Put The Bunny Back on the Big Screen!

Monday is movies. And/or TV. Last night I saw Con Air for the first time in at least 20 years. It is abhorent, grotesque, insulting, absurd...and I LOVED IT!

Last night I watched Con Air. I’ve seen the movie a couple of times, maybe I’d seen it three times ahead of this screening. I certainly remember watching it at the movie theatre when it was released a quarter-century back. We attended a late-night (11pm, Friday) screening. And walked home laughing and exhilarated after.

I’ve mentioned a few times here how lucky we are in Wellington to have The Roxy cinema, with its special weekend screenings – anniversaries and throwbacks, and just a commitment to making the cinema experience work in 2023; not just playing what is new and shiny, but digging deep to unearth old gems and absurdities, seemingly in equal measure.

But it had been a while since I’d been to The Roxy, or any cinema. The Big TV arriving had something to do with that, and just life getting in the way in general.

On Saturday night we were at the wonderful SJD gig, and my mate says “are we up for Con Air tomorrow then?” And I say, “Oh yes, wonderful!” Because I had thought about it, been on the fence, and thought it might be a bit silly to attend on my own.

So we went.

And we were both on the fence as to how it might stand in 2023. Would it work at all? Would it just be downright silly, so hammy, or would it retain its comedy-action charm?

Well, you’ll possibly have your own thoughts on Con Air, and maybe they’re not much. Maybe you saw it and hated it, or saw it and loved it, and either way felt no need to ever see it again…but I was thrilled with its big dumb silly fun, and its rather rotten core. It is a toxic, and intentionally over the top film. But if you can switch off and just let it happen then it’s almost a very good time.

Con Air is a very simple set-up for a very stupid story, a big-budget violent-action showcase that makes no sense, but hangs up its wallpaper-thin plot really quickly and almost instructs you to take off your brain and just be caked with grim violence and charmingly stupid one-liners.

Its premise, then, is that a soldier goes to jail after killing a drunken lout. He was defending his wife’s honour (of course). But the judge rules him no ordinary man, instead he is a trained weapon, a killing machine. So he’s given 10 years in jail. And that all happens before the title-card flashes. When we properly meet Cameron Poe, he is being released home to meet his daughter for the first time. On her birthday. He has a soft-toy bunny in a box with all of their letters and some pictures of hot rods and muscle cars.

Poe is about to be a free man; he’s hitching a ride on a plane with monster-criminals. Rapists and serial killers and the criminally insane. It’s cartoon-character like as they pile on the plane with their rap-sheets read as both warnings and set-ups.

And that is the plot. That’s the whole thing. We know from that – and the title alerting us – that there will be trouble. The plan will be hijacked, and the criminals will take to the skies in an attempt to make a getaway. In the film’s trailer, one of its scene-stealing crims even utters the line, “Welcome…to Con Air!”

It's a throwback to my favourite kind of 1980s action film. Where the plot is just a set-up. Character development is still in the elevator working on its pitch. We are watching the film to see fights and to laugh at implausibility, to escape reality, to hang our brains on a hook for two hours and just bask in the absurdity of escapism; revel in the movie-madness.

What made – and still makes – Con Air a particularly fascinating study is the casting. The ultra-baddies were all then-first-peaking journeyman actors. We had Ving Rhames on the back of Pulp Fiction, Steve Buscemi on the back of so many things, Danny Trejo on the back of a lifetime of work already too, but particularly Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn – and so in all three cases there you had a very strong Tarantino connection. And Quentin Tarantino definitely kept a lot of us at the movies in the late 1990s. We rushed to see anything even sideline related. We thrilled, into the early 00s, over Danny Boyle and Guy Ritchie films, and the one-offs like Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead and The Boondock Saints, anything action-y with a twist; anything with a needle-drop soundtrack and smarmy, funny dialogue.

So there’s this solid cast of known and noted players doing some good grunt-work in the background. And then there’s John Malkovich at damn near his peak. Two years after this the meta art-prank of Being John Malkovich would become a strange hindrance really, and though he would go on to make many great films still, when I think of his brilliance I think entirely of the 1993 Clint Eastwood vehicle, In The Line of Fire. This was where we realised Malkovich was something else, surely. And so, in that same way as the other actors mentioned above, we had some knowledge of Malkovich and what he could do – and then he really had fun with that in Con Air. Dialled it up to the extreme, ditched the method and just had fun throwing his creepily calm voice into all manner of scene-stealing moments.

So there’s all of that.

But we talk about Con Air because it is part of The Trilogy. The trilogy of films that Nicholas Cage made inside a year, and right after winning the Best Actor Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas. First there was the Alcatraz-escape movie, The Rock. And if not bigger than Con Air, certainly dumber, there was Face/Off. What was Nicholas Cage up to? As Cameron Poe, Cage is hilarious. But also wonderful. He tries to make us believe he is from Alabama, and it comes off a bit like if Kevin Spacey was cast as Forrest Gump. He looks up and to the right and shakes his rattly-dag hairdo. He winces. And grimaces. And brings all sorts of pathos to the plight of Poe. This could have been a Steven Seagal film otherwise. (For it is basically Under Siege or anything else Seagal was making around the time). But the stunt-casting of Nicholas Cage is the icing for this cake. Nicholas Cage: Action Star!

You can laugh at him urging for the bunny to be put back in the box. But you also care way more about a demented and illogical film because of Nicholas Cage’s eyes.

Con Air was directed by then first-time filmmaker, Simon West. His credits up to that point had included the music video for Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, leading retro-reviewer wags to call this movie some sort of Rickroll of a film. But West went on to make a few other decent action films – understanding how to use people like Cage and Jason Statham for maximum effect. He hasn’t ever knocked it out of the park quite like Con Air, but I will mention that his 2006 remake of When A Stranger Calls is a wonderful jump-scare horror with just an M-rating. Brilliant, taut filmmaking.

But Con Air was written by Scott Rosenberg. And maybe that’s more important. He had already created the aforementioned Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead, which sure felt whip-smart in 1995. He went on to be behind the Gone In 60 Seconds remake, which happened while Cage was still reimagining himself as an action star, and he has penned a few other decent films (High Fidelity, the Jumanji reboots) and – crucially – he is behind the giant dud, Kangaroo Jack (never trust someone’s brilliance unless they’ve let you in to see a huge failure as well).

Watching Con Air on a Sunday night, in an admirably half-full cinema, I was struck by how much fun is had in a truly toxic and creepy storyline. Danny Trejo’s character is called Johnny 23, the number referring to the number of rapes he’s been convicted of; his character follows this up saying he’d be called Johnny 600 if they knew the truth. Malkovich then deadpans that it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

Twice in the film, we have to watch Johnny 23 attempt to force himself on the female prison guard, who is handcuffed for the film’s duration. The only other female that gets any real screen time is Cage’s character’s wife. (Monica Potter). She’s hardly in it either. So, yes, this film is a blow for equality. But this film parades around monsters. It is cartoon-ish and grotesque and you’re not supposed to like anyone. You’re just supposed to laugh at them. And I think they get away with the rape-character storyline because both Cyrus “The Virus” (Malkovich) and Cameron Poe (Cage) deplore him. And stop him.

Buscemi’s character gets away in the end. Which is making comedy out of (and rewarding) a John Wayne Gacy/Unabomber type essentially.

Clichés abound. The plane crash lands in the Vegas strip. At one point Cage takes a bullet in the arm and doesn’t flinch. Later he’ll hang from a fire truck’s ladder with one arm – because this film knew it had you and could do what it wanted with you when John Malkovich cocks his weapon to the head of soft toy and tells Cage not to move, “or the bunny gets it”.

A quarter century and change on from when I first saw Con Air, I definitely still get it. It’s loud and ridiculous and it made me forget about work this morning for a bit. And felt like the best way to spend a Sunday night in a cinema. I loved Trevor Rabin and Mark Mancina’s score, which basically takes the Top Gun theme and spray-paints a heavier riff atop. I loved every stupid character – including the one played by a young Dave Chappelle, who was in it for far longer, and with more lines than I ever remembered. But mostly, I just loved the memory of going to these sorts of films. No worry of whether it stood up, or offended, or made sense. Movies aren’t real. And that’s why I love them so much.  

Oh, and my friend who I saw Con Air with last night…it was me and him (and another mate) that saw it in a different Wellington cinema back in 1997/98. So you see how bonding this big dumb male stuff can be if viewed correctly.

Postscript: I loved John Cusack in this movie too. He almost never disappoints though.