The Rock (

1996

)

In my review of Commando (1985), I argued that it was the platonic ideal of a cheesy 1980s action movie. Not because it was better than other films of its era and genre (indeed, you'd be crazy to prefer it to Predator (1987)) but because it is a purer distillation of the genre's common tropes than any other I've seen before. I bring this up because today's film, The Rock, is to dumb big-budget Hollywood action movies what Commando is to cheesy 1980s action movies. It is the film you picture in your head when someone calls a film you haven't seen a “popcorn movie.” Obviously, if you have no patience for sentimental heroism, frantic camera work, ludicrous plots, and simplistic characters, you should give The Rock a wide berth. However, it is such a prominent exemplar of the genre that if you have any interest at all in the sort of crowd-pleasing action movies Hollywood was cranking out in the 1990s and early 2000s then it is a must-see. Moreover, the film in and of itself has quite a bit going for it.

The film opens with a monologue from General Francis Hummel, a marine commander who has long been the Pentagon's go-to guy for illegal, quasi-terrorist actions abroad. From clandestine wars in the middle east to secret invasions of China during the Vietnam War, if there's a war the US government wanted to fight and didn't want anyone to know about then Hummel was there. In the monologue, Hummel addresses his recently deceased wife and gives the audience some inkling as to what he is planning to do and why he has waited so long to do it. He is pissed that the men he commanded in his various extra-legal campaigns have been disavowed by their government and denied even the basic decency of a military funeral and a pension for their loved ones. He's aiming to do something drastic about it, indeed something so drastic that he needed to wait for his wife to die lest she see him do it and live with the shame.

The sequence's editing style betrays Michael Bay's origins as a music video director rather than a traditional filmmaker. Images are paraded on screen in rapid succession with individual moments being chopped up and divided among the single monologue. Many of them making only emotional rather than strictly logical sense. Bay's style of editing is frequently exhausting given the sheer number of times that his film cuts and at its worst it can render scenes effectively incomprehensible. However here and in many places throughout The Rock, it enhances the emotional weight and impact of the plot. This emotional impact before logic philosophy does lead to some absurd images and moments throughout the film, like the fact that FBI agent Stanley Goodspeed apparent sleeps and screws on the roof of his house.

In short order, the audience finds out what drastic thing Hummel is planning to do, when one stormy night he and a band of loyal marines raid a military outpost under the guise of a surprise inspection and make off with 15 rockets armed with VX gas warheads. For those in the audience who don't know what VX gas is or what it does to people, the film helpfully has one of the canisters ruptures and one of Hummel's men liquefy before our eyes. Making off with weapons of mass destruction is bad enough but for phase two of his plan Hummel ups the ante and has his men take control of Alcatraz, the famous prison in the San Francisco Bay, taking all the tourists visiting that day hostage in the process; effectively reenacting the final sequence of The Enforcer (1976). If the government doesn't give Hummel and his men $100,000,000 from the Pentagon's secret slush fund (raised by selling arms to terrorists and warlords), then Hummel says he will start launching VX nerve gas at the city.

Naturally, the American government isn't just going to hand over their secret funds earned through illegal arms sales, though one has to wonder if they would be clutching the purse strings quite so tightly if Hummel had demanded tax-payer money. So in short order, a response team is assembled. Commander Anderson and his Navy SEALs will serve as the main assault force, but despite their training, the SEALs aren't going to be able to defuse the warheads or navigate their way through the maze of tunnels and passages beneath Alcatraz. The Former duty will be handled by FBI agent Stanley Goodspeed, played by somewhat restrained (by his standards anyway) Nicholas Cage. The latter will be a little harder to find, as officially no prisoner has ever managed to escape through the tunnels beneath Alcatraz. However, unofficially there is one guy, John Mason a member of the British SAS who stole secrets from J. Edgar Hoover in the sixties and has been rotting in one maximum-security prison or another for the past thirty years. The FBI pulls him out of whatever hole he's been moldering in for the last couple decades, and though he's not exactly gung-ho about helping the American government he eventually comes around.

The initial assault on Alcatraz is an unmitigated fuck-up, with Anderson and his SEAL team wandering right into an ambush laid by Hummel and his marines. After a tense standoff, they are massacred to a man leaving Stanley Goodspeed and John Mason alone to complete the mission, which sounds like a sure recipe for disaster. Goodspeed is an FBI agent, but he's essentially a lab technician, not a field agent. Mason is badass to a frankly absurd degree for a guy who has been in solitary confinement for a few decades, but he's not exactly invested in the mission, and right from the start he was looking for an opportunity to ditch his handlers and escape custody. The two are going to have to learn to work together and fast because the deadline for when Hummel threatened to launch the rockets is rapidly approaching and the Pentagon has already made up its mind that it would rather keep the $100,000,000 for themselves and sacrifice a few hundred thousand citizens.

Why does The Rock succeed while so many of Bay's other films leave me bored and frustrated? I think it's because Bay does not understand his strengths as a filmmaker. He excels at fast-paces action sequences like car chases or pitched gun battles where his frantic camerawork and rapid-editing fits with the tone of the action. Even his buildup to the action scenes is handled with a degree of skill and care, as illustrated by the standoff in The Rock between general Hummel and the Navy SEALs. As the general orders the SEALs commander to throw down his weapons and as the commander refuses the camera pans in giving an otherwise static sequence a feeling of growing tension. Sure, Bay's directorial flourishes can become tiresome, particularly when a film drags into its third hour, but his insistence on having every shot brimming with energy and excitement is at the very least an admirable trait in an age where there are so many boring “action” movies floating around.

No, the problem is that somewhere along the way Bay got it into his head that he was a comedic genius and loaded his films with comic relief. It's not just the occasional one-liner after killing a bad guy either, Bay goes so far to revives the old Hollywood tradition of a comic relief character. Despite Bay's own delusions, his films are almost never funny, and most of the attempts to make them humorous make them obnoxious instead. The Rock, though it does have a few cringe-inducing lines delivered by the effeminate gay barber character, has very few jokes. As a result, it avoids things like the jive-talking minstrel-show robots in Transfromers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009). It's a straightforward action film instead of an action-comedy where none of the jokes land, and as a consequence, it's the best damn movie Bay has ever made.

Michael bay is often sighted by film critics as a “reactionary hack” making “USA propaganda.” A filmmaker whose love for the intricate machinery of war and space flight invariably leads to banal flag-waving patriotism. Yet, when I watch The Rock, I see something closer to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [2009] than Rocky IV (1985). That is to say, it is a film that is determined to depict the higher levels of the American government as corrupt, cruel, and often insane while showing the average foot-slogger as heroic and even chivalrous. In The Rock, we see that America has been waging a series of secret, covert-operations that effectively amount to terrorist campaigns. Hummel knows that the Pentagon can give in to his demands because they have a few billion sitting around in a slush fund they've saved up from selling arms to terrorists and warlords. The FBI is no better than the military-industrial complex, as they have wrongfully imprisoned a foreign national for thirty years without even the courtesy of a trial. The reason why they're doing it only makes them look worse, as it's later revealed in the film that they are only doing this to protect the fact that they are covering up secrets about the Kennedy assassination and the alien landing at Roswell. If the Rock is patriotic propaganda, then what the hell would a film that was reasonably suspicious of American institutions look like?

Bay can only be described as a reactionary peddler of pro-American jingoism by people who have no idea what a state-sponsored action-propaganda movie actually looks like. Fortunately, The People's Republic of China has provided a definitive counter-example in the form of movies like Wolf Warrior (2015), Operation Red Sea (2018), and Sky Hunter (2017). There are superficial similarities between these films and Bay's, like the swelling heroic music, the focus on highly advanced military technology (Wolf Warrior (2015) has Chinese soldiers outfitted with pip-boys from Fallout [1997]), and the heroic violence. However, in the Chinese films, you will never see any conflict between the soldiers on the ground and their leaders in the command center. Whereas Bay shows the higher echelons of power to be warped and corrupted to the core, his Chinese counterparts present them as a harmonious and unified system of command. Corruption, incompetence, cowardice, and madness simply do not exist within their ranks.

More honest critics have admitted that The Rock at least is a liberal film even if they continue to insist that it is an aberration when compared to the rest of Bay's oeuvre. While Bay's cynicism about the American government is plainer in The Rock than in his other pictures they all share a consistent worldview where the government is riddled with incompetence and cruelty at the highest levels. From the bumbling secret agency Sector Seven in Transformers (2007) to the dystopian society of The Island (2005), no powerful institution in Bay's cinematic worlds is free from this pervasive corruption. Bay's heroes have more in common with figures like Phillip Marlowe than they do with the figures from propaganda movies. They are not exemplars or heroes, but simply good men who live in a wicked world. This is not a conservative worldview, it's a pulp-worldview.