The Rock (1996)
Directed by Michael Bay
When vengeful General Francis X. Hummel seizes control of Alcatraz Island and threatens to launch missiles loaded with deadly chemical weapons into San Francisco, only a young FBI chemical weapons expert and notorious Federal prisoner have the skills to penetrate the impregnable island fortress and take him down.
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13 films that influenced The Rock
What critics say influenced The Rock
"The Rock" is the last production of the late Don Simpson and his partner Jerry Bruckheimer, who were responsible for frenetic films such as "Top Gun" and "Days of Thunder."
Simpson lives on in Tom Cruise's Top Gun flash, in Eddie Murphy's Beverly Hills Cop swagger and in Sean Connery's daredevil insolence in The Rock, a fitting wild-ride finale for the team of Simpson and Bruckheimer.
Producers Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson have a highly-successful resume that includes Top Gun and Crimson Tide.
This final film from the production team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson (who died in January) certainly has the energy and professional look of their best action films, "Top Gun" and last year's "Crimson Tide."
In style, substance and star power, "The Rock" offers precisely the same infinitely marketable, high-octane mix of buff sex, Top 40 rock and hard-core action that Simpson and his partner Jerry Bruckheimer calibrated to near-perfection in such '80s milestones as "Flashdance" and "Top Gun."
The makers of such action blockbusters as "Crimson Tide" and "Top Gun," they are masters of the format.
That's what movies like the John Boorman-Lee Marvin 1967 "Point Blank," which begins and ends on Alcatraz, have proved.
The break into Alcatraz owes something to Don Siegel's" Escape from Alcatraz ," the 1979 Clint Eastwood movie.
One minor classic is "Escape From Alcatraz," wherein the warden virtually dares Clint Eastwood to bust out, and Clint promptly obliges.
In a movie that borrows from all the movies I've already listed (plus second-hand filching from " Die Hard " and related epics), there are two particularly obvious steals: the old hypodermic-needle-plunging-into-the-heart trick, from Quentin Tarantino's " Pulp Fiction ," and the Mexican standoff in which everybody has a gun pulled on everyone else (from QT's " Reservoir Dogs " and " True Romance " courtesy of old Westerns).
"The Rock" also earns the dubious honor of being the first major film to steal the hypodermic gross-out scene from "Pulp Fiction."
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In a movie that borrows from all the movies I've already listed (plus second-hand filching from " Die Hard " and related epics), there are two particularly obvious steals: the old hypodermic-needle-plunging-into-the-heart trick, from Quentin Tarantino's " Pulp Fiction ," and the Mexican standoff in which everybody has a gun pulled on everyone else (from QT's " Reservoir Dogs " and " True Romance " courtesy of old Westerns).
In a movie that borrows from all the movies I've already listed (plus second-hand filching from " Die Hard " and related epics), there are two particularly obvious steals: the old hypodermic-needle-plunging-into-the-heart trick, from Quentin Tarantino's " Pulp Fiction ," and the Mexican standoff in which everybody has a gun pulled on everyone else (from QT's " Reservoir Dogs " and " True Romance " courtesy of old Westerns).
"The Rock" is the last production of the late Don Simpson and his partner Jerry Bruckheimer, who were responsible for frenetic films such as "Top Gun" and "Days of Thunder."
While that one negotiated the maze of tunnels under Alcatraz in murky darkness, however, "The Rock" provides Alcatraz with a subterranean labyrinth as large and well-lit as the sewers in " The Third Man " and as crammedwith props and unidentified metallic machinery as the " Alien " movies.
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And the way that leads to a San Francisco street car chase inspired by " Bullitt ," leading to acrash almost as sensational as the train crash in " The Fugitive ."
Just as "Under Siege" was "Die Hard on a Battleship," "Speed" was "Die Hard on a Bus" and "Executive Decision" was "Die Hard on a Plane," this movie is "Die Hard on the Rock."