“The Rock”
1996 • R • 2hs 16mins • Watch trailer • Buy digital • Buy disc
👋🪨 The Hand that Rocks the Cagel: Three Nic Cage action movies in a row
You’re reading Pizza & a Movie—rewinding the stories of rental classics. This week we kick off a Triple Header I’ve been planning for a while: The Hand that Rocks the Cagel. We open The Rage Cage and release the action-packed triplets that define Cage’s turn from dramatic actor to guy with a gun and a job to do. Tonight it’s the Cage-old story of a man just trying to get along with grumpy Sean Connery. Welcome to The Rock.
Here’s the plot. Disgruntled General Hummel (Ed Harris) and number two guy Major Baxter (David Morse) have a stolen cache of nerve gas missiles and a serious axe to grind. They take over San Francisco Bay tourist hotspot Alcatraz Island, but these boys aren’t here to see sights. No, they want the government to Venmo them $100,000,000. Why? To give veterans benefits. A good thing! Or they’ll gas San Fran. A bad thing! The government taps an FBI chemistry nerdlinger, Dr. Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), and the only guy who ever escaped Alcatraz, John Mason (Sean Connery). A Navy SEAL team lead by Commander Anderson (Michael Biehn) have their six. They’ll have to infiltrate Alcatraz—the titular Rock—as only Mason knows how to do. Almost immediately all the SEALs’ tickets are punched by an ambush in the shower room, which *checking my notes* is one of the least desirable ambush locations. Can Goodspeed survive the adventure and get hitched to his sweetheart (Claire Forlani)? Will Mason stick to the mission to get the pardon crooked FBI Director Womack (John Spencer) dangled as payment? And does somebody have the microfilm with who shot JFK on it? I didn’t make that up, it’s actually a plot point.
This cast! Let’s fly through everybody’s highlights lickety-split. I’ve got a wild tale to get to.
🎭 What Do I Know Them From?
Sean Connery: Pro weightlifter, first James Bond
Nicolas Cage: Born Nicolas Coppola, nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, castle owner, comic book collector, currently in Renfield
Ed Harris: In Top Gun: Maverick last year, also in The Truman Show
John Spencer: Chief of Staff Leo McGarry in The West Wing
David Morse: Red-haired ponytail man in 12 Monkeys, after a couple projects make it out of post-production will have played 100 different roles
Michael Biehn: Kyle Reese in The Terminator, Hicks in Aliens
John C. McGinley: Dr. Cox in Scrubs
Tony Todd: The original Candyman
Bokeem Woodbine: Mike Milligan in Fargo S2
Claire Forlani: Susan in Meet Joe Black (personal fave)
Did this rock movie-goers in ’96? Critics liked it for what it was. Michael Bay is the brand name of action movies. Richard Corliss for Time called it “the team-spirit action movie Mission: Impossible should have been”, which is a bananas thing to say. It’s been called Bay’s best movie. If that’s true, it means Bad Boys and Armageddon are worse—which they aren’t. The critical through line for The Rock was that it’s a slam-bang action picture. For spectacle shaken-not-stirred with relentless pacing, look no further.
The Rock is good because Bay is really, really good at making the kind of thing that it is. Why? Why is he so good? As Bay tells it in a USA Today interview from ’09 that opens with the banger, “In Michael Bay’s sandbox, everyone is a toy soldier,” it goes back to when he was a kid. He borrowed the family Super 8 camera, put firecrackers on his train set’s tracks, and started rolling. “I actually set my bedroom on fire once,” he said. “The fire department came.” In a Bay movie, the point is to capture car chases, shootouts and explosions couched in dramatic tension gotten from juuust enough story and character. It’s supposed to look cool. To amp up the kid inside him who’s still calling the shots. At this, he’s the best in the biz.
Regular folks dug The Rock too. It cost $75M to make. Not cheap, but not Titanic prices ($200M in ’97). We Americans paid $134M to see it, but it did even better overseas. Often the international number is smaller than domestic. But this time the rest of the world bought tickets to the tune of $201M for a grand total of $335M. My guess is that the plot—Americans mad at other Americans—played pretty well. No real politics, just us wilding out. The marketing spend on The Rock was probably hefty, but setting that aside it made its money back roughly four and a half times over.
This success helped make Cage into an action star. He’d made crime movies like Red Rock West (’93). He was an Apache pilot in Top Gun-but-with-helecopters movie Fire Birds (’90), a Secret Service suit in Guarding Tess (’94), a cop in It Could Happen to You (’94). He’d set his earlier screwball days aside, intent instead on leading man capital-A acting. He’s often not the best actor in a shot, but he’s certainly acting the most. It wouldn’t be until later that he’d figure out the blend of manic energy and seriousness that really works.
Now, Michael Bay movies tend to make a big splash with no lasting ripples. Not so with The Rock, though its legacy is not at all what you’d expect. Our story takes a left turn toward WMDs, Iraq, and British spies.
Five years after The Rock, September 11th happened. The post-Cold War US had to figure out who its allies were again. One candidate was the UK. Tony Blair, Prime Minister at the time, burned a lot of international minutes on the horn with President Bush, who wanted his British bud to invade Iraq with him. You know you have a problem when you invade too often alone, but invading socially carries much less stigma.
Blair, even under the thrall of our painterly president, wanted some cold hard facts before shipping his lads off to war. For him, it wasn’t about the previous 9/11 attack. That happened to a different country, after all. Blair needed to know that Hussein had weapons in hand that could lead to way worse for a country way closer—his. What you might call a “clear and present danger”. The UK’s spy agency, MI6, went to work.
In ’02, MI6 Chief Sir Richard Dearlove let on that his snoops were on the trail of real-deal WMDs being made at frantic pace in Iraq. They didn’t just have them, they were making a lot more of them. Said who? A tattletale who saw it with his own eyeballs. And they were gonna blow the lid off Iraq’s whole operation. It was almost too good to be true. The source even described what they’d witnessed: Unusual strings of glass spheres containing weaponized material.
Uh-oh, folks pointed out, that sounds weirdly like the nerve gas rockets in the 1996 Nicholas Cage modern classic, The Rock, playing regularly on cable. Well, you say, that’s probably just because The Rock based its prop design on meticulously-researched actual weapons, right? Strings of glass balls are super practical for storing stuff you’d never want to break on accident, right? No spy would copy his homework off a Michael Bay movie, right? Well, as an official government inquiry said to Mr. Blair, I’ve got some bad news.
By a month before Coalition forces invaded Iraq in ’03, MI6 sprayed down their trousers before going to work each morning because a bad case of pants-on-fire was going around. MI6 notes referred to their source by then as “a liar who had been misleading them for a long time”, according to The Independent, former employer of hair god Trent Crimm. Did they tell Tony their scoop was actually plagiarized from a movie about missile-toting veterans who take over a tourist prison that was so silly Arnold Schwarzenegger turned it down? No, no they did not. The British House of Commons would conclude later in September that the The Rock-derived intelligence report was “presented with a certainty that was not justified.” Those Brits have a way with words.
Of his movie’s role in leading one country to help invade another, co-writer David Weisberg said, “It’s not a nice legacy for the film.” Also said he got some “funny emails” after news of the UK’s spy goof broke. MI6 did meet their informant later in ’03. Though he’d worked for Iraq in until the early ‘90s, he denied ever telling the UK anything.
That’s the story of The Rock. It’s weirdly hard to rent right now, though physical copies are only $9 as I write this. Next week in The Hand that Rocks the Cagel we see a jacked Saint Nic with long hair and a sweet tea accent as a wrongfully accused man on the wrong plane. It’ll be Con Air. And there will be turbulence.
Oh! You’re probably asking: What about the other The Rock? What was Dwayne Johnson doing in ’96? Well, he was doing this:
Hope you enjoyed this one! Thanks for reading. And, hey, if you liked it, share it with someone else who would too! Make sure no one escapes from The Rock.
NOTES:
Both Aaron Sorkin and Quentin Tarantino worked on re-writes to the script, though they weren’t credited.
It was Cage’s idea to have his character say stuff like “golly gee” instead of swearing. That classic Cage restraint we know so well.
This was shot on location at Alcatraz, which is a National Park. They couldn’t close it down—tourists were wandering around during the shoot.
They shot the scene where the FBI director is thrown off the balcony in the penthouse suite of the Fairmont Hotel. Everybody who’s anybody stayed there, from Kardashians to presidents. Here’s Casey Neistat’s tour of the $18k per night (at the time) hotel room, which would honestly best be thought of as a house:
Cage’s role was once going to Schwarzenegger. But he didn’t like the script. A shame, because you say his name and my mind goes “chemist nerd!”
The Rock is in The Criterion Collection, though only in out-of-print DVD. Fingers crossed for an HD version someday.
Screenwriter Weisberg’s stepdad was in national security for Reagan and Bush Sr. He hooked Weisberg up with actual experts on chemical weapons. Weisberg knew rockets contain two chambers which break and mix on impact, creating chemical agents. But it was too boring to show on-screen, so he made up the Grinch’s pearl necklace version we see in the film.
Chunks of this were censored in the UK, like that one guy’s foot being shot up, which is gross.
Cage and Biehn had been in Deadfall together in ’93.
Jerry Bruckheimer produced this. He took a chance on Bay a few years earlier with his debut flick, Bad Boys (’95).
The irony of a movie about a wayward MI6 agent leading to a real-life MI6 debacle is a doozie.
You could think of this as the final time Connery would play Bond.