{"id":30504,"date":"2022-11-21T10:22:41","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T16:22:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=30504"},"modified":"2022-11-19T17:46:21","modified_gmt":"2022-11-19T23:46:21","slug":"on-con-air-1997","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/21\/on-con-air-1997\/","title":{"rendered":"On Con Air<\/em> (1997)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BookAlright, kids, I’m a bit late to this party. This film came out when I was twenty-five years old. I’d just met with a beautiful girl who would become my beautiful wife, but I also briefly reunited with a lovely young lady who would not. I was busy, you know. What’s that, gentle reader? The film came out the same year as The Man Who Knew Too Little<\/em>, a Bill Murray film I saw in the cinemas with that woman I would claim (or would claim me). So this film came out in my cinema-heavy years, but I did not see it in the cinema or anywhere else for twenty-five years. Like Friday<\/a><\/em>, a still from this film has become a meme–the one where Nicholas Cage steps off the bus and revels in what he thinks is his freedom (it’s early in the film). So that is probably why I picked it up relatively recently and why I watched it.<\/p>\n

The plot: An Army Ranger leaves the service, but comes home and meets his pregnant wife at a bar (what, not the airport?). A he is a former hothead, when some bar denizens stalk the wife, he, Nicholas Cage, kills one of them in a fight and is sentenced to Federal prison (wut?) He is paroled after many years, but he’s put on a plane with really bad guys headed to a new Supermax prison. One of them is John Malkovich, which is always a bad sign. The bad guys take over the plane as part of a plot to free a member of a drug cartel (a la Die Hard 2<\/em>), and although he has a chance to go free, Cage stays on board to try to help his diabetic cell mate find a hypodermic needle to deliver a needed dose of insulin before he goes into shock. Action set pieces and a plane crash and pursuit trash the Las Vegas strip. A bit over the top, but it was designed to be a blockbuster.<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, I will probably confuse this film less with The Rock<\/em> than I might have previously. The Rock<\/em> was Nicholas Cage’s action blockbuster from the year before.<\/p>\n

Facebook ads tell me that this is one of the most 90s films ever made. I think it’s not quite so tied to its decade, but its cast features a list of people whom you’d recognize:<\/p>\n