THE ROCK (51)

Directed by: Michael Bay

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Sean Connery, Ed Harris

The Pitch: Disaffected general turns terrorist, takes over Alcatraz, holding hostages and wielding chemical weapons. FBI has to break in. Mayhem ensues.

Theo Sez: I'm a sucker for the big, overstuffed, wall-of-sound, hold-on-to-your-hats Hollywood movie - a kind of hedonistic flipside to that other guilty pleasure, the big overstuffed message-movies Stanley Kramer used to make in the 60s - and this mega-budget action blockbuster is generally solid stuff, with plenty of bangs for your buck and (as in these producers' far superior CRIMSON TIDE) a script that manages to insert bits of character and a name-dropping kind of literacy in between. Oddly enough its weakest links are the action scenes themselves, most of which are too fast to be more than blurry and/or are hampered by MTV lighting and fancy filters - in a word, are too flashy for their own good. Biggest peripheral pleasures: Cage's delightfully strange line-readings and the needle-through-the-heart reference to PULP FICTION. Big peripheral irritation: the preponderance of loud, fat, disproportionately black people in comic-relief cameos - a case of stereotyping masquerading as diversity.