The Rock

How do you follow up your Oscar-winning act? If you're Nicolas Cage, you team up with a highly respected superstar (Sean Connery, also an Oscar-winner) and take a back seat to things that go boom.

At least that's what Cage has done in "The Rock," which seems to have been founded on the philosophy that no one should be killed with a single shot when a barrage of bullets will do, and that you can't have too many fireballs or broken windows.

It's kind of sad to see actors of Cage and Connery's caliber take on roles that wouldn't tax the acting muscles of Steven Seagal. Mostly, they're required to pose for the director's favorite camera angle — aiming up from the ground, so that the stars' constantly flaring nostrils get all the close-ups.

And close-ups is what "The Rock" is all about. Director Michael Bay — who did the equally irritating "Bad Boys" and loads of Clio-winning commercials — shoots a jittery San Francisco car chase with so many close-ups that the audience will be hard-pressed to figure out what the heck is happening.

Did Bay think that this big-budget, star-laden Disney summer movie was going straight to video?

Connery gets top billing (and a co-executive producer credit) in this grotesquely violent paranoia thriller, as John Patrick Mason, a federal prisoner whose identity has been erased (by Arnold Schwarzenegger, perhaps?)

Mason has been locked up for 30 years because he refused to return a piece of microfilm to the government — microfilm that contains the truth about the Roswell UFO incident, about the JFK assassination, etc. (Believe it or not, Oliver Stone's name is not in the credits.)

He's also the only prisoner to ever successfully escape from Alcatraz, so his expertise at traversing the maze of tunnels below the infamous prison is needed when outraged Gen. Francis Xavier Hummel (Ed Harris) takes over the island with a troop of psychotic Marines.

Hummel also takes 81 civilian tourists hostage, then threatens to kill off everyone in San Francisco with four rockets armed with a deadly nerve gas unless his demands are met. Hummel wants money for families of soldiers who died in covert combat missions — families who have been denied benefits.

Meanwhile, mild-mannered FBI chemical wizard Stanley Goodspeed (Cage), is brought in to disarm the rockets. And, naturally, he and Mason become a reluctant dynamic duo once they land at Alcatraz.