The Rock (1996)

General Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris) has had enough of the guv’mint not acknowledging the service of his black ops soldiers and not even paying their dependents any money when they get killed! Clearly, the best and most obvious way to change this once all official recourse has failed is to get together a gang of other military idiots, steal a chemical agent and a bunch of rockets, take hostages from a tourist tour on Alcatraz, hole up there and threaten San Francisco with a chemical holocaust. What would you have done, gone to the press!? This is a perfectly sensible plan, really.

Fortunately, the powers that be have kept former SAS man John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery) secretly locked up for stealing the microfilms that contain stuff like the truth about Roswell and who shot JFK (that is seriously in the script), and Mason is the only man who ever escaped from Alcatraz. After a lot of farting around and the worst car chase ever, a team of soldiers accompanied by Mason and FBI biochemist Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), who ain’t a slow man it seems, infiltrate Alcatraz only to be slaughtered by Hummel’s men. Well, you know who doesn’t get slaughtered, so now it’s on Mason and the not terribly excellent at violence Goodspeed to play Die Hard on Alcatraz.

Whenever a certain type of film fan wants to make a case for Michael Bay once having made non-horrible films, they dig up this Jerry Bruckheimer production, as well as Bad Boys II, which I’m not going to touch with a ten foot pole.

In The Rock’s case, I don’t believe these people are completely wrong. Sure, the film is dumb as a rock (tee-hee), and all attempts to try and sell me on Harris’s character as an action movie villain who isn’t an actual villain but more of a tragic figure really dies with me needing to believe in a character who actually expects this plan wouldn’t end with a lot of dead people and nothing else, his unwillingness to actually fire the rockets notwithstanding. Not that Harris doesn’t do his best (and that’s, him being the great Ed Harris, a lot) to sell this nonsense. There’s a lot of exciting tense staring, glowering and quoting Thomas Jefferson, and some really great dramatic shouting in Harris’s repertoire here, and while the script is just too dumb to actually pull this off, Harris is certainly providing a highly entertaining performance that is as close to a human being as anyone in the film.

Speaking of human beings or not, apart from an army of fine character actors (David Morse, William Forsythe, Tony Todd, and so on, and so forth), there’s a pretty embarrassing outing by Sean Connery on display who counteracts Harris’s acting by just barely bothering to show up and coasting on being Sean Connery. Which makes a hilarious contrast to the actor he’s interacting most, Nicolas Cage. Cage, as always when he’s in the hand of a director who doesn’t know how to direct actors that don’t do it themselves like Harris, goes completely insane, delivering line after line of the inane dialogue he’s cursed with with wild abandon, bizarre emphasis and all physical, bug-eyed tics he can come up with. It’s pretty awesome, actually, particularly in a film where an actor really needs to shout to be heard over all the explosions and what may very well be Hans Zimmer’s worst score, seeing as it consists exclusively of musical clichés. Though, come to think of it, that might actually be Zimmer making a comment on the rest of the film.

Fortunately for my poor beleaguered brain, the film’s explosions and stunts are mostly pretty great, and it’s here where we can indeed see a younger, more competent Michael Bay. Sure, he’s never heard of the concept of holding a shot, and he really rather cuts than moves the camera in any sensible direction, but most of the action is much more readable than is typical for later Bay. And when you can actually see the fast, loud, and slickly bombastic action, it becomes really rather entertaining. There is, however, a scene that already encapsulates everything that makes later Michael Bay films so unwatchable: the early car chase is a completely unparsable mess of shot-cut-shot-cut-shot-cut-cut where it’s never clear how the cars chasing each other are positioned, what obstacles they are actually facing, or why shit around them explodes. Actually, I’m convinced the car chase consists of random shots of cars, explosions, people in wheelchairs, the scrunched up faces of Cage and Connery just hacked together for no good reason.


All this adds up to a film that’s a complete mess, dumb as all hell but entertaining on that basic level that lets you waste your life in front of a TV drinking beer and belching rhythmically to the noises of explosions. I’m pretty happy contemporary blockbusters are actually made by thinking human beings now.

The Belko Experiment (2016)

The office drones of the US company Belko Industries working in an office block rather far outside of Bogotá in Colombia are looking forward to another boring day doing the sort of vaguely defined human resources work whose use the people actually involved can barely comprehend. Their day begins rather peculiar, though, for there’s a new, heavily armed troop of guards securing the place, turning away all non-American employees at the gate for “security reasons”.

Once the work day has actually started, a voice over the building’s intercom calmly demands of the employees to kill two among their number, or more of them will be killed instead. What sounds like a sick joke becomes rather more disturbing when the building is completely sealed off from the outside by automated metal shutters. And that’s before our protagonists learn that the tracking devices implanted into their necks to dissuade the local gangs from kidnappings are actually explosives built to make a nasty mess out of one’s head.

Not surprisingly, panic and general human shittiness ensues, with people generally tending to one of two factions: one, let’s call them the ones with souls, kinda-sorta lead by Mike Milch (John Gallagher Jr.) want to try and find some way to escape or seek help. The other group, very much dominated by the company’s local ex-military COO Barry (Tony Goldwyn), is set to break into the security guard’s armoury and decide whom to murder to satisfy the disembodied voice very, very quickly. Barry does the expected mumbling about hard choices all men in power begin when it is time to sacrifice others for their interests, so everything is set up for a bit of a massacre, or “just another day at the office”, like we called it in one of my former places of employ.

Watching The Belko Experiment, one might start speculating that its writer James Gunn has developed a bit of a hankering for the more drastic films he made before he started working for Marvel on the (decidedly beloved by me, as well as millions) Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Directed by Australian Greg McLean in his usually efficient and effective manner, The Belko Experiment is a film with an angry, gory streak, full of the kind of black humour I find difficult not to read as a product of frustration with the world and the people inhabiting it right now.

In its bloody, fast and furious way, McLean’s film is really rather fun, as bizarre as that sounds as a description of a film in which nearly eighty people die in exceedingly bloody ways, quite a few of them deftly drawn as human beings by Gunn’s script and a bunch of talented actors. Even the characters that are outright psychopaths or sociopaths (including a memorably intense and brutal performance by John C. McGinley) have reasons – well, excuses, if we’re being honest – for what they do, so there’s a feeling of actual stakes to the action and the carnage.


In spirit, The Belko Experiment reminds me of certain violently satiric and angry movies produced by Roger Corman in the late 70s and early 80s (Death Race 2000 certainly comes to mind), despite its decided lack of camp appeal. There’s a comparable degree of honest anger and frustration under the artfully polished surface, at least, that makes the film more effective than many comparable movies about people locked in somewhere having to play sadistic games, as well as a rather clear-eyed idea of how fascism works in practice.

Surviving the Game (1994)

Jack Mason (Ice-T) has hit rock bottom. He is homeless, and making his life even more difficult by torturing himself for something pretty damn traumatic that happened in his past. When his only friend, an elderly white guy, dies, Jack gives up completely and tries to kill himself by walking into traffic. He’s rescued – or at least dissuaded – by Walter Cole (Charles S. Dutton) who works at the local food bank and thinks Jack is just the right man to work for him and his partner as a wilderness guide, even though the only external wilderness Jack knows is on the streets (or probably the Streets).

Alas, once Jack has gone through a curious encounter/job interview with Walter’s partner Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer in his best creep mode), and he ends up with Thomas, Walter and a group of clients in the wilderness, things turn out to be less empowering for our hero than he thought. In fact, Jack isn’t there to help some rich idiots hunt, but rather to be the human prey of former CIA men and assorted perverts – the most dangerous game, you know the drill. Co-hunting Jack are psychiatrist Doc Hawkins (Gary Busey in a short, surprisingly nuanced and creepy performance), cowboy John Griffin (John C. McGinley), and rich people supremacist Wolfe (F. Murray Abraham) who has brought his son Derek (William McNamara) to make him a real man by making him complicit in sadistic murder. Turns out this amount of injustice and cruelty is just the therapy Jack needed, and soon, he’s rather effectively striking back at his tormentors.

Among the group of rappers gone genre actors, for my taste Ice-T has always been the best one, probably because he usually makes efforts to act his characters instead of exclusively performing his standard persona. So it is no surprise that Ice-T in a film directed by undervalued (most probably because he’s black, if we’re being honest) Ernest R. Dickerson makes a rather fine action hero; and he is the more interesting kind of US action hero to boot – the one with troubles, who isn’t a perfect killing machine. In fact, the film makes rather a point out of our hero not being a killer by nature or inclination but a guy who defends himself with as much force as necessary and who is even willing to give the worst people imaginable a choice and a chance to walk away. Which is certainly more than they did for him.

Another obvious point in Surviving the Game’s favour is its cast of a host of great character actors, all with copious experience at being entertaining Bad People. They all can chew as much scenery as is needed but also don’t chew more than they should this time around. Not that the characters are exactly subtle, mind you: each and every one of them does after all represent something that is very wrong with (white, powerful) America and its structures turned up to eleven. Still, Dickerson treats these crazy freaks at times much more seriously than you’d expect, giving even the worst of them some depth beyond their inherent horribleness. Which doesn’t make them better people or people we as an audience don’t want to see killed or maimed (preferably both) by Ice-T, but sure turns them into much more interesting action movie villains. Obviously this also gives the film’s political arguments about the intersections of race and class in the USA further heft.

Mind you, this is not first and foremost a deep analysis of US society but a great (perhaps the greatest, depending on the day you ask me) action movie version of The Most Dangerous Game that just doesn’t see why it shouldn’t also consciously comment on the world around it; its makers are after all living in it and had to live through part of it.


As US style action director, Dickerson here is as fine as they come, delivering many a tense scene, a handful of pleasantly absurd ones, and nary a moment after the very effective set-up that isn’t exciting. He also really knows how to get the best out of his actors – which isn’t always typical of directors good at action – by leaving them space to work. There’s an incredible monologue by Busey’s character about his fucked up childhood in the film’s big dinner scene that alone would be worth the price of admission but in this film it’s just one of many great scenes, some of them delightfully and cleverly cheesy, some just clever.