The Rock

Some scientists believe that during the last ice age, the male brain evolved into a rigid set of behavior patterns.

If this is true, then the first draft of The Rock may have been told round a campfire during a mammoth hunt. The movie is thoroughly drenched with testosterone as its cast of real men go out and do manly things with other real men.

Of course, that is what Sean Connery does best even if it does mean that he is coasting through his twilight years by playing the pensioners' answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Repeated comments are made in The Rock about the age of Connery's character. Then the old boy turns around and kills fifty some commandos without even getting winded. Obviously, Connery is one senior who doesn't have to take any guff from the youngsters.

He does, however, have to tolerate plenty of hooey from a loony kick-butt script. The Rock is carved from a slab of pure machismo with a strong vein of paranoia added in large portions. The movie plays like a cross between The X-Files and Ian Fleming as it presents its characters as the key players in every alleged conspiracy since the assassination of Lincoln.

For example, there is the movie's main villain. General Hummell (Ed Harris) is the highly decorated leader of Marine Force Recon, an elite team of the Special Forces who are routinely sent to wage covert war in countries that don't even know they are under attack. Hummell is a fiery-eyed idealist who despises the fact that the families of his men are never properly compensated when a Recon soldier gets killed in the line of duty. Of course, the duties that they perform are not even suppose to exist which is why the military is so stingy with the funds.

Lacking a union, Hummell handles the situation the old fashion way. He and his troops steal fifteen short-range missiles equipped with a chemical weapon so deadly that the screenwriters actually had to dig out a chemistry book to look it up.

Then Hummell and his crew take over Alcatraz prison, the stony island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. His demands are simple: either the US government finally pay these families or else San Francisco will be peppered with enough deadly toxin to rival the cleaner parts of New York City.

Ever prepared for such situations, the FBI fly in Special Agent Goodsped (Nicholas Cage). He has a doctorate in chemical weaponry and is extensively trained in demolition. Unfortunately, Goodsped has no real weaponry experience and thinks that hand to hand combat is a euphemism for bedroom hanky-panky.

Which forces the FBI to confront one of their own covert problems. For the past thirty years, they have illegally imprisoned John Mason (Connery), a mysterious British agent who was caught stealing a microfilm containing every dirty secret from the alien landing at Roswell to JFK. For three decades, Mason has refused to reveal the location of the microfilm. He has also refused to explain how he once managed to escape from Alcatraz. Since Mason was able to successfully slip out, he is also the only person who knows how to secretly slip back into the old fortress with a bay side view.

A substantial exercise in gratuitous violence is guaranteed for all. So much ammunition is used in The Rock that by the movie's final reel the heroes are having to blast guys with rockets. Which means that The Rock almost succeeds in delivering the right summertime mix of low content and high energy. It even discovers a weird and funny odd-couple team in the form of Connery and Cage as they bicker their way through every firefight.

But the last third of The Rock begins to splutter and lose stream. Ultimately, the movie becomes a victim of its own demented sense of overkill. Like its two heroes, The Rock runs out of ammo prematurely and that is a big mistake. After all, the audience isn't paying good money just to watch these people act.