Transcript:
27 years ago, almost to the day, the film ConAir was released and nobody could quite believe what they had actually watched.
The premise is simple. Army ranger Cameron Poe gets involved in a bar brawl one night while defending the honour of his wife Tricia. Things get very out of hand and Poe accidentally kills one of Tricia’s assailants and is given a ten-year prison sentence.
Fast forward eight years and Poe is paroled, having served his time honourably. He’s just a man looking to get home to wife and kid and get on with living a wholesome life.
For reasons not really explained, he will depart prison on a plane which also happens to be carrying a bunch of maximum-security prisoners…or cons.
Now what could possibly go wrong?
Well…everything that you could imagine goes wrong. The plane is hijacked by the cons and mayhem ensues.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s as daft as it sounds. No. Actually it’s not. It’s dafter.
If you’ve seen The Rock or Face Off, you know the drill.
If you haven’t, please stop listening and rectify that immediately.
Like someone we all know once not quite said, “You can throw your Truffauts, your Fellinis, your Bergmans, your Welles, your Vardas and your Godards in the bin because they’ve never produced anything as ludicrously entertaining as this.”
The production behind this film was almost as unbelievable and as high concept as the plot (plot is a loose word which we shall use as shorthand for ‘stuff that happens’ in the movie.)
It was directed by Englishman Simon West whose most notable work up to this point was directing the video for Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’. From then on, things just got even weirder.
Denis Leary had heard about the script and wanted a part of the action, specifically the part of mass-murderer Garland Greene. So how to persuade the writer Scott Rosenberg he was the guy for the part? Leary’s solution was to send a baby doll’s arm covered in blood with a note attached saying ‘I am Garland Greene’ through the post.
Leary did not get the part.
Steve Buscemi did, which is convenient since the part was written with him in mind anyway.
To give the movie some acting chops and emotional heft, John Cusack was brought in to play the part of Agent Vince Larkin. Fresh from shooting Uber cool and widely acclaimed Gross Pointe Blank and giving off strong vibes that this whole thing was beneath him, Cusack insisted - if he was going to be a part of such ridiculous shenanigans - that his character wore Birkenstock sandals in honour of Charlton Heston whose heroic characters wore sandals.
Mickey Rourke also wanted a part of the action but rocking up to an audition and pulling a knife on a fellow actor understandably freaked everyone out. This was too much even for the people making this odd beast of a film.
More serious acting chops were included in the shape of John Malkovich who, according to director West, appeared not to have read the script and pretty much improvised all his lines.
And all this before shooting actually started, which predominantly took place in the desert on the Nevada/Utah border in temperatures of 48 degrees Celsius.
Testosterone levels soared. Wrestles broke out, punches were thrown in amongst fierce competition for who could do the most pull-ups and push-ups. And when filming relocated to Las Vegas for the magnificently overblown denouement, it was like a hoard of raiding Vikings. In terms of the movie shoot, it was convenient that the Sands Hotel was scheduled to be demolished so the destruction we see on film is just mostly good old-fashioned blowing stuff up for real.
Yet somehow, it all works. It’s the kind of film (along with Face Off, The Rock and Aliens) which when it’s Saturday night and you are just about to go up to bed, but before you do have a quick scroll through the channels and see this is on Channel five or whatever it’s called these days, you exhale an excited yet sad sigh since it means you aren’t going to bed - you are staying up to watch this to the end, even if you have an early job interview in the morning.
It’s not coherent. It’s downright weird. In fact, it’s bordering on ludicrous. But in moments, it is exhilarating and breath-taking in its excitement as the speed is relentless and usually results in things you can cheer. But at the same time, the basics are missing - simple straightforward stuff like plot causation, believable exposition and dialogue which sounds even barely plausible.
(Just in case you were wondering when we get to the Nottingham Forest bit, we’ve been there for a while now….)
The cast (and production crew) is a collection of people who have served time, alongside Academy Award winners and classically trained actors. As a result, it looks chaotic at times, cobbled together, like an (ahem) airline pilot trying to build a plane while simultaneously trying to get the thing to take off and fly.
There are flaws. Jesus Christ, huge flaws. Aristotelian shaped flaws running right through the whole thing. In order to enjoy it, you have to just embrace the weirdness. To try to do otherwise will just leave you shouting at things and huffing off in a huge huff.
When the credits roll, you breathe a sigh of relief. You’ve been entertained by the explosions and stuff and have ‘kind of’ enjoyed yourself. But now you’re ready for something different. You’d like to keep the good stuff - the explosions, the Buscemis, the Malkovichs) on the proviso he learns his lines), and maybe the Cusacks (if you can get him to buy in to it just a little more), but you could do without the woefully clunky bits. With a bit of thought and practice, they could easily have been dispensed with.
You are now in the mood for something a little different - something calmer, for sure. Maybe something with a coherent plot which has a clear three-act structure. Just, you know, something a little less overblown and less weird whose budget isn’t spaffed on getting someone famous in who will just phone everything in. One of those evenly paced movies that has more good moments than bad but provides a quiet satisfaction and doesn’t anything ‘too’ silly.
It might sound boring but after the overblown ridiculousness of Con Air, something like Atonement, or Equilibrium, or 500 Days of Summer, or Dead Calm would work a treat.
Burnley 1-2 Forest 19 May 2024