Not Dwayne Johnson

During one of the previous free preview weekends, I had the chance to record the movie The Rock. Recently, I finally watched it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

Ed Harris plays Brigadier General Francis Hummel, who at the beginning of the movie is seen at his wife's grave vowing to do something in her memory, and it's not long before we see what that something is. Hummel is the leader of a section of the Marines that does super-duper secret missions, so secret that when the marines die, their families aren't even compensated, because that might break the secrecy of these operations. So he and his mean break in to a naval weapons facility and steal a bunch of chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, back in Washington DC, Dr. Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage) is one of the few honest people in the FBI, at a time when the FBI hadn't redeemed itself in the eyes of Hollywood by going on a politicized extralegal campaign against former president Trump and his supporters. Godspeed is the head of a department within the Bureau that investigates chemical weapons, so it's obvious that he's going to get called in by the people closest to the President when Gen. Hummel puts the rest of his plan into action, and it's not going to be long before that happens.

That plan involves making their way to Alcatraz, taking one of the tour groups hostage, and threatening to blow up rockets that have the nerve agent as warheads over various places in the San Francisco Bay Area, killing tens of thousands of people. Goodspeed's job is going to be to disable the weapons, since he knows what to look for.

Of course, there's a pretty big problem: how to get on the island of Alcatraz in the first place. Gen. Hummel is no dummy, and has communications and radar and whatnot set up, so he and his men will pretty much seen anbody trying to get to the island by air or the surface water. But how to get there from below the surface? Well, it shouldn't be that difficult to send in some frogmen, but in theory they'd be noticed when they surface having reached the island. Perhaps there might be some subsurface way into the facility?

There's only one person who knows that, since the blueprints aren't that detailed. That person is Capt. Mason (Sean Connery), a member of British Special Forces who was imprisoned at Alcatraz for reasons that will be explained toward the end of the film, although those reasons turn out not to be germane to the plot. Mason escaped from Alcatraz, only to be recaptured and held in some secret location for the past 30 years. But now the FBI needs his knowledge to get back in to Alcatraz in order to deal with Gen. Hummel and his men.

The operation goes wrong, with all of the regular-duty FBI agents getting killed, leaving only Goodspeed and Mason left to carry out the operation, which as you can guess they are somehow able to do because otherwise we'd have the sort of profoundly sad ending that you wouldn't expect Hollywood to give us in a movie like this. A few dramas (Fail-Safe and The Bedford Incident) and parodies (Dr. Strangelove and The Day the Fish Came Out are movies that come to mind) have done it, but not an action movie with an obvious hero.

Michael Bay directed, so if you want special effects, non-stop action, and explosions, you'll get those in spades. And chances are you'll be highly entertained. But I found Bay's direction to be one of the problems with the movie, as a lot of the camera angles and editing didn't work for me, making the movie longer than it needed to be (131 minutes before the end credits begin to roll). You'll also have to suspend a lot of disbelief to watch this one. But if you can do that, you'll like The Rock.