action in its first three quarters, so that its ending is a bit anti-climactic. And while it plays with action movie cliches in a tongue-in-cheek manner, it adds nothing original to the formula.
Cage plays a good guy unwillingly dragged into the schemes of psychotic villains, just like he did in last year's "The Rock," only this time he has a Southern accent. The cons are played devilishly by a great cast, but their characters never get fleshed out beyond them being really bad guys.
Cusack's pensive Marshal starts promisingly, but the differences between him and Meaney's hard-edged DEA agent are never explored fully.
Still, "Con Air" succeeds on its own terms -- as an action movie where the characters seem to be aware they're in a film. Poe tells his dying friend and a prison guard in danger of being raped that he plans to "save the day."
And later, when a Poe looks out the plane and sees an antique Corvette flying through the air, he remarks bluntly "On any other day, that might seem strange."
In any other movie, a plane filled with the nation's most bloodthirsty criminals, only a handful of incompetent unarmed guards and a heroic bunny-toting good guy might also seem strange, but in "Con Air," it's just par for the course.
