I’m Gonna Save the Day
Con Air stars Nicholas Cage as a former solider who inadvertantly kills a man in a drunken fight. He is sent to jail, but makes the most of it. He stays fit and keeps in touch with his wife and daughter who was born soon after he was imprisoned. When the day comes for his release, he is scheduled to fly out with a dozen or more hardcore criminals. As you have surely heard by now, the criminals, led by Cyrus the Virus played by John Malkovich, have come up with a cunning plan and manage to hijack their transport plane. It’s up to Cameron, played by Cage, to save the day by doing what he can ‘undercover’ while simultaneously trying to help John Cusak’s character, a US marshall, on the ground.
It’s an entertaining film; once the film gets started, there is narry a quiet or calm moment. There are also several interesting characters, like Steve Buscemi’s character, a calm, intelligent but psychotic serial killer, and a few small subplots like the underlying tension between Ving Rhames’ character and Malkovich’s. I didn’t think this movie was as powerful or quite frankly as good the other Cage and Bruckheimer movie, The Rock, but it’s a highly entertaining movie nonetheless.
Visuals And Sounds
I was pleased with the visual and audio quality for Con Air on this Blu-ray release. Your standard gamut of visual enhancements from previous versions are there, including a sharper picture and more vibrant colors. To add to the comparsions I’ve already drawn with The Rock, Con Air didn’t look as impressive, but it does well for itself.
Con Air is loaded with plenty of explosions and gun fire, and they are presented very well here. As expected the audio track is an uncompressed 5.1 PCM track and it sounded great.
Lack of Extras
The extra features on this release are severly lacking. You get about six minutes of old, standard defintion ‘making of’ features that are about as superficial as you can get. I thought this offering was really poor.
