Con Air - Why I Still Love It

90s action monster Con Air is the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. An over-stuffed blockbuster that thrives on its own absurdity and excess.

It’s the type of film that really ought not to work. It’s excessively loud, unashamedly sentimental, often batshit insane and continually flirts with bad taste scenarios.

Yet it also boasts one of the most talented casts to ever populate an action blockbuster (outside of the MCU), has moments of pure genius that offer profound commentary on society as a whole, and several inspired action sequences.

Released in the summer of 1997 and boasting a then giant-sized production budget of $75m, it received a lukewarm critical response and lagged behind another of that year’s big, plane-based summer tent poles - Harrison Ford’s Air Force One (aka Die Hard on a plane)… Con Air taking $225m worldwide to AFO’s $315m.

But Con Air has arguably fared better over time and stands as something of a 90s action classic - the type of gonzo summer blockbuster they simply won’t risk making anymore.

Nicolas Cage heads the ensemble as a newly paroled former US Army Ranger named Cameron Poe, unfairly convicted for using excessive force during a brawl with three drunken thugs, who is desperate to get home to his wife and the daughter he has yet to physically meet.

But it’s his bad luck that his journey home just happens to be on a prison transport plane commandeered by a cargo of convicts dubbed the “worst of the worst”, including criminal mastermind Cyrus ‘the Virus’ Grissom (John Malkovich), black militant anarchist Nathan ‘Dog’ Jones, serial killers William Bedford (Nick Chinlund) and Garland ‘The Marietta Mangler’ Greene (Steve Buscemi), as well as serial rapist Johnny 23 (Danny Trejo) and makeshift pilot and fellow convict Swamp Thing (MC Gainey).

Driven by his military code of honour and inherent sense of decency, Poe spurns several chances to get off the plane in order to try and save his prison pal Mike (Mykelti Williamson), a transferee in dire need of an insulin shot, and female prison guard Sally Bishop (Rachel Ticotin) - with help on the ground from intuitive United States Marshal Vince Larkin (John Cusack), who senses that Poe is an ally who represents his best chance of getting the plane down and saving the lives of the other innocents on board.

It’s all high stakes stuff, as pumped up as a Michael Bay flick, yet with a keen sense of its own stupidity.

British director Simon West, making his debut, seems to have a good grasp of the limitations of the material and the quality of his cast, allowing them to really inhabit their characters and dial up the craziness or thespian excess whenever possible. And it’s this showboating from all the major players that helps Con Air to remain the success that it undoubtedly is.

Chief among these is Buscemi’s deranged killer - a Hannibal Lecter inspired monster capable of profound insight, surreal empathy (witness his encounter with a young girl during one pit-stop that somehow provides enlightenment for the rest of the movie) or his subsequent cult hero-like status come the finale.

Buscemi somehow makes him likeable and shamelessly steals every scene he’s in, spouting memorable lines that are as profound as they are vaguely true. Try: “What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years... at the end of which they tell you to piss off? Ending up in some retirement village... hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time. Wouldn't you consider that to be insane?”

Or: “Define irony. Bunch of idiots dancing on a plane to a song [Sweet Home Alabama] made famous by a band that died in a plane crash [Lynyrd Skynyrd].”

The man’s not wrong!

But then Malkovich also shines as the intelligent but ruthless Cyrus, revelling in his own ruthlessness and somehow convincing as the type of man who could convincingly control a bunch of muscular, testosterone heavy lunatics. He also gets to deliver the odd put-down with relish: “I despise rapists. For me, you're somewhere between a cockroach and that white stuff that accumulates at the corner of your mouth when you're really thirsty.”

Cusack is another who gets to showcase his own particular brand of cool - combining the fast-talking intelligent charm that is his trademark (“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by observing its prisoners." Dostevsky said that... after doin' a little time.”) with some equally quick-thinking action scenes. His use of a rival agent’s prized car (and its subsequent payoff) is priceless.

And then there’s Cage - the overly earnest action hero, who somehow retains a stoic sense of calm and decency despite sporting a ridiculous hillbilly mullet (the most uncool of looks) and forced to utter hilariously OTT lines such as “put the… bunny back… in the box” while keeping a deadly straight face.

Admittedly, that line has become an out and out classic given its fantastic delivery. But then Cage was entering peak mainstream form, coming off the back of The Rock the previous year and heading onto the likes of Face/Off and Gone In 60 Seconds. The first three, in particular, remain among the best action blockbusters the 90s had to offer (with all their glorious excess).

Credit also deserves to go to West for overseeing some fairly complex plot mechanics - most notably an extended sequence at the fictional Lerner Field that simultaneously combined a Mexican cartel member attempting a double cross, Poe and Larkin bonding with each other while working out a deal, a gun heavy ambush between the convicts and the military, and an attempted rape and rescue.

But there’s also some pretty tense stand-offs between various characters and a will they/won’t they blow the plane out of the sky scenario, as well as the darkly comic disposal of another convict (Dave Chappelle), whose ejection from the plane onto a random car in the busy street below offers an early communication between Poe and Larkin.

True, the overblown Las Vegas finale quite possibly offers one set piece too many (particularly as it doesn’t really deliver anything special other than widespread pyrotechnics and carnage), while it’s debatable whether there was ever a need for a rapist among the characters (with Ticotin working hard to overcome what could lazily have become a damsel-in-distress).

And there are plot holes aplenty, not to mention a few exchanges and quips that feel hopelessly outdated and sometimes vaguely misogynistic.

But to get too bogged down in what doesn’t work somehow seems to be missing the point. Con Air wears its brash, super-sized craziness like a badge of honour. It even doubles down on it whenever possible.

In doing so, it’s unashamedly good fun. A violent, trashy spectacle that has the good sense to play to the strengths of its cracking cast. It’s an absolute blast that only seems to get better with age.