CON AIR (45)

Directed by: Simon West

Starring: Nicolas Cage, John Malkovich, John Cusack, Steve Buscemi

The Pitch: On the day of his release a parolee is placed on a convict transport plane with a bunch of the nastiest criminals in America, who proceed to take over the aircraft.

Theo Sez: Almost a guilty pleasure (I was already pencilling in a 60+ rating after about an hour), at least till the guilt moves from an aesthetic to a moral context. It offers at least the promise of a brighter future for the action movie, one with more than the usual stripped-down, monosyllabic dialogue and with kick-ass guns in the hands of quality actors - put there, for the first time, by a quality (or at least distinctive) writer : it's as if Martin Amis, say, had been asked to write an episode of "Miami Vice". There's a goofy thrill to seeing, amid the macho mayhem, weedy John Cusack fielding hilariously over-elaborate dialogue like "We're hoping it'll make him garrulous...You know, loquacious. Verbose, effusive." ("What's with Dictionary Boy?" growls Colm Meaney irascibly ; "I believe Thesaurus Boy would be more appropriate," replies Cusack, unfazed). The problem is that, though these non-genre collaborators presumably make producer Bruckheimer feel classier in a BARTON FINK way ("We've all got that Scott Rosenberg feeling - but since you're Scott Rosenberg I'm assuming you've got it in spades"), they don't particularly care about or understand the action movie - this situation goes nowhere very much after the halfway mark - or, even worse, are attracted to it mostly as a chance to let off a little macho steam. There's something morally repugnant (as there was in COPYCAT two years ago) about the killers-as-celebrities sensibility underlying the movie - not least in Buscemi's character, a serial killer who boasts of having worn a victim's head for a hat and whose sole function in the film is to look creepy and spout offbeat one-liners : a (wholly gratuitous) scene between this weirdo and a little girl, suffused with queasily giggly will-he-won't-he-kill-her tension, calls to mind John Waters' recent comment (apropos of the snake vomiting Jon Voight in ANACONDA) that the bad taste he used to specialise in has now entered the mainstream. Maybe the future doesn't look quite so bright for the action movie after all.