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
