The Nineties Action Fest plows on with Michael Bay's second film, 1996's The Rock. The final collaboration between uber-producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson (who passed away during production), it's the movie that made Nicolas Cage a capital-M, capital-S Movie Star which he'd follow the next year with the tag team of Con Air and Face/Off and was one of Sean Connery's last top tier roles.
The opening credits play over a montage of Marine Brigadier General Francis "Frank" X. Hummel (Ed Harris) putting on his dress uniform and visiting his wife's grave to apologize for what he's about to do. What would that be? To lead a heist of 15 rockets armed with VX nerve gas from a munitions depot, take them to Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay and take over 80 tourists visiting the prison hostage. His demands? $100 million from a secret CIA slush fund to be disbursed to the families of soldiers killed during black ops whose deaths were covered up, no medals conferred, not benefits to the families. The rest is to pay his crew of mercenaries and turncoats. If not paid within 40 hours, he'll kill hostages and start firing rockets which could exterminate all life in the Bay Area.
Backed against the wall, FBI Director James Womack (John Spencer) reluctantly agrees to bring imprisoned former SAS agent John Mason (Connery) out of the hole they'd put him in without trial after they'd caught him with a trove of state secrets because he is the only man to have escaped from The Rock. Womack offers Mason a pardon if he'll help lead a SEAL team onto the island, through the maze of subterranean tunnels, to recapture the rockets and poison gas.
Along for the ride is Cage's Dr. Stanley Goodspeed, a FBI chemical weapons expert who's just learned his girlfriend, Carla (Vanessa Marcil), is embabied. He'd told her to come out and meet him in San Francisco, but when he found out what he was there for he tried to dissuade her from coming without letting slip why. Naturally, she comes anyway and he's got that on his mind as well.
Things get off to a good start until the SEAL team trips an alarm alerting Hummel and his men and the entire team, lead by Michael Biehn without plot armor, is wiped out in a turkey shoot, leaving only the elderly Mason and the not-a-fighter Goodspeed left to take on an island of trained soldiers to save the world.
The Rock is where Bay's penchant for the bombastic "Bayhem" style really flowered with big set pieces like the car chase through the streets of San Francisco when Mason escapes to meet his daughter whom he'd fathered when he'd knocked up her mother after meeting at a Led Zeppelin concert during a previous prison break.
But for all the noise, he allows for some character moments to prevent the characters from just being cartoons. Mason and Goodspeed's antagonism eventually becomes a grudging mutual respect and Hummel isn't a simple villain seeking money for his own enrichment, but a rightfully wronged man who chooses the really wrong way of pursuing redress for his grievances. Bay manages to balance the tricky tones at times and speaks on the commentary track about how that took time to sort out through test screenings.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of goofy action details like the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom mine cart chase and a sequence where Mason has to carefully time his rolling through a ludicrous tunnel of gears and flame bursts like a Mario game in order to open the door for the SEALs. As I recently saw a reel on FaceSpace from the Confused Breakfast podcast, why would Mason have needed to go through the fire tunnel when escaping when the door has the handle on the inside? These are the things you don't think about.
This wasn't Cage's Big Cash-In After Winning An Oscar play either for Leaving Las Vegas, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar, came out while shooting The Rock. He hadn't become as exaggerated as he would in his next two blockbusters, so it's a restrained goofiness. Connery was in his own post-Oscar emeritus years headlining various so-so movies that no one remembers like Rising Sun, Just Cause, and Medicine Man, but he steps up with a grizzled authority and charm as Mason.
Moving on to the A/V presentation, while there were a few DVD releases of The Rock including a Criterion Collection(!) edition, albeit with a non-anamorphic transfer(!!), same as with the Criterion release of Armageddon(!!!!!!) - Fun Fact: I have both of those - this has been the only Blu-ray release and you can tell it was early in the format's run (released in 2008) because it includes an uncompressed LPCM 5.1 audio track, but defaults to Dolby Digital 5.1 (there are also French and Spanish DD tracks), because not all receivers could handle PCM for some reason. Nowadays, it's a piece of cake and the best option offering a clear, punchy audio track with good booms. On the video side, it's a very good transfer which maintains the filmic look of the source and Bay's preference for steely blues and blacks at night, but bright primary colors like the yellow Ferrari in daylight. Since this is owned by Disney, it's unlikely to get a 4K release, but this is fine.
The big selling point for collectors was that all the extras from the Criterion release were ported over allowing us to get a Criterion experience without the price tag. Leading off is an excellent commentary track with Bay, Bruckheimer, Cage, Harris and technical advisor Harry Humphries. The speakers were recorded separately and then edited together and it works much better than you'd think, especially when jumping between people discussing the same details. Cage goes at length about how he worked to insert his ideas into the dialog and Harris talks about the challenge of making Hummel more than a monster. Make sure to listen all the way through the credits for a wild story Bay tells about Simpson showing up in the edit room for Bad Boys with an Armani suit that encounters ice cream.
The features are in 480i, but watchable. Navy SEALs on the Range has a couple of the actual SEALS who appeared in the film on a training range operated by Humphries. Hollywood: Humphries and Teague has them explaining why common gun handling tropes in movies like the "gangster grip" (holding the pistol sideways) or the "Wyatt Earp" are terrible for accuracy, then showing the proper techniques. Special Effects for Dive shows the elaborate miniature puppets and rigs they created for a few shots of the SEALs insertion on the island and Action Effects: Movie Magic shows the climatic jet attack and how the airplanes were CGI but the explosion was done with an actual fireball filled from 170 feet up against a bluescreen background.
Secrets of Alcratraz discusses the history of the island as a trading post, then an Army fort, then a prison. An actual inmate shows how he and his compatriots futilely tried to escape and the actual escape that was portrayed in the 1979 Clint Eastwood flick Escape From Alcatraz which happened due to budget cuts that left gaps in security is detailed.
There is an interesting interview with Bruckheimer where he recaps his early life in Detroit - Fun Fact: he graduated from Detroit's Mumford High School as memorialized by Axel Foley's sweatshirt in Beverly Hills Cop - and how he transitioned from working in advertising to film producing, teaming up with Simpson to make films like Flashdance and Top Gun.
The Rock World Premiere, Outtakes (mostly Ed Harris blowing lines and swearing; didn't watch it all), and an assortment of trailers and TV spots wrap up the extras.
The Rock is one of the premium A-tier Nineties action flicks and this Blu-ray is currently the best way to collect it if you're a fan with a good video and audio presentation and a respectable batch of extras.
Score: 8/10. Buy it.
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