How can anyone not love this movie?

I’ve seen Con Air so many times, I remember being literally ecstatic when I bought the DVD like 6 years ago? (remember, there weren’t that many DVDs to choose from then :-P) Having seen Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s Team America, a fullblown piss-take of Bruckheimer movies, between the last viewing and now, I spent the first quarter of an hour giggling like a crazy person. But then the cast started to build, first John Cusack, then Malkovich and Buscemi, and there’s just too much to love in the end. From the comedy (“On any other day, that might seem strange…”) to the seriously heart-string tugging ending (I just love how Skye Bartusiak is so scared at first then she hugs her dad so tight, and that bunny is one of the film’s many perfect, simple images).

Buscemi has the movie’s coolest scene. He’s painted as the most diabolical villain since Hannibal Lector, and he takes imaginary tea with a little girl. You get this horrible feeling something terrible is going to happen, and then the movie even leads you to believe that what you expected actually happened. For a movie like this, that feeling is dragged out to an astonishing extent, and then you see the little girl waving the plane off, and Buscemi looking distinctively changed, holding his little Ken doll and singing “He’s Got the Whole World in his Hands”. Gasp could this movie have… a message?

I almost want this movie on DVD again after this viewing. It was the absolute last truly great “true” Bruckheimer movie (yeh, he’s done good stuff since, like Pirates of the Caribbean, but they’re not really standard definition Bruckheimer, like the crappy Pearl Harbor and the dodgy Armageddon). He consistently pushed those movies closer to the cheese line, and this one, for me, sits perfectly perched right on it.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2005 at 12:26 am in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.