However, Ed Harris as the "villain" is a little more sophisticated than most. Harris doesn't have that "desperate madman streak" in him, so you don't feel he's going to destroy most of San Francisco just for fun. He certainly would never be accepted as a Batman villain prototype, since his bad guy ness leans more toward Robin Hood than Lady Macbeth.
Still, conscience or no, Harris plans to hold America hostage and has appropriated a chemical weapon able to eradicate large numbers with each drop.
And so comes Connery and Cage to the rescue. The pair are well matched. Connery looks old (but still awfully sexy) and Cage is comfortably goofy. Mind you, to really enjoy this movie, you have to overlook quite a few questionable moments. Connery has been incarcerated for 30 years in an underground prison in a basement in Pohoke. He knows that Nelson Mandella has been freed and become president, yet he didn't know that Alcatraz had become a tourist attraction. Maybe Mandella was a more likely topic of gossip in the prison shower blocks.
Connery looks and acts like 007 thirty years later. We discover he was a member of her Majesties finest, the SAS and even though he's been reading philosophy in a dark hole for thirty years, he is still remarkably well in shape.
Nicolas Cage plays a delightful "chemical superfreak" and he's just freaky enough to be believable. Occasionally his well written lines are a fraction late in delivery, which make them awkward rather than brilliant. For the most part, however, Cage is quirky and bizarre. And, like all action adventure flics, we do have to expect that this useless book nerd will suddenly remember his twenty minutes of combat training and manage to kill more marines than I've ever seen plus diffuses the rockets, save the world etc. etc. Okay, okay so its far fetched, but it could be a lot worse.
The Rock refuses to take itself too seriously, and the wise audience member will do the same. If you run out of popcorn during the car chase early in the movie, pop out for a refill and return about five minutes later, then you'll miss the annoying handicam work and the "lets see how clever we can be at blowing up things" segment. I also found the final killing of the renegade marines to be a little tedious. Did they have to be killed one by one? Still, I guess the movie has to appeal to those more testosterone endowed than I. I am getting rather tired of seeing people skewered, however. No matter how clever an effect it is - enough is enough. Either think up some other disgusting way to show the pointless ending of human life, or just kill them all in one go and be done with it. Nonetheless, I enjoyed The Rock a great deal.