Here is how Con Air was chunked together. A roomful of cynics brainstorms: how can we combine the public's worst fears with their greatest prejudices to make the most money? Assemble all the country's most vicious criminals (one from every stereotype extant) then hire some credible actors to play the parts so the audience might not notice the characters are as thin a filo pastry. Next, get a Don Rickles wanna-be to write what passes for dialogue but is really just a series of vicious and cruel put downs. Granted, these are occasionally amusing, but hardly worth the price of admission. Finally, create a crisis, explosion, chase or crash every five to ten minutes so we don't notice all the gaping logical holes in the plot, et voila, you have yourself another summer blockbuster action flick.
Con Air is a cynical cash grab, not a movie. Since the premise is ridiculous (what prison system in the world would put all these bad asses on the same plane? Why would Nicholas Cage get thrown in prison for 8 years for defending his wife from a gang of rapists? What prison would allow all these freaks of nature to spend enough time together to come up with this master plan? It just gets more preposterous with every pathetic attempt at a plot twist) any suspension of disbelief is possible only if you are brain addled or fried.
This film also contains one of the most distasteful scenes in recent cinema, as mass murderer Garland Greene (Buscemi) sits down for tea with an unsuspecting 8 year old girl. Why does this moment exist, except to make us squeamish?
There are some decent actors in this movie, and they have sold their souls to the devil. It ain't a pretty sight. Shame on you boys.
