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 

 

Apollo 13

Actors : Tom Hanks, Ed Harris, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Gary Sinise

It had been less that a year since man first walked on the moon, but as far as the American public was concerned, Apollo 13 was just another "routine" space flight - until these words pierced the immense void of space: "Houston, we have a problem." Ron Howard directs Academy Award winner Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise and Ed Harris in a riveting suspense-thriller from Imagine Entertainment. Stranded 205,000 miles from Earth in a crippled spacecraft, astronauts Jim Lovell (Hanks), Fred Haise (Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Bacon) fight a desperate battle to survive. Meanwhile, at Mission Control, astronaut Ken Mattingly (Sinise), flight director Gene Kranz (Harris) and a heroic ground crew race against time - and odds - to bring them home. It's a breathtaking adventure that tells a story of courage, faith and ingenuity that is all the more remarkable because it is true!