The Rock Review

This is the one that proves Bay can direct when someone hands him a cast. Ed Harris plays a general who takes hostages because the government abandoned his men and never acknowledged their deaths, and Harris plays him as a man who has thought it through and hates every step, which gives the film a moral weight nothing else in this filmography has. Sean Connery, playing the only man to escape Alcatraz, is at his most charming and most contemptuous.

Nicolas Cage is doing something genuinely peculiar as a laboratory chemist who keeps announcing he is not a soldier. The Hans Zimmer score became the template for a decade of trailers. The failures are real. The last act depends on chemical rockets and green gas in a way that stops making sense if you look at it, the tunnel sequences sag, and the general's men turn on him in a heel turn the script rushes through in a single scene. Still the loudest good movie of the nineties.