Cage-mas continues as Margaux and I talk Con Air.
Trevor: You gotta hand it to Con Air, it gets going pretty quick. Five minutes in and Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) is already getting sent to prison. This movie wants to get to the plane as quickly as possible, so it dispenses with stuff like backstory. But I’m okay with that, because Con Air is pretty fun.
Margaux: There’s so much to take in during the cold open, but all you really need to know is Cage’s questionable accent this time around is best described as, “shrimp boat captain.” While defending his wife’s honor (I’m pretty sure that’s what he was doing) by participating in a knife fight in the rain – peak 90s, really – Cage’s turn up proves to be fatal and he kills one of the three men who attempt to jump him. He gets seven years in prison, oh yeah, and all this happens on the night his wife tells him she’s pregnant.
Trevor: I was wondering if Con Air originally took place in Alabama, or if Cage decided he wanted to do a Southern accent and demanded a location change. (And it’s funny you mention shrimp boat captains, because his diabetic pal was Bubba from Forrest Gump.)
What I never really think about when I think about this movie is what an insanely talented cast it has: Cage, Steve Buscemi, John Malkovich, John Cusack, Ving Rhames, even Dave Chappelle. When guys like Cage and Malkovich are bringing their A-game, there are few actors I enjoy more. And I guess that’s why I think Con Air is almost more of a showcase for Malkovich than for Cage. If they remade this movie, I think Cage would make a terrific Cyrus the Virus.
Margaux: From a villain standpoint, Con Air works best when they’re all confined to the plane, the first thirty minutes are so batshit nutty, you can tell all those A-list actors you just listed are having a really good time being the bad dude(s). But I must admit, the only one who carries any real menace is Danny Trejo. Despite the fact that his rapist character is the most over the top and outwardly hateable, he’s obviously the only actor with any real prison street cred.
Trevor: Having a character who brags about raping 600 women is something you could not get away with in a modern action movie like this.
Margaux: Right? The dialogue is so plainly written by six white guys leaning into their worst frat boy, racist stereotype leanings. It was hard to listen to the “prison banter” at times.
Trevor: I agree that the film is most interesting when it’s on the plane, and not focused on John Cusack’s dick-measuring contest with Colm Meaney. Those scenes were hard to follow because I was too distracted by John Cusack’s enormous suit. The jacket goes to his knees, and the tie is almost as long. It’s like the role was originally written for John Goodman, but when Cusack took the role they didn’t have time to get him a new suit. Or Cusack was on his way to, or coming from, an audition for the Talking Heads. My point is, the suit was very big.
Margaux: Don’t even get me started at Cusack’s awkward choice to wear Italian sandals with white tube socks, WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK? He runs around Lerner Airfield, basically a dust pit, and his socks are still white. I know he’s supposed to be some type of insufferable book nerd, but really his fashion choices are the most insufferable thing about him.
Con Air really does start the action as soon it’s able to, I don’t think the plane had reached 20,000 feet before all out pandemonium breaks out.
Trevor: It’s a lot of fun, and at times surprisingly violent. The distraction that they chose to use was Chappelle lighting someone on fire, which I had completely forgotten about (“Hey chief, if you make it through this, I hope you don’t hold a grudge”). I kind of miss the salad days of R-rated blockbusters like this; these days we have Marvel films and Star Wars films, which I like, but if you want to see a comedian light someone on fire you end up with something like Shoot ‘Em Up, which is both too campy and too serious. My point is, huge R-rated films are kind of a thing of the past, which is a shame.
Margaux: There definitely is a “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” feeling to Con Air, it’s not going to win any Oscars or even be received well by critics, but it’s dumb fun. There are one too many plot twist at the very end, but overall, you don’t get a cast like this together often to make lightly racist comments at each other and shoot multiple people in the head.
I did think Steve Buscemi was somewhat miscast as poor man’s Hannibal Lecter, Garland Greene. But his scene with the little girl in the pool was one that made me most uncomfortable and raised the most questions, like: why is she unsupervised? Why does live so close to an airfield? Why is literally not-a-one person around? I also hate when kids sing creepy nursery songs.
Trevor: Well, yeah, everyone hates that. Buscemi’s performance actually worked for me, because everyone was so over the top, so it was nice to see a note of restraint. He did a good job with Garland’s soul-deadened monotone, but let’s face it, Con Air had no need for his character. He gets on the plane, gets off the plane, and doesn’t really affect the main story at all.
Margaux: Exactly, his storyline sort of existed in a vacuum, nobody really came looking for him when he wandered off at Lerner. And he’s the only “con” who survives and goes to most likely kill and wear other people as hats till whenever he’s caught again. He’s just not really addressed, until they want him to do something creepy. But he’s not what we’re here to discuss.
Who is Cage fooling with all that hair? Even if he was in jail for a hundred years, he’d never be able to grown out his hair like that.
Trevor: The long hair did him no favors, but I gotta say, his tanktop/blue jeans ensemble actually looked pretty good on him. This was right after Leaving Las Vegas, so I feel like Cage was still trying to anchor Cameron Poe in some semblance of reality or humanity, which isn’t what this movie needs. He’d go totally nuts in Face/Off, and I think that Cage would have been a better presence here. He doesn’t do “strong and silent” very well.
Margaux: The chemistry between Cage and Malkovich led you to wonder what this movie would’ve been if the roles had been reversed. I wish Cage interacted with Chappelle more because I think their dynamic would have felt less serious than it did as Chappelle as Malkovich’s underling.
Trevor: Oh man, imagine a Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor movie remade with Cage and Chappelle in the lead roles. Stir Crazy with those two? One of my favorite parts of this feature is that I’ve been imagining a ton of Cage movies I want to see.
I’d rank Con Air above The Runner, but lower than, say, Snake Eyes. Cage is fun, but you can sense him holding back, and all too often he disappears in the ensemble.
Margaux: There was too much going on for Poe to really shine, everyone’s motives were made clear and with Cage’s drive being the most pure and his “save the fuckin’ day” attitude, it rendered him as the straight man. Whether it was intentional or not, I thought the humor of Cage bringing his never-before-seen daughter a stuffed rabbit he bought in jail was really funny. Even the whole aspect of trying to tie his daughters birthday to his release was ridiculous, that poor little girl had the worst eighth birthday ever. Between that rabbit he eventually retrieves from a gutter (? or some sort of mosquito infested body of water) and dragging her to a half destroyed Vegas strip, that’s some homecoming.
Trevor: Yeah, it’s crazy. This movie is crazy. We just wanted more of that from Cage.
Margaux: Almost as crazy as Cusack’s wardrobe.
Next up: Face/Off
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