#26 — Con Air

This is part of an illustrated countdown of my 49 1/2 most essential action movies. Last week I talked about one of my favorite samurai movies, which is more than rowdy enough to count qualify as “action”.

Con Air, which is short for Convict Airlines, is a perfect title for an action movie, and also creative branding (even if the concept is problematic). I don’t think this would work in real life, having a Hannibal Lector type as your flight attendant, or the guy from Being John Malkovich (can’t remember his name) as your navigator.

It is good if you want your action movie to feel like a big Batman cartoon, and it’s clear to me that’s what Con Air is trying to be. We have a bona fide rogues gallery here, and everyone gets a special name like “Cyrus the Virus”, “Diamond Dog”, or “Jelly Bean”. I can’t remember if someone is named Jelly Bean, but if they are, they earned it through deadly use of the beans. All the criminals have a reputation that precedes them. That means if Jelly Bean walks onto a prison transport, all the other bad guys are gonna say something like “whoa, it’s Jelly Bean. I heard he killed three men in a bar with, uh….a jelly bean, I think”.

So you’re dealing with a collection of heavy hitters, and they steal this plane to fly to freedom, and they’ve got hostages. It’s a bad situation when you really think about it. You need a hero to match this caliber of villainy, someone the magnificent Nicolas Cage could stand against without being acted off the screen. His name is Cameron Poe, which is one of the all-time great action hero names on account of it bucks the conventional John Brick- Wilson Stone-Maxter Muscle naming scheme that a lot of these movies utilize. He contains a tenderness within his rugged exterior. He says things like “If you speak to my wife again, you tell her that I love her. She’s my hummin’bird.” with the voice of a southern gentlemen. He could exist in almost any era and remain unchanged. His nobility sustains him. He peacefully serves his unjust prison sentence by working out, eating Doritos, and reading books on Spanish and origami. He looks like a living breathing Creed song, a junkyard dog, but he’s an angelic Golden Retriever bathing in sunlight and moral principal. He’s the antidote to Cyrus’ virus, the calming winds to Billy’s bedlam — sort of a Con Angel, transcending time and space.

Cameron Poe is friends with an inmate named Baby-O (Mykelti Williamson, you might recognize him from Heat), which sounds like a cereal for babies. He’s a diabetic, not known for outstanding feats of violence and whatnot, he just wants to peacefully do his time and go home. But they get stuck on this new airline for criminals and it forces them to fight or fold. There’s a sense of honor and loyalty between them that I really like. When Baby-O thinks he’s gonna die, he has a crisis of faith, but Poe is the kinda guy that will take a bullet for his bro without flinching just to show him God does exist. It’s a real walk-on-water moment that stuns his fellow inmates, even as they try to kill him. It really crystallizes what flying Con Air is all about.

It’s the presentation. Typically this kind of bombast is a form of compensation, a mask for mediocrity. It’s not a bug here, it’s the main feature — denoting its cheeky tone with humorously dorky dialogue (characters will often go into observational diatribes that are utter nonsense, but I don’t hate it), propulsive editing, and catchy music. I really like the score in particular. There’s bouncy bass rhythms that sound like lost Eric Serra tracks — following characters like wrestling intros. Sometimes a wailing guitar sound will accompany acts of courage. I will also go on record as liking the use of “How Do I Live” for the emotional climax. It’s a very Cameron Poe choice.

The movie also ends with a credits montage of everybody with their character names (Swamp Thing, Johnny-23, etc.) like they did in Predator, just as one of those hope-you-had-a-fun-time things, and it’s appropriate. That’s the kind of end credits you can only use for big, goofy, action extravaganzas — it’d be dumb if something like The Raid did that. The cast also has to collectively earn it, and they do.

So you’ve got this robust Die Hard template, but it’s padded out with the lavish expenditure of a 90s Bruckheimer action disaster flick. It has a huge cast with people like John Cusack, Rachel Ticotin, and Steve Buschemi (to name a few). It has explosions for days. It knows exactly what it wants to be, and everyone seems to be having fun. Apparently it won a Razzie Award for Worst Reckless Disregard for Human Life and Public Property, but I think that’s exactly the kind of award a movie like this should strive for. Personally, I think it got snubbed out of BBCAH award (Best Blue Collar Action Hero) and possibly a TDMELTA (They Don’t Make ’Em Like This Anymore). Michael Bay is one of the only current action directors that is still doing anything like this, but he left Nic Cage behind and has paid for it, IMHO (In My Humble Opinion).

In fact, I’ll go as far as to say this is the best Michael Bay movie he never directed, and I prefer it to almost all of his work. So congratulations to Simon West on his first and best feature film. It’s a shame we never got Con Airs, sort of the Aliens to Con Air’s Alien — but maybe Mr. West saw Die Hard on Alcatraz and wanted to follow that up with Alcatraz On A Plane. In summary, this is a much better movie than Expendables 2, and I recommend it.