by Lindy West
Connery can sense that Cage is not a bozo, but also not a very good FBI agent. He tells Cage that he will consider the FBI’s offer, but in exchange he wants a schower, a schave, the feel of a schuit, and a schwuite at the Fairmont Hotel Schan Franchishco. Cage says okay, and Connery signs the contract without reading it or even asking what the mission is (DUDE).
When Cage leaves the room, Connery uses his spy skills to quickly turn the quarter into a knife. A GLASS-CUTTING KNIFE! He cuts through the window and scares the shit out of Womack, his nemesis. This does not seem to effect anyone’s enthusiasm about the plan. Let’s go!
Cage is not a field agent—he is more of a laboratory nerd who mostly works with evil dolls—so Womack tells one of the real agents to give Cage his gun. (Really? You couldn’t go back to HQ and get one from the closet?) That agent is like, “A gun? For what? You’re a chemical freak!” which seems like wildly bad teamwork, and Cage goes, “I’m a chemical super-freak, actually,” so credit to that guy for the assist.
We’re at the Fairmont Hotel Schan Franchishco in the penthouse schwuite. Connery is getting a haircut from a gay schtereotype on the balcony while the FBI guys are inside going to town on some room schervisch schandwichesh that Connery ordered to dischtract them.1 Connery seizes the moment to tie a clothesline around Womack’s wrist and dangle him off the balcony, then escape while everyone else is busy rescuing him. Connery’s on the run!
Hairdresser, cowering in terror on the elevator: Okay, I don’t want to know nothin’, I didn’t see you throw that man off the balcony, all I want to know is are you happy with your haircut!
Classic gay person!
Now there’s a car chase. Connery and Cage and the entire FBI absolutely pulverize San Francisco, which they are specifically in town to save. It seems like if you’re Sean Connery, and your whole thing is insisting that you’ve been wrongfully imprisoned by the US government, maybe you should not commit many guilty vehicular homicides the second you have the chance? Or maybe it doesn’t count because nobody seems to be that mad about it. “Damn! This sucks!”—streetcar conductor whose streetcar (i.e., job) just exploded. (Many of these quotes are fake, but this one is real!)
In my memory, this entire movie takes place on Alcatraz.
Counterintuitively, even though he just burned and maimed many, Connery is actually tender. He only ripped Womack’s arm out of its socket and ran away from the FBI so that he could go see his daughter for the first time in twenty years and try to make amends. “I’m not an evil man,” he tells her. She’s skeptical, and just then every cop in San Francisco drives up. Cage, intuiting the sitch, swoops in with the big save: “He’s working with us.”
This is a soft, healthy masculinity of which I approve! Men deserve perceptive, caring friendships with other men!
As they sketch out a plan, the FBI tries to get Connery to tell them the way into Alcatraz, but he just says he’ll know it when he gets there: “My blueprint was in my head! I was underground for three days in the dark.” Everybody’s just gonna have to trust him.
Then, unfortunately, Connery says this: “Womack, you’re between the Rock and a hard case.” Somebody is still rich from writing this line! And, what the hay, I support it!
A Navy SEAL team is assigned to accompany Cage and Connery into the Rock, and buon giorno, look who it is! Fabrizio! Fabrizio promises Cage that he will protect him like he would protect his nonna’s gabagool. Cage feels a little bit better.
They all get suited up in scuba gear—“In my day, we did it all with a schnorkel and a pair of flippersh”—and swim in through a hole in Alcatraz (that was easy). They’re in!
The only way out of this room is through a big tube that is regularly blasted with a jet of flame (what is that for?). Sean Connery offers to roll through the flame tube and unlock the door for everyone, and it’s okay because he “memorized it” sixty years ago. As soon as he rolls through the tube, the Navy SEALs start bitching, “Looks like he fucked us, Commander.” “That son of a bitch jumped ship.”
HOW??? EVEN IF HE DID, HE’S NOW INSIDE ALCATRAZ. HE ESCAPED YOU BY…BREAKING INTO PRISON?????????????
He didn’t, though. He opens up the door and is like, “Welcome to the Rock.”
OPENING CREDITS. (JK.)
It rapidly becomes clear that Nicolas Cage sucks at breaking into the Rock. He is not good at guns, or climbing, or walking, or being quiet, or being fast, or having a good attitude. And yeah, of course he’s not! He’s not trained!!!! He shouldn’t be there!!!!! It’s like having a basketball player on your team because he’s good at repairing basketball hoops!!!!!
They creep up to a manhole that will take them to the next level of the Rock. They just have to neutralize the security system first. The Navy SEAL commander successfully tricks the laser prism, but he doesn’t know it’s also got a wiggle detector! They’re caught! Now they are completely surrounded by Ed Harris’s boys. It’s Marines vs. SEALs.
The Navy SEAL commander tries to reason with Ed Harris: “Sir, we know why you’re out here. God knows I agree with you. But like you, sir, I agreed to defend this country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Wow, what a morally complex situation, almost as though this movie deserves every Oscar, foreign and domestic!
MEN YELLING MEN YELLING MEN YELLING.
Right in the tensest moment, some bonehead accidentally kicks a rock and everyone flips out and shoots each other until literally all of the Navy SEALs are dead, even Fabrizio. Mamma mia. Ed Harris is sad. Nobody heard him yell, “Cease fire.” He didn’t come here to kill SEALs! He came here to give Marines $1 million! This sucks!
Nobody knows that Cage and Connery are still down there in the sewer tubes, a significant advantage for their mission, but unfortunately they start chitchatting so loud that the mercenaries immediately find them: “We have a rodent problem.” “Flush the pipes.” They start dropping bombs down there, and not the fun kind of bombs (shits).
Cage and Connery narrowly escape, then sneak into the morgue (which seems to still be fully functional and packed with vats of corpse chemicals, even though this has not been a functioning prison since 1963?) where the first three VX rockets are hidden. Sean Connery throws a knife through a Marine’s neck and advises Cage, “You must never hesitate.” If you see a neck, you have to throw a knife through it.
Connery covers Cage while he goes to disarm the rockets. “You’re shooting too close to the rockets!” Sean Connery will not stop shooting close to the rockets. He’s a maverick like that. A Marine is about to pull the pin on a grenade near the rockets, so Connery shoots an air-conditioning unit and it falls on the guy, squishing him, and yet nobody wrote or ad-libbed the line, “Why don’t you COOL OFF?” Rude! Maybe I don’t like this movie!
This is so stressful that Nicolas Cage finally snaps (YESSSSSSS): “Look, I’m just a biochemist. Most of the time, I work in a glass jar and lead a very uneventful life. I drive a Volvo. A beige one. But what I’m dealing with here is one of the most deadly substances the earth has ever known, so what say you cut me some FRIGGIN’ SLACK?”
They escape and/or fall (I forget) into a hole and now somehow they are riding around on a mine cart in a subterranean cavern. Quick Q: Why is that in Alcatraz?
Ed Harris starts threatening to shoot civilian hostages if Connery and Cage don’t stop riding around in the mine carts and messing with his rockets. Connery is like, “Okay, lemme hop out of this rolly coaster and just go talk to him.” He climbs(?) up there and lays a PHAT guilt trip: “I can’t see how you honor the memory of the dead by killing another million…This is not combat, it’s an act of lunacy, General, sir. Personally, I think you’re a fuckin’ idiot.” Oooooooooooooo!!!!!!
It was a great plan, but now Connery and Cage are both locked up in the cells of Alcatraz. If only they knew someone who knew how to escape! Only fifty-one minutes until the vaporization of San Fran! Meanwhile, back in Washington, DC, the thermal plasma is ready. The president is going to plasma Alcatraz!
Sean Connery escapes from his cell, duh, and understandably tries to bail on the whole thing, but comes back at the last second to rescue Nic Cage (cute!) and also San Francisco, I guess. It’s not soon enough, though—the time runs out and Ed Harris fires the first rocket! Holy shit!
Everyone braces for San Francisco to disappear, but at the last second Ed Harris changes the coordinates and makes the rocket fire into the ocean because King Triton didn’t pay him one hundred million seashells.
Unfortunately, he still has one rocket left, and the mercenaries are going batshit. Ed Harris is like, “Look, it’s over, they’re not paying us, they’re shooting us with thermal plasma, we should probably just bail.” And Tony Todd is like, “The day we took hostages we became mercenaries, and mercenaries get paid,” and Ed Harris is like, WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO, MAN? Then the mercenaries shoot Ed Harris. It’s mean!
Nic Cage and Sean Connery battle it out with the last few most evil mercenaries, who—to be clear—COULD have just escaped at this point and gone back to their regular lives but instead are determined to fire off that last rocket. They’re like, “No, if I can’t get a million dollars, I at least want to kill all of San Francisco!” WHY, THOUGH? What’s the benefit? The whole point is that you are mercenaries driven by self-interest above all!
Cage faces off against Tony Todd.
Cage: Do you like the Elton John song “Rocket Man”?
Todd: I don’t like soft shit.
Cage: Well, I only bring it up because it’s you. You’re the rocket man. [shoots Tony Todd with rocket]
If you’ve been on the fence about this movie so far, how about now?
There’s only one mercenary left. He and Cage grapple over the last rocket’s guidance chip and—crap! The deadly VX balls spill out and start rolling everywhere. It’s Michael Bay’s big hot potato moment. Cage finally gets the upper hand and stuffs one of the balls into the mercenary’s mouth: “EAT THAT, YOU FUCK!!!”
HOW ABOUT NOW?
With his last breath, as the VX gas leaks around him, Cage stabs himself in the heart with a special anti-chemical weapons potion that makes you immune to all chemical weapons. Sure! He sets off the green signal flare of victory, but before they see it, the Blue Angels have already dropped the first thermal plasma bomb! It’s okay, though, because Nic Cage jumps in the water, and thermal plasma isn’t hot enough to burn water.
Connery rescues him one last time, and they have a tender moment of nontoxic masculine best friendship. Cage knows that Connery’s pardon was a sham and Womack is planning to throw him back in secret prison, so he sends him on his way: “If you can get to the Pan Pacific Hotel, there’s clothes in my closet, $200 in the Bible.”
Connery tells Cage to go to Fort Walton, Kansas, and he’ll find a little treat hidden in the leg of a church pew.
They part.
Cage assures Womack that Connery was obliterated in the plasma explosion. Then he goes to Kansas. He finds the church. He finds the pew. He breaks open the leg. He opens the package.
It’s the microfilm. Now he knows who shot JFK!
WAIT
YOU GUYS
WAIT
HOLY SHIT
IT’S LITERALLY THE PRESIDENT’S BOOK OF SECRETS.
HOW ABOUT NOW?????????????????????????????????????????????
RATING: 9/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Footnotes
1 It feels very Jay Leno, or something, to lean in this hard on the Sean Connery accent joke, but let me tell you, when I finally rewatched The Rock, I was POSITIVELY HORIZONTAL over how much it is not even an exaggeration! I had forgotten! Sean Connery is so utterly incapable of making the alveolar sibilant [s] sound, it is possible that his name has actually been Sawn Connery this whole time! There is no way of knowing!
… Miami?
Real quick: Was 2003 our tackiest year, as a species? I know the competition is stiff—there was 1997’s swing revival, 1998’s failure to contain and exterminate said swing revival, or literally any given moment in the Trump era (for instance, the random day I’m writing this, when America’s toilet king bragged on Twitter that his daily COVID-19 press briefings are a “ratings hit” rivaling even the Bachelor finale!).
But remember 2003, though, when girls wore those miniskirts that were like six floaty napkins stapled to a scrunchie, with perhaps an Edwardian waistcoat sewn of cobwebs as a top? Where at any moment a baby’s sneeze across campus might expose Kaylee’s entire bunghole and even the slouchy Western belt she wore over her three layers of different-colored camisoles couldn’t save her? In case you’ve repressed the memory, 2003 was the kind of year where Jessica Simpson might wear rubber flip-flops to the Golden Globes, and Nicole Richie was nearly elected president on a platform of “straight blonde hair on top, long curly dark brown extensions underneath, one feather.” The 2003 vibe—culturally, socially, politically, spiritually—was very “energy drink commercial directed by Mark McGrath, and not Mark McGrath in his prime, either.” Millions of Americans were forced to mourn Mr. Rogers while wearing a hot-pink corduroy train conductor’s hat. Never again!
Bad Boys II is a 2003 movie.
Verily, the first ten minutes of Bad Boys II are unimpeachable. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are police officers in Miami who are also good boys. They are hard at work investigating a sophisticated, multimillion-dollar international ecstasy smuggling operation that for some reason is being funneled through an unincorporated community of eight wetland yokels who live in an old boot.
On the night that literally millions of dollars in pills are set to drift ashore in a rusty corn can, the swampy clods throw a Klan rally to celebrate their forthcoming bazonga paycheck and subsequent appearance on My Lottery Dream Home (a bigger boot!). But just as the crosses begin to flicker alight, two of the merry Klansmen doff their hoods to reveal…whoa, it’s Will Smith and Martin Lawrence! Did you believe me earlier when I said they were good boys? You idiot!
These are BAD BOYS.1 TWO.2
Smith and Lawrence, public servants paid with taxpayer dollars, then absolutely indiscriminately massacre the Klansmen using guns, explosions, a helicopter, and Henry Rollins. Which, obviously, if you have to massacre someone, make it an eager foot soldier in a white supremacist domestic terrorist organization with ties to the highest echelons of American political power working to entrench brutal inequalities and bring back slavery if they’re being honest, but also, maybe it’s better, as a rule, for the state to stay out of the massacre business? Does that make me a Republican? Or the opposite? Either way, Smith and Lawrence have a job to do, which is to stop kids on spring break from having too much fun dancing.
In the melee, Smith shoots Lawrence in his anus. Ten minutes of perfect cinema.
The movies were just kind of figuring out how to use computers in 2003, and nobody was just kind of figuring out how to use computers harder than Michael Bay. It’s tempting to say that every frame of Bad Boys II looks like a TV commercial, but truly every frame looks like a print advertisement, like those Candies ads where Jenny McCarthy’s taking a shit, shallow and glossy and tinged acid green. There are four car chases, one of which is at least fifteen minutes long. Even the most passing transitions are giddily tasteless: the camera EXPLODES out of the speedboat’s tailpipe and ZOOMS across Biscayne Bay and WHAMS down the ventilation shaft in the backward sunglasses factory and SHOOMPS into the buttcrack of a raver’s low-rise jeans and SPROINGS across her transverse colon and SQUEAKS through her appendix and AIRHORNS out her belly button and PLOPS into the Cuban drug lord’s mojito as he shoots his favorite nephew in the head while saying, “Adios, kemosabe,” or something fucking cool like that.
When faced with a choice, Bay picks “all of the above” every time. He’s like a dog in one of those obedience trials who’s like, “Obedience? I don’t know her,” and just goes buck wild on the sausages. Except instead of “obedience” it’s “having a coherent plot that holds the audience’s attention” and instead of “sausa
ges” it’s “explosions, Ferrari chases, and how many different cool kinds of box could a gun come in.”
Which, to be clear, I support. I was twenty-one in 2003, and tasteless shit isn’t just IN my blood, IT IS MY BLOOD. I crave excess! There’s something else I crave a little bit more, though, which is all of the parts in Bad Boys II when Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are yelling at each other. More of that, please, Mr. Bay! Maybe 10 percent less car-chasing, 40 percent more bickering! It’s the first rule of filmmaking: when you have Will Smith and Martin Lawrence at your disposal to do unlimited bickering, you do not NECESSARILY need to add a scene where a Humvee obliterates a Cuban shantytown, killing many hundreds of impoverished children! Smith! Lawrence! Brutally roasting each other! Make it four hours long! That’s your blockbuster! NO NEED TO GILD THE LILY, BAY.
Maybe if I understood why the Humvee was obliterating the Cuban shantytown, this diversion would feel worth it to me, but as far as I can tell, the plot of Bad Boys II is…MIAMI.
?
Here’s what happens, as best I can understand it. Martin Lawrence’s sister, Gabrielle Union, is a DEA agent (?) who has gone undercover (?) to infiltrate…something drugs. Something has something to do with the pills from the beginning, and something to do with Russians laundering (?) money (?). Unfortunately, the “bogeys” (did not write down who that was in reference to, do not remember) do a hit on Gabrielle Union’s friend (?), causing everyone to car chase for one year. A semitruck full of evil Haitians is chasing Gabrielle Union, who is chasing the bogeys (?), because they stole her Russian’s $2 million, maybe. Will Smith is chasing the semitruck in his Ferrari (for seriously SO long—HOW IS THIS FERRARI NOT FASTER THAN THE SEMITRUCK?) on the surface streets of downtown Miami, occasionally firing his assault rifle haphazardly into large crowds of civilians. People are just getting STRAIGHT-UP MURDERED. And what are they trying to track down again, $2 million? Just one of these wrongful death lawsuits is going to cost the City of Miami that much, and Will Smith has killed approximately seven thousand people at this point!! Let it go, dog!