The Rock (1996)

  I keep trying to like this movie.  I must have seen it now four times and I just can't do it.  Every time I try I just hate it more.  And it's the best kind of 90's garbage, too.  Before Nicholas Cage had tax problems, Sean Connery retired, and Michael Bay's name became synonymous with a joke about explosions.  Sometimes I'm so disappointed in myself.

FBI Agent Stanley Goodspeed (Nicholas Cage) is a chemical weapons specialist happy to live out his days defusing bombs and looking for limited vinyl records.  Then a disgruntled Army general (Ed Harris) takes over the island of Alcatraz, imprisoning all the tourists, and threatens to shoot fifteen rockets filled with an extremely toxic nerve agent into San Francisco.  Goodspeed has to go and diffuse the rockets but he can't get to the island without help.  In desperation, the director of the FBI (John Spencer) releases the one man to ever successfully escape from the Rock, a former SAS operative named John Mason (Sean Connery) who has been held without trial for the last thirty years.

The whole film is so overwrought it should be reclassified as performance art.  Harris and Connery try to see who can chew the most scenery -- a contest in which everyone loses.  Cage is a neurotic wreck and everyone else seems to be going for a certain frothing-at-the-mouth intensity.  I'm sure there are a lot of people who enjoy this movie.  They can keep it.