Stay with me here. In no particular order but it will be. I’m thinking, thinking processing the information…Two years and three dudes. Bruckheimer. Bay. Woo. Another three dudes. Travolta. Connery. Malkovich. Yes, a tight, blockbuster span from 1996 to 1997. Are we getting the idea now? They all have one heroic man in common: Cage, Nicolas Cage. Here’s the template: In 1995 Cage garnered himself an Oscar for his performance in Leaving Las Vegas, arguably the most depressing movie ever made about a man who decides to drink himself to death. Yeah. I would have to rank either that or Manchester by the Sea as a rare four hanky movie you may not want to watch if you’re feeling that dark itch. Anyway, let’s not veer off course too soon here…I speak of the legendary Triumvirate of Cheese to which no other mere mortal will or could ever touch again in the history of cinema.

We start at the beginning. Bay directs, Bruckheimer produces. They teamed up previously with the 1995 hit Bad Boys and would strike gold again with The Rock, a movie with, at that time, the most ridiculous premise ever. Here it is: A rogue squad of military men have taken over Alcatraz Island and plan on jettisoning horrible chemical weapons upon the unsuspecting citizens of San Francisco. Their demands? 100 Million in reparations for their fallen servicemen. A worthy cause for sure. Who can stop them except Nicolas Cage and Sir Sean Connery? Two men versus an entire platoon of totally incompetent trained killers wielding machine guns. Ah, but one of those men, John Patrick Mason, played by Sir Connery himself, is a deadly master of yada yada.

Ed Harris plays the crazed General Hummel totally straight in this, no hint of cheese whatsoever. He takes the paycheck and like a true professional, gives us no glimpse of just how insanely ridiculous this all is even when he has the two heroes dead to rights and gloats over them instead of shooting them in the head and being done with it.

At any rate, the good stuff in this movie, like any buddy-buddy action flick, is the team up between Connery and Cage culminating in some of the greatest lines in cinematic history.

Connery: “Your best? (besht) Losers always whine about their best (besht). Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.”

Cage: “Kara was the prom queen.”

Connery: “Really?”

Cage: Emphatically cocks the hammer on his gun. “Yeah.”

It’s a classic. I saw it at the Colchester drive ins when it came out. Either snuck in with C-Ya, Gribby, and Yeti in one of their trunks or took the old poison ivy route over the fence.

The following year, the Bruckheimer train kept moving. For those unaware of his cinematic contributions, I’ll rattle off just a couple from the list. Uh, Top Gun. Days of Thunder. Armageddon. Beverly Hills Cop I & II. Oh, and a little film called National Treasure also starring Nicolas Cage. Anyway, yes you’ve been living under a rock but it matters not, I’m here for you.

Con Air. Oh Con Air. Have you ever asked yourself what would happen if a bunch of psychopathic killers and death row inmates took over a giant airplane? If you answered yes, then this is the movie for you. Even better, what would happen in this scenario if we placed a man named Cameron Poe in there, a green beret just out of prison for defending his pregnant wife’s honor and letting the tiger out of the cage in a bar parking lot? Yes, Poe is played by Cage who wears a wife beater throughout the movie and has greasy, wavy long hair to boot. I guess they wanted to have history repeat itself. Huh? Well, they tried this in 1993 with my buddy Jean Claude Van Damme in Hard Target.

Cage was a much better actor, less badass, yes, but he exudes more swagger in Con Air than Van Damme ever could because he’s amore aware of his personal limitations and very aware of just how stupid the premise of Con Air actually is. I mean, I think the military would just shoot the damn plane down and say screw the few innocent people riding aboard. No?

I watched the first five minutes of Con Air at five in the morning last week while feeding my baby daughter. It was so bad I unconsciously groaned the entire time…But also smiled. That, my friends, is the true impact of camp and in the echelon Con Air is pretty far up there. I’d say top ten easy but it doesn’t even touch the next piece of art that Cage put out in the same damn year.

Bruckheimer’s got nothing on Woo, at least Woo for a brief moment in 1997…After a massive career in Hong Kong with classics such as Hard Boiled and The Killer, Woo came over and landed with the aforementioned Hard Target, a real dogshit movie, not even good enough to be campy. It’s just boring. C’mon man, we need to see Van Damme whipping ass, doing spin kicks and all of that. He can’t act worth a damn.

Anyway, Woo would carve out another steamer, Broken Arrow before gracing the annuls of cinematic history with the masterpiece Face Off.

Now, a little lesson in camp history folks. Face Off is up there on the Mount Rushmore of cheese along with Roadhouse, The Eiger Sanction, and probably National Treasure. My criteria are pretty harsh here because one must be aware of the differences between campy great cheese and just plain shitty bad cheese.

So, we have two bitter rivals here, the villainous and narcissistic yet charismatic Castor Troy, played by Cage, and the chaste but boring by the book cop Sean Archer, played by John Travolta. But wait a minute! Cage also ends up playing Archer and Travolta plays Troy. What? Yes, pure genius! Confused yet? Travolta as good guy Archer puts Troy in a coma after stopping yet another of his plots but in order to find out the codes for some detonation he actually uses a new technology and swaps faces with Troy. This leads to all sorts of angst and weirdness as Troy killed Archer’s son but now Archer looks in the mirror and sees the face of his nemesis.

But ah, Troy with no face wakes out of his coma, puts on Archer’s face and goes about playing the role of good guy. In an act of the ultimate revenge, he even has sex with Archer’s wife. The plot thickens! It’s great stuff and I wont spoil anything for those itching to watch but I will tell you there is a patented Woo Mexican stand off toward the end where each man with the other’s face look directly at one another in a strange mirror mirror sort of confrontation. Oh, and white doves flying.

In conclusion, I can think of no other span of time in the realm of the old school cellulose action flicks where someone put out such total quality chintz. One could turn to the heralds of it all, Arnie and Sly, but those guys played it too serious and let’s face it, held no torch to the acting chops of Cage. Stallone is in an altogether different league as he wrote many of his starring roles, and also won an early Oscar but not for acting. Arnie with his late 80s push pumped out four classics from 1987 to 1988 with Predator, The Running Man, Red Heat, and Twins but again, although most of those movies could be considered ridiculous, none had anything close to the outlandish premises contained within The Triumvirate of Cheese.

You AI generated image for this blog post, #393.