Word: conning
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...with summer pictures wasn't that they were bad movies; it was that they were the same bad movie. But more than ever this summer, with the moguls at the sausage factories sending out a new slice of action salami each week--The Lost World: Jurassic Park, followed by Con Air, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Batman & Robin, Face/Off and Men in Black--the big films look like instant remakes, retreads or reductios ad absurdum of last Friday's film, which wasn't all that hot either. Some of the movies have incidental felicities, and, to abort all suspense right...
BRUTALITY. What they lose in personality, they make up in body count. In these sociopathic action films, the hero has a bad case of blood lust. The psychos, like the Steve Buscemi serial killer in Con Air, are comic, sympathetic sorts. And anyone who's not a major character is called for icing by Mr. Freeze, or blithely sideswiped by Speed 2's Bullock during the most deplorable driving-test scene in film history. Something is wrong with Hollywood if the answer to every story problem is a crash. Even the otherwise canny Disney cartoon Hercules...
...Con Air, a thriller about a mutiny of convicted murderers aboard a transport plane, Nicolas Cage plays Cameron Poe, a bad-luck good guy on his way home from serving eight years in San Quentin on a bum rap. Cage's body is buffed enough for a macho role, but the Academy Award-winning actor seems a stretch as an action star. With his stubbly beard and stringy hair, he looks like either Jesus with a grudge or the guy who stares at kids from the other side of a schoolyard fence. Then, an hour into the film, Poe finds...
...cons in Con Air could almost have landed their plane on it. We speak of The Desk, the 20-ft.-long, T-shaped mahogany table once shared by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. From this monolith the two producers launched enough script-to-screen missiles to become Hollywood's premier action faction. Their two-hour commercials for American machismo (Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Bad Boys, Crimson Tide) made stars of their young actors and quillions for S. and B. Then in January of last year, Simpson died at 52 of a drug overdose. The industry asked, Whither--or wither...
...Desk is in mothballs now, and so are any questions about Bruckheimer's ability to do it himself. Last year's The Rock, which he produced without Simpson's help, earned a burly $134 million at home and $196 million more abroad. Con Air, which could equal that take, wears the Jerry Bruckheimer Films label, but it has all the S. and B. accoutrements: a director bred on Madison Avenue, a Lego-assembly plot about escaping from a confined space, a lot of chatty male attitude, a dogged belief that car crashes and gay men are hilarious, and the near...