TheRetroCritic

The late nineties were a weird time. Nicolas Cage kept being cast in ridiculously overblown action movies ( Con Air , Face/Off ), Michael Bay was about to work with J.J. Abrams on Armageddon , dogs and cats living together: mass hysteria. Back in 1996, The Rock came out and combined the acting talents of Mr Cage and Mr Sean Connery in what seemed like an odd pairing, and, I suppose, in what  was an odd pairing, but which also worked surprisingly well. Knowing what we now know about Bay, The Rock is an interesting film to revisit because it's both very much his style and yet nowhere near as irritating or cheesy as the likes of Armageddon and Transformers 2 . I mean, of course you still get soldiers marching in slow-mo at sundown, insulting comic-relief stereotypes (look out for a gay hairdresser more concerned about hair than he is about bullets), perplexing one-liners ("How do you like how that shit works?") and ludicrous art direction but there's just somet