22 Things I Learned from Transformers: The Last Knight

1. It’s easy to sneak onboard a military flight with a robot the size of a fridge freezer.

2. Oxford, Westminster, and the White Cliffs of Dover are minutes apart.

3. Decommissioned submarines come fully equipped with pickled ginger and grated radishes.

4. Transformers have been on Earth for several thousand years, arbitrarily intervening in our wars to keep themselves busy. Only the tireless efforts of Albert Einstein, Frederick Douglass and others have kept their presence hidden.

5. Oxford lectures take place while – and indeed, consist solely of – wandering around museums making snide remarks about history.

6. Astrophysicists speak only in simplistic metaphors, and refer to these loudly and grandly as ‘physics’ (eg ‘Like Tiger Woods taking a swing: physics!’; ‘Earth will cook like a bag of popcorn in a microwave: physics!’).

7. Transformers can now reassemble themselves when they’re dismembered.

8. Except when they can’t.

9. English women find it acceptable to spy on the passionate lovemaking of their relatives.

10. Transformers hang out in Cuba because they seek both non-extradition territories and places to tan.

11. Stonehenge was at the exact centre of Pangaea.

12. There’s always a mysterious artefact.

13. There’s always a prophecy.

14. There’s always an air strike (or twelve).

15. There’s always a secret message hidden in the childhood relic from the father who you always thought neglected you.

16. There’s always a bit where Anthony Hopkins says ‘dude’, ‘bitch’, or ‘bro’. Oh no wait, that one’s new.

17. Two films in and already Mark Wahlberg looks bored.

18. There’s only one female Transformer, and she’s a villainous temptress from deep space with the power to warp men’s minds.

19. Which does beg the question: where did these baby Dinobots come from?

20. The headquarters of the European Space Agency look a lot like London’s City Hall; Sir John Soane’s Museum is a private residence; and London streets consist of nothing but one intersection near Bank, the Mall, and Westminster Bridge, repeating over and over during a car chase like the backgrounds of a cheap cartoon.

21. In the world of Transformers, everyone is gratingly obnoxious to everyone else most of the time. (When not being obnoxious, people either ignore one another, or tell one another they’re the best mechanic/father/honourable knight they’ve ever seen).

22. No-one crashes two planets into one another like Michael Bay crashes two planets into one another.

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22 Things I Learned from The Mummy

1. Iraq is full of crows.

2. Every blockbuster should open with news reports about the progress of Crossrail.

3. Ancient Egyptians dumped their problems in Persia.

4. There’s no problem so big it can’t be solved with an airstrike.

5. Birds fly at the cruising altitude of a military cargo plane.

6. There’s only one parachute on military cargo planes.

7. Medieval England is back in vogue (see also King Arthur and Transformers: They Keep Coming).

8. There’s a secret hideout for monster hunters under Aldwych.

9. It’s not an easter egg if it gets a close-up.

10. The only way to establish the setting is a female public toilet is through a prominently placed tampon dispenser.

11. The words ‘sarcophagus’ and ‘hieroglyphics’ are impenetrable archaeological jargon.

12. Having four irises is scary, apparently.

13. Big Ben is in the Square Mile.

14. In the midst of an apocalyptic, city-destroying sandstorm London’s tubes will continue to run.

15. There’s always an ancient ritual.

16. Which will always be interrupted.

17. Tom Cruise cares too much.

18. Russell Crowe cares not at all.

19. Charlie Day wasn’t picking up the phone (but Jake Johnson was).

20. It’s ok to ‘liberate’ precious antiquities from the Middle East with no consent, care, or paperwork.

21. It’s ok to be a total liability as long as you’re in charge.

22. It's not ok to copy the Marvel Business Model with a completely unrelated series of properties in another genre and expect an automatic hit.

22 Things I Learned from Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

1. It’s easy to find a working Humvee lying around in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. The keys will even be in the ignition.

2. Ditto dot matrix printers, which will be fully equipped with paper and working electricity.

3. Previous franchise entry cliffhangers can be gesturally honoured but logistically and emotionally ignored.

4. Alice is a fickle friend, and cares nothing for K-Mart, Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, and Ada Wong. But then, neither do you.

5. Tanks are way bigger on the inside.

6. Milla Jovovich never met a vehicle she couldn’t wreck.

7. Pharmaceutical company Umbrella manufacture and ostentatiously brand their own cufflinks, motorcycles (with BMW), and chainsaws.

8. Arbitrary deadlines do not make for compelling deadlines.

9. Ali Larter is the only one of the gang returning the producer’s phone calls.

10. Shawn Roberts isn’t worth the gym membership card his face is printed on.

11. You can never have too much Iain Glen.

12. But you can have too many clones.

13. That laser corridor deserves its own variety show.

14. Editor Doobie White (yes) apparently gets paid by the cut.

15. There are zombie hordes everywhere! Except when there aren’t.

16. Zombies are flammable! Except when they aren’t.

17. A devastated Washington DC, a businessman plotting an “orchestrated apocalypse”, relentless nepotism… this film may be prescient political satire.

18. Writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson has been watching Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies.

19. And RoboCop. And the latest Bourne fiasco. And, er, Daylight, I think?

20. Switching from native 3D to a cheap conversion is never a good idea.

21. If you like endless one-on-one combat filmed with swooping cameras and cut to ribbons so you cannot for the life of track what is going on, then boy is this the movie for you.

22. Alice doesn’t live here anymore. And neither do I.

22 Things I Learned From John Wick

1. Contrary to expectation, Keanu Reeves is chock full of awesome.

2. This film’s trailer has more plot than this film.

3. Assassins have their own hotels.

4. Assassins have their own gold-coin based economy.

5. Assassins never fight in anything other than immaculate three-piece suits.

6. Stabbing yourself is a reasonable fight move.

7. Aggressive stunt driving is a great way to work off widower grief.

8. New York City is jam-packed with actors from HBO TV shows.

9. Dogs get delivered at night by courier.

10. The most exclusive nightclubs require you to shower before entry.

11. When in doubt, blame a nepotistic Russian crime syndicate.

12. Ornate churches are reasonable cover for money laundering.

13. You can never have enough gunfights, until you can.

14. You can always have enough chrome.

15. Michael Nyqvist may very well be able to act, and possibly to act well, but we see no evidence of this here.

16. The handcuffs can always be picked.

17. The best friend always gets tortured.

18. The villain always has a chopper waiting.

19. Don’t hang around Bethesda Fountain after dark.

20. It’s acceptable to kill approximately 6,567 people one-by-one in gruesome ways if you’re avenging the death of a cute puppy.

21. Since Reeves’s rhythmic, slightly off-tempo and quite beautiful fight manoeuvres make up exactly 96.7% of the running time, perhaps John Wick would have worked better as a ballet.

22. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the land of mediocre action thrillers, the one that can string together a halfway adequate fight scene is disappointingly hailed as a masterpiece.

22 Things I Learned From Spectre

1. It’s acceptable to recklessly endanger civilians so long as they’re Mexican.

2. Long takes are a cheap way of making your film seem technically accomplished.

3. Rooftops are like Super Mario levels.

4. Spy laptops come with instant DNA scanners.

5. The villainous and endlessly resourced Spectre organisation only have the one branded ring, and they share it around.

6. The word ‘cuckoo’ is not scary.

7. Dave Bautista paints his fingernails.

8. Daniel Craig is a big fan of Roger Moore.

9. James Bond carries a tux everywhere, but not necessarily a gun.

10. You don’t need wings to pilot a plane.

11. There’s no point introducing magic nano-blood if you then don’t do anything with it.

12. Sam Mendes never conceived of a visual motif he couldn’t run into the ground.

13. Everyone massively overdresses for dinner.

14. There’s always a soft landing.

15. Unless you’re a villain.

16. In 2006 interrogations were being recorded on VHS tapes.

17. Truly evil people don’t wear socks.

18. One bullet is all it takes to blow up an entire building.

19. Hack writing deploys bland references as though they had inbuilt emotional and dramatic weight, and weren’t the cheap gimmicks they actually are. (See also: Star Trek Into Darkness)

20. It’s acceptable for a black female field agent to hang out with the white men during the mission planning stages, but she has to wait in the car while the important stuff happens.

21. Spending $300m and being two-and-a-half hours long doesn’t make you big.

22. Quoting past franchise outings in illogical ways and giving a character a Proustian name doesn't make you clever.

22 Things I Learned from San Andreas

1. There’s always a lower ledge.

2. It’s okay for black guys to make racial jokes.

3. If Dwayne Johnson says your shoe is untied, you better damn well believe your shoe is untied.

4. Ex-wives always trade up in these kinds of movies (see also 2012, War of the Worlds).

5. CalTech is brought to you by Apple and Pepsi.

6. Dwayne Johnson is brought to you by Dodge.

7. This movie is (oddly) brought to you by the San Francisco tourist board.

8. Kylie Minogue makes a stellar stone-cold bitch (shame her situational awareness is hopeless).

9. Televisions will still work after multiple earthquakes measuring well above 9 the Richter scale.

10. Ditto cell phone towers, but only for a short time.

11. Long takes are meaningless in an era of bluescreened digital imagery.

12. $100m blockbusters still can’t photoshop family photos for toffee.

13. When a real man fancies a new set of clothes he precision-crashes his helicopter in the menswear department.

14. Standardised shipping containers have a sense of poetic justice.

15. Skyscrapers are no substitute for a nuclear family.

16. The relentless spectacle of arbitrary mass death is in no way traumatic.

17. When the world trembles, get up against something sturdy.

18. When The Rock trembles, reach for the fast forward button.

19. 100,000 tonne freighters can sneak up on you.

20. Fifty foot chasms in the world can sneak up on you.

21. Happy endings can never sneak up on you.

22. This movie being a whole shaking mess of good fun sure snuck up on me.

22 Things I Learned From 'Fast Five'

1. Briefings by hard-ass DEA agents are always delivered while disembarking a military plane.

2. Drug warehouses have less security than a local supermarket.

3. Uniform cops always take reading material with them to the bathroom.

4. Goatees require hair stylists.

5. South American criminal overlords, invariably played by Joachim de Almeida, are getting dumber by the year.

6. Police in Rio are equipped with top-of-the-line cruisers (for a refutation, see Elite Squad).

7. Female criminals, trained by Mossad, are only good for wearing bikinis and getting groped.

8. Car thieves aren’t bad guys, just misunderstood.

9. Brazilians aren’t misunderstood, they’re just all bad guys.

10. Eliding nearly all muscle car races from a series that has built a reputation (albeit infamous) on such things is a witty, but risky, approach.

11. The DEA have access to technology that can see through masks and scan entire cities in seconds, yet insist on transporting stolen criminal assets on unprotected passenger trains.

12. If wearing a vest were acting, Vin Diesel would be nominated for an academy award.

13. If sweating were acting, Dwayne Johnson’s head would win an academy award.

14. If having blue eyes were acting, Paul Walker would, well, still be a confused-looking beach bum.

15. Favela da Rocinha in Rio is swarming with the heroes of stalling franchises, and contractually requires sweeping helicopter shots every five minutes (see also, The Incredible Hulk and the forthcoming Twilight: Breaking Dawn).

16. With pregnancy comes solidarity.

17. Taking part in a horrendously dangerous and destructive heist won’t cost you your job with law enforcement.

18. Six codas is five codas too many.

19. After directing three of these films, Justin Lin has finally figured out how to smash one car into another car (and – preferably – smash that car into another car into a bridge into another car and into a bad guy, and into another car).

20. This film makes the Nicolas Cage Gone In Sixty Seconds look like the Nicolas Cage Drive Angry 3D.  And as if that wasn’t enough to recommend it, it doesn’t star Nicolas Cage.

21. Driving irresponsibly isn’t just cool, it’s heroic.

22. Fast Five, Fast and Furious Five, Rio Heist: whatever you call it, five is this franchise’s lucky number.

 

The Ten Commandments of 'Faster'

Thou shalt privilege style over content.

Thou shalt shoot first, and never think to ask questions.

Thou shalt herald the return of Dwayne Johnson to where he doth belong.

Thou shalt feature the best work Billy Bob Thornton’s done for years.

Thou shalt condemn Carla Gugino to being an expository third wheel.

Thou shalt devote undue time to off-kilter yet oddly sober sub-plots.

Thou shalt not, despite advertising strongly suggesting the contrary, feature a car chase worth mentioning.

Thou shalt make unto thee a graven image of all generic precursors.

Thou shalt covet religious solemnity.

Thou shalt reap congenial entertainment from unpromising material.

Colour Me Stupid: A Chastising of 'Red'

Okay, Hollywood.

Sit down.

We need to have a talk.

No, by “we need to have a talk”, I mean, you sit there and listen, okay?

Good.

I honestly don’t know where to begin. You’ve let me down. You’ve let the viewing public down. And most of all, you’ve let yourself down.

Don’t sit there and shrug like you don’t know what you did.

You know.

Really? You want me to spell it out?

Fine. We’re here to talk about Red.

Yes, I know you thought what you were doing was, what do the kids say these days, cool? But it wasn’t. Just because it stars a bunch of ageing popular actors like Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich, is based on a graphic novel, and has a fast-moving nonsensical plot, doesn’t make it acceptable, let alone “cool”. Don’t give me that “but Helen Mirren shoots an Uzi” defence. The people at E! might buy that, but you’ll get no sale from me. Helen Mirren firing a gun is just as lame as Jason Statham firing a gun if the film around them is lame – that’s basic movie maths.

Speaking of the plot: I know it’s only trashy fun and all that, but nonetheless, if you’re going to use the massacre of a Guatemalan village as the instigator of your torturous narrative, then treat it with some respect. You’ve no idea what I’m talking about do you? If your heroes are CIA killers, then you need to be quite careful about how you portray them.

Let’s look at Grosse Pointe Blank. Quiet, I know it’s old, but I’m trying to teach you something. There’s Martin Blank, right, and he’s an assassin. He kills people for a living. But the film is a comedy. It’s light-hearted.

Yes, I know so is Red, let me finish.

So Martin Blank kills some people in the film. Mostly these are anonymous thugs or out-and-out weirdoes. Martin is also afflicted with a terrible ennui, brought about by his job. He comes out at the other side of all the gunfights with a newfound respect for human life. This journey helps us associate with him as a protagonist. The tone of the film also lessens the unpleasantness of his character: other people each have a pithy, unbelieving remark when he says he’s a contract killer (“do you get dental with that?”/”can I join up?”/”good for you, it’s a growth industry”), and the reason he has been marked for death himself is a bizarre accident involving a stick of dynamite and a millionaire’s pet retriever.

Compare this catalyst with the one in Red: the massacre of a Guatemalan village. This, like the exploded dog, is an unseen event and one which is way, way down the list of narrative priorities. A dog being detonated is funny, if morbid. The slaughter of a native population, especially one seemingly based on true events in Salvador in 1981, is less of a laugh riot.

I’m not against using real occurrences to spin out a fictional narrative, even one as fanciful as this. But to do so without the least bit of explication, respect, or even basic interest … that’s just unnecessary. Then to do so without suggesting any culpability on the part of the central “sympathetic” characters (who covered the murders up for the CIA without any trace of conscience) and not even having the decency to explain the compartmentalised blame (on an American politician, of course) is bordering on corrosive.

Fine, no one watches these things for the plot.

Yes, The A-Team featured successful US adventurism in Iraq (as did Iron Man), and The Losers began with the hilarious sight of the death of several dozen children before ditching all mention of them. I know.

That doesn’t make what you did in Red okay.

Nor is it the most annoying thing about the film.

Everyone enjoyed the sight of black ops teams and submachine guns in suburbia in Mr & Mrs Smith, but let’s not call that film a masterpiece. Let’s also note that whatever spark the Brangelina vehicle had (beyond the stars) came from the (over)awareness of the absurd disconnect between the action and the setting.

In Red, pretty much everyone’s a spy and a killer, and people show up with grenade launchers and no-one bats an eye. Remember Star Wars, and how Han Solo was always bursting the pomposity with his cavalier, blue-collar wisecracks? And remember how George Lucas’s recent prequels sucked so, so much, in part because they lacked this outsider perspective to all the nonsense?

No, Mary Louise-Parker’s office-worker-along-for-the-ride does not count. Why? Because she becomes normalised to the violence almost instantly (compare that, if you will, to Jason Bourne’s companion Marie vomiting when she sees her first dead body), and is excised entirely from the drama in the third act.

And don’t get me started on the troublingly reductive attitude towards women, all of whom either need to be saved by men (even gun-toting Helen Mirren) or take their cues from them at every turn.

What else? Stealing music cues from the Bourne films, Mr and Mrs Smith, and The International is a fine way of confirming that your movie has no original ideas. I know Kick-Ass did the same thing. But you know what? Kick-Ass was lazy, crass filmmaking too.

I have more to complain about, but I think our time here is almost up.

It doesn’t matter that those guys on rotten tomatoes mostly thought it was “alright”. If they thought making Paul Bettany into a post-apocalyptic action-hero was “alright” would you do that too? Point taken. But then these are the people who thought Salt was “alright”. Jurassic Park 3 was “alright”. Give them a press-pack with a complimentary key ring and they’ll rave about The Expendables, and that thing was like an etch-a-sketch of a crayon drawing of a trailer for an action film a six-year-old heard about one time.

Yes, I could have been more forgiving.

But you’re spending a lot of money. More than that, you’re spending my good will.

And I think we’re both running perilously low on both.

Now get out of here and don’t do it again.

Flights of Fancy: An Essay on 'Con Air': Parts 6 - 7

Part 6: Penitentiary Wars and Love Songs: Flirting and Power

Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema’ describes the manner in which women are treated cinematically. Mulvey sees them as objects to be looked at by a male-centred camera gaze; their presence “freezes” the story, as they are presented for erotic contemplation. She mentions the trend in 1980s Hollywood to remove such elements from action films by the invention of the ‘buddy film’, in which the interaction between two male stars is given primacy at the expense of the development of heterosexual relationships in the narrative.
    In The Rock, when Stanley Goodspeed states he will “do his best”, his veteran guide to Alcatraz remonstrates: “Your best? Losers always whine about their best, winners go home and fuck the prom queen.” Goodspeed cocks the gun in his hand and explains that his girlfriend was the prom queen. It is a moment of defiant heterosexual bravado, but it also has elements of the flirtatious. In Con Air, such homosocial one-upmanship is pushed further towards explicit male-on-male sexual energy, which – given both its marginalized and stigmatised position within American culture but also the conventions of the action genre and especially that of the prison film – could potentially carry with it overtones of rape and violence. One of the most surprising aspects of Con Air is, for the most part, a disavowal of the sexual deviancy of both convicts and non-dominant sexuality.
    Cyrus Grissom, orchestrator of the escape plan and uber-alpha male among alpha males, is fawned over by the other convicts. Pinball Parker is described as Cyrus’ boyfriend by a DEA agent using Parker as a human shield. Shortly following this, and after Parker has failed in securing an apology from Cyrus for calling him a “two bit dope fiend”, Cyrus comments that Cameron Poe’s involvement in the brief hostage crisis was “truly nice work.” Later, Cyrus takes Poe’s side over a decision regarding the fate of the remaining prison guards whom Diamond Dog wishes to execute: Poe winks at Diamond Dog at the end of the exchange, like a romantic lead who has gotten the better of a love rival. “A self-educated man” Poe says approvingly when Cyrus mentions that he learned nothing from his father – again, the line plays like flirtacious banter.

    The antagonism between Poe and Billy Bedlam seems to have no basis, but the boiling-point for it comes at the point that Bedlam discovers Poe’s personal items, particularly those concerning his daughter. “I knew you was a punk, and I was right,” Bedlam announces, and his revelation could well stem not so much from uncovering Poe’s lie about the length of his sentence than about his pronounced heterosexuality, evidenced by a wife and child. (This revelation is symbolised through a cuddly toy which becomes vital to the mise-en-scene). Poe’s own conversion to the all-masculine world of the penitentiary is hinted at in the montage of his life behind bars. On a care package sent by his wife: “those pink coconut things have made me quite popular. Met a guy the other day, Baby-O, he sure does love ‘em.” Deconstruction of such a line seems unnecessary.
    There are numerous further examples, the most direct of which are on the extended cut of the film (Poe: “I like black cherry jello.” Cyrus: “You like black cherry jello? I like black cherry jello. And I like you.”).
    These are veiled ideas, but they hint at the peculiarly American fear of prison as a place of inevitable sodomy and sexual debasement (The 25th Hour being the most obvious example of this on film). Rather than suggest that the plane full of hardened criminals is a place of sexual threat, the film instead creates a small community of like-minded sexual liberals (barring Jonny-23, who is despised by ringleader Cyrus). The transsexual convict Sally-Can’t-Dance is at no point threatened or abused by anyone except our hero (who cannot bring himself to land a punch and so slaps her). Cyrus is aware and accepting of her life choices (he tells her to scratch the eyes out of any police, as he stuffs a clip of ammunition in her cleavage).

    The conditions between the prisoners suggest a need for alliance and an acceptance of sexual difference – but not the sexual normality which is defined by Poe, which is symbolised through his waiting family, itself encapsulated in the fateful bunny which is brandished as a symptom of his betrayal by both Billy Bedlam and Cyrus, before finally being reclaimed by Poe and presented to his child. It is, however, “a little dirty”, the conflict over Poe’s normative sexuality having left its scars.
    This comfortable homosocial environment can also be seen as reflective of the action genre itself, and a development of the buddy movie’s excision of female agency and aesthetics from the principle narrative. Action films are primarily for men, and there is an element of aesthetic pleasure in the spectacle of another well-toned male torso barely concealed by an ever-dirtying white vest. Con Air goes some way toward acknowledging the inherent acceptance of man-on-man appreciation which terrifies other films into violent debasement and objectification of women (I would argue the examples of the threatened Bishop and the pretty Trisha are too tame to count). In this it is truly unique within the normative and often sexually immature world of the genre.

Part 7: Concluding Thoughts

I have experienced a tension in writing this piece, exposed or not, between a colloquial tone justifying the analysis of Con Air while also engaging in a (hopefully) lightly humorous drawing out of both the ridiculousness of the film and what could be perceived as the ridiculousness of studying it with any academic sincerity; this sincerity itself being the opposite pole, one of an attempted rational engagement with concepts of postmodernity, narrative and gender issues which understands Con Air as a symptomatic cultural artefact.
    The purpose of the above, then, has not been an attempt at a rhetorical flourish through perverse subject choice; but nor has it been a dry deconstruction of a piece of cinema. This is one of the challenges of both Con Air and the study of contemporary Hollywood blockbuster cinema. Such films offer themselves as empty spectacle, and do so with such competent craftsmanship for this stated goal that to understand them as, if not culturally meaningful, then certainly symptomatically indicative of prevailing cultural ‘turns’ (postmodernism, masculine studies) and the theoretical frameworks applied to these shifts (the work of Baudrillard, Jameson, et al) is to invite the accusation of frivolity.
    Con Air seems to me to go out of its way to invite such use as an evidentiary document, and in addition to the above the film contains potentially complex and at the very least unnecessarily problematic viewpoints on race and ethnic identity and the utility and consequences of incarceration, to name but two further avenues of study. This may not necessarily make it a smarter film than its peers (and I tread wearily around the issue of artistic value linked to the successful fulfilment of authorial intention, the hairline fractures within which thinking the modern art movement began to show many years previously) but it in my mind makes it more interesting. It remains a piece of entertainment in which men in vests flee from explosions in slow motion; however, the hollowness of both the sentiment and the spectacle on display seem to offer more methodological grip for investigative analysis than other examples of American action cinema.
    It was at no point my intention here to suggest that Con Air is a masterpiece (although that argument can of course be made). It was rather my goal to intimate the ways in which popular cinema can offer intriguing discourses on a multiplicity of subjects without being necessarily overt or academic about it, and to use Con Air for this purpose because in my own mind it is a superlative example of this.

Flights of Fancy: An Essay on 'Con Air': Part 5

Part 5: Reasons To Rehabilitate: The Use of The Feminine

The protagonist of Con Air is fighting to get back to his blonde wife and angelic child (and along the way he protects the honour of a female prison guard from a rapist). The codification of women as passive objects to be obtained at the heroic conclusion of the narrative is widespread in Hollywood films – the desire for a heterosexual relationship and masculine environmental control interpreted as a great cultural leveller. Poe’s wife Tricia does little of consequence, and Guard Bishop exists in much the same role as Poe’s obligatory black friend – to be imperilled, used by the villains and saved by the hero.
    Despite their conservative use within the narrative, the female characters are surprisingly free of objectification. Tricia is a married woman, a mother, and un-sexual (the possibility for a steamy scene in the opening minutes is avoided, presumably due to her pregnancy). Larkin’s assistant Ginny clearly has an unspoken affection for him, but this plot goes nowhere and she is never used as anything other than a professional at work (if a slightly wimpy one: “All those prisoners on one plane” she says apprehensively at the start of the film, which Larkin flippantly dismisses). Her twinning with Tricia in one of the last shots of the film explicates the unconditional existence of female affection in the world, and the gaudy uncomplicated nature of it (through the bank of glowing lights behind them):

    Guard Bishop is treated as nothing but a sex object by rapist Johnny 23 (“When you wake up, I’m gonna be Johnny 24!”), but his viewpoint is undermined by the marginalized and lecherous positioning of his character (“Don’t treat women like that!” yells Poe as he knocks Johnny out). The unconscious rapist is in effect castrated in the finale, his arm (the symbol of his violent virility, carrying a tattoo for each victim) torn off and left dangling on handcuffs. (The only presence in the film to invite objectification as a female sex object is the male cross-dressing convict Sally Can’t-Dance, about more in Part 6).
    One of the only times Steve Buscemi’s crisply cool sociopath Garland Greene talks about his own crimes is to state that “this one girl, I drove through three states wearing her head as a hat.” It is unclear whether this “girl” is a woman or a child. Poe’s response to this claim is to insulate himself from the arbitrary sickness of Greene by reminding himself that today is his daughter’s birthday. A subtle but important connection is drawn between Greene’s crimes and, in opposition to these, the utopian life Poe expects when united with Casey.
    It is Greene’s actions when he meets an eight-or-nine year old girl in a trailer park near Lerner Air Field which redefine his character. They talk and sing bland songs inside a dry swimming pool, and a jump-cut forces the audience to assume Greene has murdered the girl. When we later see her waving goodbye to the convicts’ plane, it is clear that Greene is to be seen in a new light. This allows his escape from maximum security isolation to be a happy ending.
    The poverty-stricken girl has for Greene been a “walking, talking reason to rehabilitate” (as Guard Bishop said to Poe of his own daughter). This man, who has perpetrated dozens of motiveless killings, is redefined by a single non-violent meeting. In discussing the presentation of paedophiles in the media, Yvonne Jewkes states that “the moral panic over paedophilia has perpetrated the notion that sexual dangerousness resides in strangers and that those strangers are not like ‘us’.” (Media and Crime, p97). Greene is indeed a stranger – isolated within his own vehicle for prisoner transport, gagged like Hannibal Lector, and attired in a white jumpsuit with the word SEPARATEE emblazoned on it, he is treated by society as a virulent pathogen.

    While he is dangerous, he is never labeled a paedophile, even though the tea party between himself and the child hinges on the threat of abuse, not least in the disturbing point-of-view shot that closes the scene. Greene’s violence and cruelty are spoken of, but not depicted: a moment in the extended cut of the film hints at his premeditated and unnecessary murder of a guard (“feel better?” asks Cyrus when he sees the body) – while this omits directly presenting the murder, it still failed to make the final cut, presumably in part because it makes the happy ending of Greene’s escape more discernibly worrying.
    It is left to Cyrus to be a threat to the little girls of this world. “The last thing little Casey Poe ever gets to smell will be my stinking breath,” he says to Poe with lasciviousness. “You ain’t getting near my daughter,” Poe retorts later, and it is this reminder of Cyrus potential paedophiliac qualities which most justify his overwrought punishment and death. 
Con Air treats women conservatively as objects under threat or objects of reward. However, it presents pre-pubescent girls as the ultimate engines behind correct action, as Poe’s desire to meet his daughter are his explicit motivations, while Greene’s rehabilitation suggests that love and mercy shown to a child are enough to overwrite heretofore unremitting sociopathy.
    I hope to here have indicated the conventional approach to the feminine taken by Con Air, which is reinforced by its depiction of (inevitably female) children as angels of redemption. This groundwork is necessary for the following exploration of the strange and unexpected presentation of masculine identity in the film.