Ah, where to begin..."Con Air" starring Nicholas Cage and John Malkovitch is a huge, lumbering crime/suspense movie filled with larger-than-life lowlifes, cascades of crashing metal objects, and some nasty character clashes as the protagonist, Poe (Cage), and his (and everyone else's) arch-nemesis, Cyrus "The Virus" (Malkovitch), struggle to take a hijacked military transport plane and its cargo of seedy convicts in opposite directions. Poe is everything a prison drama in need of a hero could ask for: noble, muscular, quietly calculating, and (of course) imprisoned for nothing more than defending the honor of a lady. Cyrus, on the other hand, is everything a prison drama in need of a villain could want: superintelligent but amoral, greasy, gratuitously violent, and BALD.
The premise is established as Poe, Cyrus, and thirty or so other convicts are manacled and strapped into a plane en route to a new prison. But Cyrus, who is something like Lex Luthor on PCP, has orchestrated a brutal, flawless hijacking, and soon the plane and the guards are under the control of the inmates, who plan to fly to freedom in Mexico. What awaits them in Mexico? Well it's never entirely clear, but it seems that there they have asylum under the care of a drug cartel who just happens to have need of thirty sweaty prison escapees. But there's one hitch. Poe is on board, and even though he's about to get out of prison and can get off the plane at an upcoming stop, he decides to carry on a grossly irrational lone crusade to divert the cons from their destination.
Thus unfolds a thoroughly crazed study in continuous overstatement, overflowing with ripe one-liners, less-than-necessary detonations, and hyperactive heroics that are so transparently contrived its hard to tell if the joke this movie devolves into is intentional or not. Little more is required of me in reviewing this piece than to dip into its almost bottomless trove of memorable quotations, such as one uttered by Poe as he attempts to cajole Cyrus after having his cover nearly blown. "Cyrus," he says in his lazy Southern drawl, "this is your Bar-B-Q, and it tastes real gooood."
At another juncture, after the plane has gotten stranded on the ground at a desert refueling stop, and the army is closing in, Cyrus devises a plan to bottleneck the military trucks and personnel in a junkyard by blowing up trucks at either end. "Thus," he says, "forming an air-tight chamber filled with lots and lots of dead people." Hey, this was just a bunch of burning vehicles trapped in a junkyard, but "air-tight chamber" works for me.
One more I really have to mention comes when Poe is down in the baggage compartment of the plane with another con whose been giving him suspicious looks up till now. This con discovers Poe's personal effects, including a stuffed rabbit belonging to his young daughter, and from these infers that Poe has been less than honest about his status as a prisoner (he lied to Cyrus about getting out soon). After warning the con to "please...put the bunny back in the box", Poe wrestles with, then impales the hapless thug, finishing with the unforgettable "why couldn't you just put the bunny back in the box?"
At any rate, the bodies pile up, as Cyrus flaunts his heartlessness so frequently that it becomes all too obvious that he will eventually meet some sort of deliciously mangled fate. And he does. Let's just say it involves several consecutive layers of smashing and crashing, followed up by one monumental instance of "mashing"...
This, and all of its attendent twenty-five minute climax-erupting, takes place before the backdrop of Las Vegas, where the giant plane eventually has to ditch (on the Strip, no less). This, of course, is followed by a chase scene on the ground involving a commandeered fire engine...
Are you starting to get the picture, here? This movie is so over-the-top it has to start all over again at the bottom. Every kind of cliche known to man waltzes through this film in a non-stop parade of the ridiculous, from motorcycle cops who speed away as the camera pans down to a half-eaten doughnut on the street, to a slot machine that hits "jackpot" and spews quarters as the massive transport plane crashes through the front window of a casino and hits it, to a final scene where Poe is reunited with his wife, backlit by a screen-high flashing neon sign.
I laughed, I cried, I laughed so hard I cried. Yes, folks, this movie is big, loud, and dumb as a post. I almost recommend it purely for its ironic entertainment value. It is truly a model of unabashed absurdity.
A prison parolee faces impossible odds when the air transport flighthe's on is skyjacked by the nation's most vicious criminals.More at HotMovieSale.com
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