Con Air
With an awful lot of bad guys; Written by Scott Rosenberg
Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer
Directed by Simon West
by Chaz Thorndike
If you’ve seen the ads and previews (why they’re called “trailers” when they’re at the beginning of the other films and come out long before the movie is beyond me), you’ve basically seen Con Air. Only the movie’s longer. No one really cares what it’s about, they care if there are lots of quick-witted bad guys saying lots of cool bad guy stuff during lots of innovative bad-guys-foil-stupid-good-guys-traps in which lots of stuff blows up, gets shot to smithereens, and every one looks cool while doing it. Does Con Air have all that? Yeah. It’s so over-the-top, yet humorous almost to the point of genre parody (Bruckheimer did Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Days of Thunder, and The Rock, while West is a British music video whiz), that there isn’t time for one of the many colorful characters with a cool nickname to act out of character. Consider: each character is one solid color, yet there are so many different solid colors moving around so quickly, you don’t care that no one ever colors outside their lines, nor has any aspirations to add other colors to itself. That’s the pseudo-psycho-drivel explanation for a lot of famous people all crammed into one gloriously unrealistic plot in which everything’s so fast and everyone’s so wedged together that no one gets to showboat. It’s only after you’ve had time to reflect that you realize you’ve seen each actor do better work. But you don’t think of that when your eye’s are melting and your ears are ringing. It’s only later you become a snot-nosed critic. Like it was only later I realized there were only two women in the movie. And two little girls. One of the women was a tough yet ruggedly attractive guard. The other was a cornbread commercial. I guess when you’re breaking out of maximum security prison, you’re fighting, blowing things up, killing people, and saying outrageously clever things to achieve the freedom to pursue the all-American girl. I hope they don’t make a sequel.
