The Rock Reviews

It's an action junkie's angry fix -- 130 minutes of sound and fury, signifying nothing but big bucks and boundless contempt for viewer intelligence. Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage) is an FBI lab nerd who specializes in chemical weapons. John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery) is an elderly spy so tough that 30 years in prison without trial hasn't chilled him out. (He wouldn't turn over the microfilm that answers all the important questions of the our time, from who shot JFK to what the U.S. government really did with those aliens at Roswell.) He's also the only man who ever escaped from Alcatraz -- funny, we thought that was Clint Eastwood -- which is where disaffected Gen. Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris) and a band of renegade Marines are holding hostages and threatening to poison all of San Francisco. Needless to say, Goodspeed and Mason team up to break into the maximum security prison; restless photography and manic editing goose up the already hyperkinetic proceedings. Action buffs and adolescents of all ages will note that THE ROCK is without doubt the final Simpson-Bruckheimer production: famously Type-A schlockmeister Don Simpson died earlier this year of a heart attack.