The Rock

Day 234 - 8/22/09 - Movie #230

BEFORE: Another movie with a general seizing control of a prison - this time it's Ed Harris, and Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery have to take it back...

THE PLOT: A group of U.S. marines, under command of a renegade general, take over Alcatraz and threaten San Francisco with biological weapons. A chemical weapons specialist and the only man to have ever escaped from the Rock are the only ones who can prevent chaos.

AFTER: OK, I guess this isn't a "prison" movie per se, except for the Alcatraz setting. If I had known more about the plot, I might not have included this in my prison-movie chain - but I just didn't know enough about it. It's a fairly standard Michael Bay shoot-em-up (and blow-em-up) film - this guy never met an explosion he didn't like (except maybe the little ones).

I'm not an action film junkie, so this was sort of satisfying without being enormously entertaining to me. Nicolas Cage was fine as an FBI chemical-weapons specialist, but he was outshined by Sean Connery as a former spy/escape artist who was a former Alcatraz inmate.

You sort of have to take a lot of things for granted, like a glowing-green poison gas that can kill thousands if dispersed in the atmosphere, which someone has decided to store in little breakable glass balls. Also that someone would design a rocket to carry these poison gas balls - and in order to disable said rocket, one has to remove ALL the poison balls, not breaking one of them, in order to reach the little computer guidance chip...okay, I guess...

Supporting characters played by John Spencer ("West Wing"), John McGinley ("Scrubs"), David Morse ("St. Elsewhere") and William Forsythe (the guy from "Raising Arizona" who wasn't John Goodman)

RATING: 7 out of 10 Navy Seals