OVP: The Rock (1996)

Film: The Rock (1996)

Stars: Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, Ed Harris, David Morse, John Spencer

Director: Michael Bay

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sean Connery: click here to learn more about Mr. Connery (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned in our last entry on Saturdays with the Stars, Sean Connery's career got a new life in the late 1980's when he won an Oscar for The Untouchables and followed that up with a mammoth hit in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  These two films set up the course for the remainder of his career-Connery would still star in major action films, but would take on an advisory role, frequently the vaunted elder who would mentor younger, more "age-appropriate" leads like Richard Gere, Wesley Snipes, and in today's film, Nicolas Cage.  These movies were hits.  Much was made (we'll get there in a second) about how Connery really ended his career with a sluggish slump into retirement, but this ignores that during the late 1980's, 1990's & into the 21st Century, when Connery was being knighted and being named the oldest man ever to achieve the title of "Sexiest Man Alive" from People Magazine, Connery starred in a number of smash hit movies like The Hunt for Red October, First Knight, The Rock, and Entrapment.  While other actors of his generation like Paul Newman and Marlon Brando had, by-and-large, been relegated to old man dramas (and in more cases than not, cemetery plots), Connery was a box office draw in the way that men decades younger than him were and was talked about as a still-relevant movie star.

(Spoilers Ahead) Perhaps this is best boiled down by talking about The Rock, the biggest hit he had during this era (the film would make $335M, adjusted for inflation that'd be $709M, which is basically impossible to do today without it being established IP).  The movie itself is made by Michael Bay, who at the time would've been short-hand for crap (or at least was headed in that direction), and in the past decade, has been saved by Millennial film fans (nostalgic for an era when IP wasn't the only way to make a movie) as being more worthy-of-praise than he was at the time.  The movie makes little sense, and not just because its politics so closely resemble Bay's rather sketchy takes on Libertarianism.  We have Brigadier General Frank Hummel (Harris) holding Alcatraz hostage in hopes of securing $100M for the families of those who died in top secret missions.  He is holding dozens of hostages on the island (tourists who have visited it), and the government sends in a team of agents, though they're quickly boiled down to just two: Dr. Stanley Goodspeed (Cage), a chemical weapons expert with little field experience, and retired Captain John Patrick Mason (Connery), the only man to ever successfully escape from Alcatraz.  The two team up to not only stop Hummel from detonating a chemical weapon that could destroy tens of thousands, but also to see if Mason can get his freedom, which is dangled as incentive but all involved know is just a ruse to get his help.

The real enemy in this movie, it's worth noting, isn't Harris's general, but instead FBI Director James Womack (played by John Spencer), and that's because you don't get a government that wants to help the people in a Michael Bay picture.  Even more so than Clint Eastwood, Bay's films are quintessentially glorious, tech-savvy propaganda for government incompetence.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing (lord knows there's a case to be made that government incompetence dominates our collective consciousness in the Trump Era, and has to a degree in every administration), but it also means that The Rock is a movie you don't really want to think about too much, as it becomes too ridiculous & frequently too absurd to consider it technically.  A lot of your mileage with the movie will depend on your take on Connery & Cage's unlikely friendship, and your tolerance for gratuitous violence.  The violence here is less artful and more just disgusting, and I will own that I don't think Cage & Connery work at all.  Connery's performances with Costner & especially Ford in the late 1980's worked better because there was a subtlety, a clear driving friction with which they can find common ground.  But Cage is not a subtle actor, and Connery can't seem to find any sort of chemistry with him...it just feels like they're making two different movies.

Connery would continue making films regularly until 2003.  He ended his career with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a bad superhero movie that made a lot of money, which hadn't been the case for some of Connery's most recent endeavors like Playing by Heart and The Avengers (for the record, not a superhero movie).  He retired, and with the weird exception of an animated adventure film, never made another movie despite entreaties to join later installments in the Indiana Jones & 007 franchises, dying in 2020 at the age of 90 from a combination of pneumonia & dementia.  Despite decades of trying to escape it, the first line of his New York Times obituary of course included the words "James Bond."

Next month we're going to talk about one of Connery's peers, someone who would dominate action films in the 1960's and especially the 1970's.  Like Connery he wouldn't really get the credit for being the fine actor that he was, but unlike Connery, he didn't seem to care, finding "selling out" a bit more palatable when one gigantic smash hit that changed his career's trajectory captured the public consciousness (and divided critics, both cinematic & political).