One of the benefits (though this movie has me wondering about that word choice) of reviewing films as I do for The Legionnaire is getting to catch up on titles that I did not watch when I was younger.  This might be shocking to some, but I did not see Con Air until I watched it for this entry.  Who knows what prevented me from doing so, and I wonder if I would have had the same reaction to it thirty years ago as I did today.  The more youthful me had a greater attraction to dumb action flicks.  The forty-six-year-old me, who practices Catholicism in earnest and cares about my relationship with God, sighed for two hours.  It is also jarring to hear star Nicolas Cage attempt a Southern accent as the Alabama born, former Army Ranger main character, Cameron Poe.  If any of this sounds intriguing, I encourage you to continue reading.

What Cameron is not continuing to do at the start of Con Air is serving as a United States Army Ranger.  As we see him honorably leave the service, we hear some of the traits of what it takes to be a Ranger, such as always leading the way and never leaving behind a fallen comrade.  Keep these directives in mind as we go forward.  Now that he is a civilian, the first thing he does is go to his pregnant wife, Tricia Poe (Monica Potter).  As they while the night away at the bar at which she is employed, a group of drunk locals harass the couple.  Her advice is to forget their shenanigans, which he does until they accost them in the parking lot.  Though he is defending himself and his burgeoning family, the judge does not take kindly to the fact that he kills one of his attackers, citing his military training as a mitigating factor in the use of deadly force.  He is handed a seven-year sentence, and there follows a montage in which he counts down the days until he can finally meet his daughter, Casey Poe (Landry Albright), in person.  When the day arrives, he is selected to be transported by plane in a program initiated by the United States Marshals service.  The idea is to fly all the bad guys at once whenever they need to be taken from one part of the country to another, and it is the idea of Marshal Vince Larkin (John Cusack).  As such, Cameron will be sharing a ride with his friend and cell mate, Mike “Baby-O” O’Dell (Mykelti Williamson), and a number of other notorious criminals.  Chief among them is Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom (John Malkovich), who has been imprisoned for breaking ever law imaginable.  He has been using has incarceration to educate himself on a number of subjects, but surely that will not be used for ill, right?  If you answered negatively, you would be correct.  No sooner have the wheels left the ground than Cyrus, along with his accomplice, guerilla fighter Nathan “Diamong Dog” Jones (Ving Rhames), pull out pins they have embedded in their skin.  With their shackles removed, they swiftly take over the vehicle.  The mutineers are unaware, though, that Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Agent Duncan Malloy (Colm Meaney) has embedded one of his men with the prisoners.  Agent Malloy does not trust Marshal Larkin’s plan, and gives his undercover operative, Agent Willie Sims (Jose Zuniga), a gun.  Afraid he is about to be caught, Agent Sims reveals himself, but is soon overpowered by Cyrus, who has the pilot’s weapon.  The plan now is to land in Carson City, Nevada, to do a prisoner exchange.  Because Cameron is basically free anyway, he has every reason to volunteer to be one of the exchangees, but he opts to stay in order to help Mike, who is in need of an insulin shot for his diabetes.  At the same time, Cameron does what he can to convince Cyrus that the ex-soldier is on the side of the convicts.  Cameron is willing to sacrifice his freedom for the sake of his friends, and to try to prevent further atrocities done on the guards.  It is a Catholic move, even if the movie never frames it in this manner.  At Carson City, the plane’s transponder is taken out and placed in another flyer, while Cameron tries to alert the authorities that they have an ally onboard.  Marshal Larkin gets the message, but Agent Malloy is not keen on anything his younger counterpart has to say.  Thus, Agent Malloy heads off with three helicopters to go after the wrong plane.  Meanwhile, in the air Cameron manages to get another message out on the body of one of the mutineers, this time saying that they are headed for an abandoned air base in the desert.  Once again, Agent Malloy ignores the warning, dismissing the word of a criminal.  Thus, it is only Marshal Larkin that races to the location, but they are able to do little to stop Cyrus’ plans.  Perhaps that is not fair?  They do keep them from linking up with their planned getaway jet, but after a lot of explosions and shooing, the title flight is back in the air.  However, now they have realized that Cameron is not the person he claims, with Cyrus figuring out that the Ranger had been the one to warn the police.  However, it is Mike who tries to take the blame and is shot for his efforts.  This is what finally sets Cameron off, and he storms the cockpit to order the convict pilot to land.  There are some complications.  First, Agent Malloy’s helicopters are trailing them and about to shoot them down.  Secondly, the plane has suffered damages and cannot make the Las Vegas airport.  There follows one of the more ridiculous stunts in cinematic history, with them touching down on The Strip and sliding to a halt with the nose in a casino.  There is one more chase scene as everyone survives this, and Cameron and Marshal Larkin go after Cyrus.  Ultimately, good guys win, bad guys lose, and Cameron is reunited with his family, who have conveniently been flown to his location.

I guess you can say that Con Air has a happy ending, if you can forget about the path of destruction it cuts across Sin City.  The sequence bears some description, which means that I have left out a number of details.  The one character that did not get mentioned is Garland “The Marietta Mangler” Greene (Steve Buscemi).  He is brought on when they go through Carson City, and he arrives shackled in a full body suit with his face covered.  Instead of manhandling him, guards guide him with metal poles that grasp his arms.  Predictably, once they take off, he is freed, but most of the time he sits there saying creeping things.  The people with whom he converses the most are Cameron and Mike.  During their time at the abandoned base, Garland wanders off and finds a little girl playing by herself.  The implication is that something awful is about to happen, yet we see her skipping around after they depart.  Does this mean he is reformed?  I do not know, and he apparently he is unaccounted for by the authorities in the last scene.  However, it does point to the fact that criminals, like anyone else, can change.  Society takes a near zero-tolerance approach to law breakers, even when they have gone through the system.  Further, there are many Christians who are in favor of the death penalty, even for people who have not committed murder.  This logic is applied to those guilty of sexual crimes, particularly assaults on children.  I understand, but this is not Church teaching.  We are talking about some of the most heinous acts imaginable, and the characters in the movie represent those people.  But they are still people and worthy of a chance at redemption, though they might never be free again.  All life is precious to God, and He wants us to leave sin behind to follow Him.  This cannot be done if we are dead, as is the fate for many of the bad guys in the movie.

There is a lot of death and destruction in Con Air, which is one of the many reasons I do not recommend it.  And as I have already said, I cannot get over the awful Southern accent Cage speaks with throughout, though sometimes he slips and talks normally.  Either way, there is little that is normal about this movie.