Alcatraz. Only one man has ever broken out. Now five million lives depend on two men breaking in.

All movies have good and bad points, but The Rock strikes me as having a couple of really fundamental issues that can be summarised in a couple of lines:

On the plus side it stars Sean Connery

On the other hand, it also stars Nicholas Cage.

It has tons of action, a good helping of shooting, an excellent car chase and a novel way of smashing up a San Francisco cable car.

However, it has a plot thinner than a supermodels panties.

That’s really all you need to know about The Rock, but for the sake of completeness, here is a somewhat fuller description:

Connery is as close to a Movie God as you get and although I prefer Brosnans' Bond, that says more about my age than it does about his abilities. He is perfectly cast as John Patrick Mason, an ex British Army SAS officer who many years ago had some nasty secrets about the Americans (just about every nasty secret in fact - quite how he came by them is lost somewhere in the midst of the plot quagmire) and refused to give them up. In the true spirit of democracy and every man being equal under the law, the honest and incorruptible (pardon my mirth) Americans chuck him in jail and throw away the key. Part of the reason he is put into the deepest, darkest hole they can find, his identity hidden, his past erased, is that he is the one person to have ever escaped alive from Alcatraz. Presumably if he can escape from there, anywhere else should be easy. What doesn't make any sense is why the US authorities don't just bump Mason off - it would be a lot easier than keeping him in prison forever. At the risk of doing Connery a dis-service I should point out that he plays Mason in exactly the same way as he plays everyone else. That is to say, as himself. Luckily in this instance it doesn't matter on bit. Even when it does matter he seems to get away with it (I am reminded of the Scottish Russian Captain Marko Ramius in The Hunt for Red October..)

Cage plays Stanley Goodspeed, an FBI chemist tasked with investigating and defusing nasty terrorist surprises. His life is clearly lacking in excitement, but its all about to change. Not only is his girlfriend pregnant but a Army General is about to lose his marbles and hold the city of San Francisco to Ransom.

Ed Harris is the highly decorated General Francis X Hummel who is suffering from a twinge of conscience over all the men under his command who have died on 'black' operations and the been conveniently forgotten by the US government. He intends to take matters into his own hands and make sure the families of those who died are well cared for. His method for producing the necessary charity is somewhat unconventional. Rather than having a raffle or holding a benefit he, along with a few good men under his command, steal 15 VX gas equipped warheads, kidnap 81 tourists and dig-in on Alcatraz. Just to make the point he phones director Womack of the FBI (John Spencer)and explains that he requires $100 million in compensation (I call it ransom) with which he intends to pay off the families of those killed in action and then take himself and his band of mercenaries off to a warm and sunny non-extradition country where they will live the rest of their lives in palatial luxury. If he doesn't get his money he will execute some of his kidnap victims and then destroy San Francisco with the nerve gas.

Obviously the US government can't accept his demands and decides that the best option would be simply to vaporise the entire island. Mercenaries, nerve gas and tourists all gone in one easy move. Unfortunately, it transpires that VX gas doesn't burn up in normal napalm and the new super hot burning weapon isn't ready yet. So the only immediate option is a manned attack on the island. Rather than just sending in crack assault troops, the FBI decides to complicate matters by sending Goodspeed with them to defuse the rockets and Mason to show them the way in. (Who better to find their way secretly into Alcatraz than the only man to have escaped. Unfortunately, having been locked away without trial for most of his life, Mason isn't too enamoured with this idea. He escapes from custody and makes a mad dash to see his daughter. This leads to a fantastic chase through the streets of San Francisco with Mason in a Hummer chased by Goodspeed in a sports car.

After they get Mason back, it's time to begin the assault on the island. From this point on, any kind of sense or reason in the story goes out of the window in order to allow various action movie things to happen. Whilst I am no military strategist, even I know that you don't make a covert attack on a heavily guarded island equipped with radar, by helicopter. On the other hand if you are a sound designer, you need that helicopter sound to make the windows shake and give you an excuse to pan a sound around the other five channels of audio.

This use of stunts and effects purely for the sake of it becomes a bit of a running theme throughout the rest of the movie. However, Connery and Cage manage to hold the whole thing together pretty well and even develop a bit of character depth for each other. Ed Harris seems to have spent his life playing the all American hero and obviously relishes the chance to be a bad boy for a change. Unfortunately he ruins all of it right near the end with an almost whispered 'What have I done!'

So as a movie, The Rock is an awful interpretation of an excellent idea. It could have been much, much better but so little attention was paid to making the plot work that I wonder if it wasn't written as a detention paper by someone in remedial screenwriting. But sad to say, I really enjoyed it. True I find Cage irritating in the extreme, but his Goodspeed character is really quite likeable and I might even have warmed to him if he hadn't been made to spend so much time doing ridiculous things. The way he disarms the rockets is totally laughable and obviously designed purely to increase tension . It’s a movie to watch once only, unless you can suspend your brain from doing any thinking.

As a DVD The Rock is just average. The video is nothing special, but tidy with no sign of any digital artefacts. The sound is good and well placed, but a little heavy at times with respect to the dialogue. You don't get anything worth talking about in the way of extra material - just a single trailer. Its certainly one to watch - but I'd be tempted to rent not buy.