The Rock

Actors : Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, Ed Harris, Michael Biehn, William Forsythe

The safety of San Francisco hangs in the balance when General Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris) and his renegade squad of US Marines take over the abandoned Alcatraz prison and threaten to launch a poison gas attack on the city if their demands are not met. The FBI's response is to call in Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), a nerdy weapons expert, and John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery), a former SAS man who has been in prison for the last 30 years, and send them together into the prison complex. Can this unlikely pairing prevent mass murder? The free world holds its breath.

Between his high-octane debut, Bad Boys, and 1998's wannabe blockbuster Armageddon, hotshot director Michael Bay forged his dubious reputation with this crowd-pleasing action extravaganza. In Rock, a psychotically disgruntled war hero (Ed Harris) seizes the island prison of Alcatraz and threatens to wage chemical warfare against nearby San Francisco unless the government publicly recognises the men who were killed under Harris's top-secret command. Nicolas Cage plays the biochemist who teams up with the only man ever to have escaped from Alcatraz (Sean Connery) in an attempt to foil Harris's terrorist scheme. As one might expect, what follows is an action-packed barrage of bullets, bodies, and climactic confrontations, replete with enough plot contrivances to give even the most jaded action fan cause for alarm. It's a load of hooey, but the cast is obviously having a grand old time, and there's enough wit to make the recycled action sequences tolerable. --Jeff Shannon