The Rock (1996) * * *

Directed by:  Michael Bay

Starring:  Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, Ed Harris, David Morse, John Spencer, William Forsythe, Bokeem Woodbine

Before digging into the Transformers series, Michael Bay made smaller scale thrillers (ha! groan) such as The Rock, which at least stays within reasonable reach of the laws of physics in its action scenes.     It naturally doesn't hold up under much scrutiny, but it cheerfully and energetically moves ahead and gets the job done.   

The Rock is not Dwayne Johnson's biopic, but instead stars Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery as a prisoner and FBI agent trying to thwart a mad general's plans to launch chemical weapons on San Francisco.    The general, Francis Hummel (Harris) is not alone.   He has an army of military men at his disposal to help him take over Alcatraz, hold a tour group hostage, and demand hundreds of millions from the U.S. Government.   Why?   Because Hummel is outraged at the government's refusal to pay survivor's benefits to the families of soldiers killed in action under his command.    Oh, and I'm sure a few sheckles for his own troubles too.

Hummel, well-played (as usual) by Harris. is not a cackling, one-liner spewing villain, but a man of complexity and maybe a little heart.     This adds a decisive twist to the proceedings and, as it turns out, some of his underlings are much more heartless than he is.     Cage is FBI agent Stanley Goodspeed, who has never seen much real field action, but instead spends his time as a lab rat studying the very chemical Hummel plans to use on San Francisco.     He is thrust into the inferno alongside Patrick Mason (Connery), a lifelong prisoner/former spy who knows all of the U.S. government's dirty little secrets.    He is not unreasonably upset at being secretly imprisoned for 30 years, but he is recruited because he is the lone known person to successfully escape from Alcatraz and knows the ins and outs of the former prison.    It seems the guys in Clint Eastwood's 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz probably didn't make it.  

Mason and Goodspeed find themselves battling Hummel's army alone after their Navy SEALs team is wiped out.    There is plenty of tension between the two men who don't trust each other.    Goodspeed feels Mason will bolt at the first opportunity, while Mason doesn't trust anyone, much less an FBI agent who seemingly can barely fire a gun.     The feds on land and back in Washington are faced with the decision to pay Hummel or call his bluff and risk the deaths of millions, which would surely have a big impact on any President's potential re-election.    And you thought Trump had a big dilemma on his hands whether to pull out of the Paris climate accord.  

The Rock is, by its very nature, silly fun.    But it is well-crafted silly fun.    The actors plunge headlong into it and are clearly enjoying themselves, which is all you can ask.    Harris adds extra dimensions to Hummel which prove interesting later on and Cage and Connery soon form a working truce as expected.     Later Michael Bay films such as Armageddon were edited so frenetically that you couldn't gain a true sense of the action.     The viewer is assaulted by sound and fury to the point of numbness.     But Bay also made films like The Island and Pain and Gain, in which he slows down and tells stories.     The Rock belongs in the latter category, while full disclosure compels me to confess that I have not seen a single Transformers movie.      I doubt I'm going to start now.