In between the overblown sitcom shenanigans of Bad Boys and the apocalyptic sci-fi madness of Armageddon, Michael Bay managed to direct one of the best action movies of the 90s. History kinda remembers The Rock as “one of his good ones” right there next to Pain & Gain. It’s not wildly embarrassing or full of Transformers, so it’s kind of an “out of sight, out of mind” situation. But at the exact moment that Bay seemed to be the next big thing in action filmmaking, the culture shifted and left him holding the bag on a style of blockbuster that now feels old-fashioned.
The Rock came out in June of 1996 to decent reviews and became a pretty respectable hit. Less than a month later, Independence Day became far and away the biggest movie of the year. It was a huge disaster movie in the style of a 70s Irwin Allen epic, but with all the crowdpleasing sci-fi trappings of Star Wars, at that point an 80s relic preparing for a comeback in a big, bad way. Independence Day primed the moviegoing public for more jokey science fiction in their summer blockbusters, which was evident in Men in Black, one of biggest hits of 1997, and which also happened to star Bad Boys’ Will Smith. Simply put, Independence Day was everything that The Rock wasn’t. But you can’t hold that against The Rock.
According to Wikipedia, it took eight screenwriters to bring The Rock together. Disney purchased the original treatment from David Weisberg and Douglas Cook. Their script was reworked by Mark Rosner, and the three of them became the officially credited screenwriters. This LA Times article details the legal dispute brought by Jonathan Hensleigh, who worked closely with Michael Bay on the final shooting script. Aaron Sorkin and Quentin Tarantino allegedly did some uncredited rewrites. Then Sean Connery had his own team of writers step in to punch up his dialogue. Whole lotta cooks in that kitchen.
That kinda stuff is interesting to me, because I like learning how this particular sausage gets made. It’s not unheard of for movies like this to have script doctors or punch-up writers, and it seemed to happen a lot in the 90s. Hell, Kevin Smith, M. Night Shyamalan and Joss Whedon all did it to one degree or another. Point is, The Rock definitely feels like a film pieced together by a committee. Fortunately, the final product was worth all that effort. In baseball terms, The Rock is a solid hit right down the middle.
The plot at the center of The Rock is pretty simple: A team of turncoat marines led by Ed Harris seize control of Alcatraz and take all the tourists inside hostage. They plan to launch a chemical weapon attack on San Francisco unless the US Government pays restitution to the families of fellow marines killed in action. The feds go to former SAS captain John Mason (Sean Connery), the only inmate to ever escape Alcatraz, to lead a team into Alcatraz to stop them before the attack can be launched. He’s teamed up with chemical weapons expert Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), and the two of them become a mismatched buddy pair tasked with saving the city.
Stanley’s supposed to be our likeable everyman character, but Nicolas Cage never met a role he couldn’t turn inside out. He seems hellbent on twisting Stanley into someone weirder or more tortured, seemingly for his own amusement. Stanley comes home from work after deactivating a chemical bomb, and gives his girlfriend Carla (Vanessa Marcil) this agonizing speech about how irresponsible it would be to bring a baby into a world as fucked up as this. So naturally, she breaks the news to him that she’s a) pregnant, and b) Catholic, so c) he damn well better marry her. Stanley’s a real jerk, but he’s no monster, so of course he says yes. It gives Stanley a good incentive to keep fighting when all seems lost, though, and he even tries to use this to shame Mason into sticking around to help him.
It’s a pretty threadbare character on the page, but Cage gets a whole lot of room to play around with it. Good thing, too, because without him The Rock wouldn’t have near enough personality. He gives Stanley a bunch of oddball quirks, like how he’s introduced ogling a Beatles record and explaining why vinyl is superior to CD. He has a life outside of the office, though apparently not enough of one, because he’s also so dedicated to the job that he tries really, really hard not to swear, even in the face of certain death. Stanley Goodspeed is truly a land of contrasts.
As for Sean Connery… Well, he’s Sean Connery. He’s always had a bit of a limited range as an actor, but he gets into his groove and it’s hard to argue against him. Mason’s a no-nonsense guy, and he has every right to not trust anyone, having been locked up for the past thirty years. There’s a fan theory that Mason is what happened to Connery’s James Bond after 30 years, which definitely tracks. What doesn’t track is when people who’ve had their brains poisoned by cinematic universes take that train of thought one stop too far and say “The Rock is canonically a James Bond movie”. Get outta here with that shit. But back to the point, it’s fun seeing Connery have to play off all these younger guys trying so hard to be the toughest guy in the room, and he just stares them down like they’re ants. There’s a lot of macho bluster and bullshit flying around this film, and I enjoy seeing Connery and Cage both cut right through it in their own ways.
There could have been a path forward here, a road not taken where a Michael Bay movie could turn the testosterone-fueled action genre on its ear. Both The Rock and Bad Boys feature mismatched pairs, where one character is out of his depth and simply trying to hang while the other knows the score and is tired of everyone else’s shit. Martin Lawrence and Nicolas Cage both play these vulnerable, unheroic characters, and it makes a movie more compelling to see those characters rise to the occasion. Bay could’ve become that guy, delivering action heroes with a sense depth and humanity, something resembling an everyman streak. I realize how silly that thought is, especially knowing what kinds of movies are in my future. Still, it’s fun to dream…
The Rock isn’t just a great action movie because of its two leads, though. It’s a great action movie because Bay and Bruckheimer and the whole team seemed to have finally cracked the Die Hard code, the formula that so many action movies between 1988 and 1996 tried to follow to varying degrees of success. Like Die Hard, The Rock makes the location a character unto itself. Alcatraz is a great setting for an action movie, and the fact that they got permission to actually shoot on location gives it that extra bit of juice. The prison cells, the watchtower, the dingy corridors and shower rooms that play host to some truly gnarly shootouts. You’ve got the plucky hero, an iconic, visually dynamic setting, a terrorist plot that’s basically just a heist in disguise; it all just clicks.
Just like Stanley’s obsession with vinyl records, The Rock feels like a product of a bygone era. It’s a movie deeply rooted in the exceptionalism of the American military, something we’re gonna be seeing a whole lot more out of Michael Bay soon. It also comes out in a time when America’s foreign rivals were few, and domestic terrorism was very much in the news. This was just a year after the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, so this sort of thing was definitely on our minds. It belongs in the same category as John Frankenheimer’s Ronin (a film I recently recorded a whole podcast about), another post-Cold War action film where in the absence of war, servicemen become mercenary. The 90s were a very brief window of time when our movies, like our country, had to go searching for dragons to slay.
But those times were changing quickly. Even though The Rock was a pretty solid hit, Independence Day changed the game and helped set the stage for a resurgence of science fiction. With his next feature, Michael Bay finally dominated the box office, but still found himself playing catch-up with a culture moving too quickly.
UP NEXT: The end of the world as we know it.
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