'Con Air': A Miracle
The GOAT of 90s action movies achieves the platonic ideal of its genre.
Stipulated: To write about Con Air, one must write about all of Con Air.
Any attempt to deconstruct this movie constitutes a crime against cinema. In this case, we must say an unequivocal “no” to the fashionable, sharp, and single-angled approach of 21st-century pop culture commentary. We must, instead, acknowledge and fully accept that this movie achieves two epic, singular feats: Con Air as an utterly flawless distillation of the action movie ideal; and, Con Air as an entry of synergism so perfect, Merriam-Webster should include it in their definition of the word.
It is impossible to argue with any conviction which element of Con Air is most indispensable. The casting (mad and inspired)? The plot (you know what’s up)? The script (put some of these lines in an A24 indie and they get an Oscar nom)? The setting (sand-storming desert, the Las Vegas strip, the sky)? The tone (…)?
We won’t be choosing today, because no real choice exists here. Remove any one element, and Con Air tips off the pinprick-sized pinnacle of its achievement, becoming just another great 90s action film, a la The Rock or the first installment of Mission: Impossible.
But Con Air never falters, it never falls. It exists in a strata unto itself. To discover this movie is like stumbling across a stone of painite. There is nothing else like it, and there never will be.
It’s perfect anytime, but it’s especially perfect for a post-Christmas schmaltz detox. You’ll be reacquainted with the world of flubbing DEA agents and Alabama oil rigs, a million candy canes and Santa sleighs notwithstanding. You’ll be blessed by the reminder that simulated explosions are cool, and that late 90s action film soundtracks never flinched at going hard.
Nicolas Cage and his Alabama Accent
Oh, Nicolas.
Portraying Army veteran Cameron Poe, incarcerated on charges of killing a drunken jerk, and finally on his way home to his wife and 6-year-old daughter, Cage is earnestly delivering an attempt at a southern accent so atrocious that its in-your-face absurdity becomes endearing. Perhaps the best moment: writing his wife and daughter in a letter voice over that he’s coming home, “coming home forev-ah.”
Cage brings his wily weirdness to Poe, the same singular weirdness he brings to every role, and without it, you would not be reading about this movie right now. He’s one of a handful of actors who could instill interest in the consummate “good guy” on a plane full of hardened convicts. He’s the only one simultaneously willing and able to sincerely do so with a southern accent that never even pretends to approach authentic, let alone believable.
The Lines
The screenwriter of Con Air is Scott Rosenberg. However much he got paid, it’s not enough.
Action movies necessitate a big budget for all those… action sequences. That usually means the quality of dialogue is not atop anyone’s agenda. And it shows.
Con Air, though, is chock full of clever lines, verbal pizazz. Characters have unique voices, and what they say conveys not just information, but personality. Flair.
But a small sampling :
Cameron to security guard about his transport: “As long as I make it home on time, it makes no never mind.”
Cyrus describing his killing of prison guards: “well-known and oft-lamented facts of penal lore.”
Cameron, commenting on a Colombian cartel gangster putting a silencer on his gun: “Well hoo-ray for the sounds of f***ing silence.”
And my personal favorite: “Sorry boss, but there’s only two men I trust. One of them’s me, and the other’s not you.”
John Malkovich
John Malkovich got his start in the theater. He’s a two-time Oscar nominee. He’s worked with Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Spike Jonze, and the Coen Brothers, among many other notable directors.
What’s he doing in a rip-roaring action flick aimed directly at mainstream America?
He’s killing it, my friends. That’s what he’s doing.
Like Cage, Malkovich is always playing mostly himself on camera, and that’s exactly what we want. The brains behind the entire operation (cons taking control of their aircraft transport), Malkovich’s “Cyrus the Virus” character is by far the smartest guy in the cabin, an unrepentant and witty criminal of the highest order whose most redeeming quality (besides his humor) is the specific disgust he voices towards rapists.
No one else can go toe-to-toe with the wild blend of absurdity and candor Nicolas Cage is bringing to this movie. When John Malkovich as Cyrus holds hostage the pink stuffed rabbit that Cage’s Cameron is bringing home as a birthday gift to his daughter, we simultaneously believe it and laugh at it, and feel no contradiction. That’s a rare gift, my friends. That’s a kind of transcendence.
Bonus: have you ever wondered if John Malkovich’s voice is 100% recognizable in Spanish? In Con Air we find out the answer.
It is.
The Magical Workings Of Time and Geography
This film embraces a delightful disregard for the reality of physics, a wholesale rejection of the basic tenets of time and space and how they function together.
For instance: Cameron’s wife is pregnant when we first meet her, but it’s also the same scene immediately following Cameron’s honorable discharge from the Army. Details strongly suggest this is a long-awaited reunion; how then is she so early along in a pregnancy that there’s not even the slightest hint of a baby bump yet?
Cameron is convicted of murder in Mobile, Alabama. He ends up at a federal prison in California. Discuss.
John Cusack plays Larkin, a U.S. Marshall, and he oversees the first plane transport takeoff. But he also is able to immediately get to the prison and inspect Cyrus’ prison cell. And then, also, drive to the mostly abandoned local airfield in Lerner. And all this in the span of an hour.
Towards the end of the film, convict Diamond Dog (Ving Rhames) estimates the convicts have “10 to 12 minutes, max” before law enforcement arrives. In that timeframe, Cameron gets in a firefight with the drug lord gang from Colombia, has a subsequent heart-to-heart with Larkin, Sandino and his sole living Colombian pal decide to take the escape plane for themselves, are seen by Cyrus, are explosively unsuccessful in getting their plane off the ground, which necessitates a battle strategizing meeting led by Cyrus with all the cons about how to take on the (somehow still incoming) band of law enforcement.
The Lerner airport is a local spot for hobby pilots, apparently, a tiny runway in the middle of a desert that doubles as a graveyard for junked airplanes and other scrap metal. For some reason, a decaying Red Cross tent happens to be there, just in time for Cameron to find a syringe for his buddy’s insulin shot.
Con Air understands no one is here for timeline or geographic realism. Knowledge of itself and its purpose adds strength upon strength. Respect.
Nonstop Momentum
The stakes of the film are simple: Cameron wants to get home for his daughter’s birthday. It should be a plane ride away.
But a cabin full of convicts is, obviously, a threat.
Then, there’s the DEA agent who sneaks aboard for MacGuffin purposes. He’s got a gun, and he will shoot if he feels threatened.
Then, there’s Cameron’s friend and former cell mate who is also, as the wise screenwriters would have it, being transferred to a different prison on the same flight, and whose insulin shot is destroyed in the general melee of the cons taking over the aircraft. He’s perpetually just minutes away from dying throughout the movie.
There’s a sandstorm at the Carson City stop that would be a kind of “normal life” danger, but nothing much in this context.
Once the DEA guy gets himself knocked off, his DEA boss back on the ground wants to shoot the plane down. So there’s that.
Then, Cameron is discovered as the snitch who alerted Larkin to their plane’s new destination. Cyrus would definitely kill him, but before he can get to that…
The DEA destroys the plane’s engines, meaning they have to crash land in Vegas, and choose to do so not out in the wide open desert that literally encircles Vegas for hundreds of miles, but instead right down the main drag of Sin City’s strip.
Once the plane finally comes to a stop, the “civilian casualties will be enormous” prediction by DEA guy definitely seeming possible though evidence is never shown, Cameron and Larkin meet at last, only to jointly catch Cyrus sneaking onto a fire truck (how? why?) and racing away. Naturally, the two new bros must chase him. Chase him on police motorcycles.
The single most ludicrous minute in the history of action movies yet awaits. At the 1:43:30 mark of Con Air, Cameron and Cyrus are duking it out on the roof of the getaway firetruck, while Larkin grabs a hose and sprays it into the driver’s seat. Cameron handcuffs Cyrus to the fire engine ladder, then hits whatever button make it go up. The firetruck — the front of it flooded, the tail-end on fire, at last emerges from the gleaming white tunnel it’s been speeding through for a good long while now. The driver, unable to see due to all that flooding, hits a parked car or two, then himself crashes out of the window. Larkin jumps off the firetruck roof while Cyrus, with no choice in the matter, handcuffed as he is, must bear the full brunt of a skyway walk bridge, which breaks the firetruck ladder and sends someone’s body falling through telephone wires that spark off in miniature fireworks. Cameron catapults himself off the firetruck, just in the nick of time, before it crashes into an armored car and promptly does what every other vehicle in this movie must do: explode. This time with cash fallout. Meanwhile, the firetruck ladder deposits Cyrus beneath the automated anvil of some heretofore unseen machine, which falls on his face and (presumably) flattens his skull.
We’ve traversed exactly 60 seconds.
I can’t possibly explain how hard I laughed when I watched this last week. It’s just audacious filmmaking, folks. It’s just incredible.
Unapologetic, Generalized Asininity
In the opening credits sequence of Con Air, there’s a completely unexplained prison fire, apparently serving as the 2.6-second backdrop for Cameron voicing over his letter to Casey that he “feels like the luckiest man alive.” It’s never mentioned again, never resolved.
Cameron befriends his cellmate Baby-O (Mykelti Williamson) through sharing the Snowballs (“pink, coconut things,” per Cameron) his wife sends him, but Baby-O will later face near-fatal consequences from missing his insulin shot. Seems suspect.
How many men can shake off handcuffs with one small metal pin? Answer: three?
The airport terminal for the first Con Air takeoff looks like a mid-century hotel lobby. No explanation is ever offered, but at several points I wondered why the law men were suddenly in someone’s shnazzy living room. In said surreal indoor space, a sputtering DEA agent throws his cigarette butt on the ground and stomps on it. Inside.
After Sandino tries to steals, and then destroys, the convicts’ getaway plane, they’re forced to haul the full-sized passenger prison aircraft out of a sandbank with nothing but long ropes and their shirtless torsos. Massive biceps they may have; the capacity to move an airplane they have not.
Larkin and Cameron, two men who have met only once for approximately three minutes, hopping on unmanned but (luckily!) fully keyed up police motorcycles, a single moment of eye contact all that’s required to signal: we ride or die tonight, we ride or die together.
This list could go on. (Steve Buscemi! Dave Chappelle! I’ve got more to say about John Cusack!) But I trust the transcendence of ‘Con Air’ above mere action flick has been established. It is ultimately beyond the scope of this essay—of this writer—to fully convey the achievement here.
All we can really do is call it like it is. This film is just about a miracle.
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