We’re cranking up the Cage Rage here as promised, with a little piece that also provides a perfect showcase of a guilty pleasure. It’s funny to remember that in the late nineties, Cage was essentially a legit action star—around the same time, he in fact was put alongside legend Sean Connery himself in another Jerry Bruckheimer-produced flick in ’The Rock’. But his reputation for a master of schlock does arguably retrospectively enhance the enjoyability of this one even more—it’s time to put the bunny back in the box with Con Air.
What’s the plot? Well, like your typical late nineties action piece, it was apparently thought up by someone first thing in the morning while in a rush to grab their coffee. Cage plays Cameron Poe, a former US Ranger (to justify why he ‘nevah leaves a mahn behahnd’, you see), who through rather contrived circumstances ends up being convicted of manslaughter and thrown into the slammer while his baby daughter grows up. Now, for the whole film Cage puts on an Alabama accent, which just increases the hilarity of everything he saws, and believe me, it’s a script where every line of dialogue is dancing oh so exuberantly on the boundaries of absurdity to say the friggin' least. ‘Ahm gonna show you Gawd does exist’ indeed.
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| The face of someone smelling pure cheese on the wind, and loves it anyway. |
You’d think then he’d be the most enjoyable performance in this one. But oh no, we’re just getting started. Poe ends up being put on a prison transport plane alongside a collection of psychos, murderers, and probably at least one person who parked an inch over a yellow line, several of whom are in on a breakout plot from criminal mastermind Cyrus—played by none other than John Malkovich. In fact, Malkovich’s singular given direction through the whole film was ‘be the slimiest, smuggest, most sadistic son of a bitch since Caligula’—and it works oh so entertainingly. But even he’s not the only standout—we’ve got fellow cons Ving Rhames, MC Gainey, Danny Trejo, and even Dave Chappelle, all giving their best. Hell even on the good guy side we’ve got Colm Meany doing the polar opposite of his role as Miles O’Brien as an utterly hammy, shouty, perpetually enraged lunatic, and with him, it’s an absolutely laugh.
And right here the film nails one crucial ingredient of being a cheesy guilty pleasure—when you’ve got a cast like that having fun through the whole thing, and everyone clearly is, it’s inevitable you’re probably going to join in too. The whole setup, where Cage is trying to stop the nefarious crims from the inside, is completely silly—but it doesn’t matter when everyone’s just rolling with it! I haven’t even mentioned my actual favorite in the whole film, which is course Steve Buscemi—whose character seemed to have been added in as an afterthought, but he gets all the best lines, and given that I like Buscemi in just about anything, I sure won’t complain.
The whole thing can be summed up by the film’s accompanying song, ‘How Do I Live’ by LeeAnn Rimes, which yes was nominated for both a Razzie and an Oscar! The lyrics are completely doofy when you actually look at them, but it cracks me up anyway:
“How do I live without youuuuu?
How do I breathe without youuuuu?
No seriously I’ve forgotten how to aaahhkkkkkhhhhhh”
But either way, the best part is of course a big firefight of gratuitous explosions and Cage running in slow motion while his ridiculous mullet blows in the wind, all set to a soundtrack going nuts with Aerosmith style guitar chords. This is minutes before Malkovich holds a stuffed bunny hostage with a gun, done completely seriously. There’s no winking at the audience, there’s just pure magnificent nonsensical extravagance—and there we hit the second key ingredient. Play everything straight, play it to absurdity, and play it with confidence, combine that with the factor mentioned earlier, and man oh man do you have some campy joy at hand! And this is all before we get into the climax, which kicks off with half of Vegas being trashed by way of emergency landing!
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| Negotiating tactics, lesson 5: if all else fails, KILL EASTER. |
Well, okay, there are some things I’ll pick at that legitimately raise my eyebrow. The rest of the finale kind of drags, mostly being about destroying the other half of Vegas, and the way Buscemi gets his character—a guy who sees Jeffrey Dahmer as a role model—kind of sort of 'redeemed' is baffling, lending credence to my assumption that he was thrown in there because he happened to be hanging about near the set one day. So make of that what you will.
Overall, for some quality Cageness, and for gloriously stupid 90s era action, Con Air hits that sweet spot—it helps that there’s plenty of practical in-camera sequences too bereft of the lame CG that other just plain stupid films of this era sank into. It may not be an example of fine writing, it may not even be an example of anything even resembling restraint, but I’m not even going to pretend it doesn’t leave me with a big dumb smile.
Oh, but we’re not even done yet—that same year, Cage gave us another action film with even less restraint and even more silliness! Let’s see if we can crank up the Cage Rage even more next time, and I’m going to have so much fun finding out…
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