All that, but with none of the septic irony, the relentless self-conscious hedging, that infects so much of our lives these days. The Rock does not take one single moment to look you in the eye and say, yes, we know this is a little silly, we are sorry, please know we are cool—there’s no need! The Rock believes in itself, it commits, it is happy to be fun. Coolness is a deadly neurotoxin. Inject The Rock into your heart.
In The Rock, Nicolas Cage is some kind of…gas expert? (same, LOL) who works for the FBI…de-gasifying…stuff…that the FBI finds that has gas on it. We meet him in an underground gas lab where he is examining a plastic baby. Suddenly, the baby starts leaking gas, which really surprises everyone, though you’d assume they expected something like that since they’re having a gas scientist dissect the baby inside an airtight glass cube? Oops, the gassy baby is also a bomb. Nic Cage, rapidly corroding, sums up the situation efficiently: “Okay, I’ve got some bad news and some really bad news. The bad news is that the gas is corrosive and it’s eating our suits. The really bad news is that there’s enough C-4 explosive and poison gas to blow the whole chamber and kill everybody in the building.”
Like, I just, I’m so grateful for this movie.
Later that night, finally relaxing at home with his hot woman, having narrowly escaped being melted at work, Nicolas Cage finds out his girlfriend is pregnant and demanding marriage. It’s a lot for one day! That’s why I forgive him for saying, “Whoa, okay, marriage police, pull over!”
Meanwhile, Ed Harris and his friends are on a tour of Alcatraz, probably just having fun, right? NEGATORY. GET READY. Ed Harris is a retired general in the Marines, maybe the best general ever, who’s fed up because his boys didn’t get any recognition or military pensions after they died doing clandestine black ops. “These men died for their country, and they weren’t even given a goddamn military burial!” Yeah, man, that’s fucked up! Ed Harris wants their sacrifices publicly acknowledged by the US government, and he wants each of their families to get $1 million. Seems reasonable!
And the ONLY WAY TO DO THAT, obviously, is to steal some rockets armed with deadly VX poison gas, take over the prison-turned-tourist-island Alcatraz with a band of rude, crude mercenary dudes, and threaten to vaporize San Francisco unless you receive $100 million out of a secret government slush fund within three days! TRULY THE ONLY POSSIBLE WAY TO GET UNCLE SAM’S ATTENTION, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU ARE A FAMOUS GENERAL WHO LITERALLY KNOWS THE PRESIDENT. Toxic friends will say, “Call a newspaper maybe,” but it’s Scorpio season, okay? Cut unsupportive snakes from your life, honey!
Ed and friends set up shop in the ’Traz. They lock all the tourists into the cells as hostages, install “anti-motion trembler device[s]” so nobody can sneak up on them from the basement, and rally around Ed for a little pep talk. “Couple hundred years ago,” Ed tells them, “a couple guys named Washington, Jefferson, and Adams were branded as traitors by the British. Now they’re called patriots.” Wow, man, makes u think.
Then Ed sends a Zoom invite to the US government (triggering, TBH) and relays his demands via video chat: “I have choked on these lies for my entire career. But here and now, THE LIES STOP.”
(Seriously, though, what was this crystal-clear 1996 video phone? The closest thing to an actual video call in 1996 would have been for Ed Harris to take a bunch of pictures of his Nokia screen while he was playing snake, develop the film at the mall, staple the pics into a flip-book, and mail it to the Capitol in an envelope that he licked with his mouth because they didn’t even have the peel-off kind yet. Give The Rock a freaking retroactive Nobel for future-predicting already!!!)
The government officials are not sure what to do here. On the one hand, Ed Harris is a famous hero, and they agree that he does make a good point about how much they blow. On the other hand, he is doing a very bad terrorism right now, and they are against that except when it’s them doing it in other countries.
Ed makes it real simple: “You alert the media, I launch the gas. You refuse payment, I launch the gas. You send payment, I launch the gas. You launch the gas, I launch the gas. You pay the gas, I launch the pay. You gas the gas, I am the gas.”
VX gas is really bad, it turns out—“one teaspoon of this hits the floor, it’s lethal to one hundred feet”—and, bad news, Ed has a BUNCH of teaspoons. The VX gas comes in these lime-green bath beads and you know as soon as you see them that someone is getting FUCKED UP by one later. There’s only one weapon that burns hot enough to destroy VX: “Thermite plasma…but it’s still in the test phase.” Well, great.
YOU KNOW WHAT, I’D SAY JUST GIVE HIM THE $100 MILLION, BUDDIES. I’D DO THAT OVER POTENTIALLY LIQUEFYING SAN FRANCISCO. He doesn’t even want the money from the taxpayers—he wants it from the slush fund! That’s what a slush fund is for! It’s literally where the term came from: if Ed Harris comes and says he’s gonna turn all the people into slush, then you fund him!
Instead, though, the government decides to give it
