An action hero was born when Nicolas Cage teamed with Sean Connery in Michael Bay’s The Rock. However, Cage’s status as a genuine action star was solidified in the summer of 1997 when he released not one but two action classics. One was Face-Off, and the other (which came out first) was Simon West’s Con Air. Re-teaming Cage with his producer from The Rock, Jerry Bruckheimer, the movie felt very much in line with its predecessor, mixing high-octane action with a pedigreed cast of character actors that included a scene-stealing Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames, John Cusack, Mykelti Williamson, and John Malkovich as the film’s villain, Cyrus “The Virus,” who engineers a hijacking of a plane full of convicts. However, he’s foiled by Cage’s Cameron Poe, a heroic Ranger railroaded into an unfair sentence, who’s finally been paroled and won’t let anything stop him from returning home to his family.
Con Air is a total blast of nineties action; they don’t make them the way they used to. This comes from a time when R-rated tentpole-level action movies were the norm, and indeed Con Air was a solid box office hit we pay tribute to in this episode of Revisited! This episode is written by Cody Hamman, narrated by Travis Hopson, edited by Juan Jimenez and produced by Adam Walton.
Do you fondly remember Con Air? Let us know in the comments!