When Nicolas Cage won the Best Actor Oscar in 1995 for his devastating portrayal of a heartbroken alcoholic with a death wish in Mike Figgis’ “Leaving Las Vegas,” he was 31 years old and soaring into the prime of an already impressive career. He had access to the best screenplays in town and the interest of just about every A-list director. So Cage did what any reasonable movie star would do: he made three of the decade’s zaniest blockbuster action movies.
For those of us who fell in love with Cage as the good-hearted punk Randy in Martha Coolidge’s lovable 1983 film “Valley Girl,” he kind of owed us. Though he’s utterly brilliant in “Leaving Las Vegas,” Figgis’ grimy drama makes “The Lost Weekend” look like “Arthur.” It’s a brutal, frankly unrewarding ordeal. For close to two hours, we watch Cage’s financially/personally ruined screenwriter grimly follow through on his promise to speedily drink himself to death. And while it was nifty to see Cage take home a well-deserved Oscar, there was cause for concern that we were on the cusp of losing an inimitable weirdo of a leading man to the prestige factory. Was the fun all over?
It wasn’t. In 1996, Cage starred as a Beatles-loving chemical weapons expert in Michael Bay’s ridiculously entertaining “The Rock.” The following year, he doubled down on the action hero bit with the exponentially preposterous “Con Air” and “Face/Off.” He’d gone from making a cautionary tale about drinking to having the time of his life in explosion-laden larks meant to be watched with a beer in hand.
Of the three, John Woo’s “Face/Off” is both the least realistic and most artistically accomplished (it remains the Hong Kong maestro’s finest American movie). At 136 minutes, “The Rock” is easily the most excessive. This brings us to Simon West’s “Con Air,” an unapologetically nonsensical tale that is, at heart, about a man who just wants to bring his daughter a cuddly stuffed bunny.
Put the bunny back in the box
“Con Air” was Cage’s second go-round in a Jerry Bruckheimer action extravaganza, and, despite its ludicrous set pieces, the one that called for his most understated performance. Cage’s Cameron Poe is a Gulf War hero who, after serving eight years in prison for killing a man in self-defense (he tried to assault Poe’s pregnant wife), has been paroled, which will allow him to reunite with his wife and see his little girl for the first time. To commemorate the long-anticipated moment, Poe plans to give his daughter a stuffed bunny.
Alas, Poe’s prison transport, which is scheduled to drop off a who’s-who of the country’s most dangerous criminals, gets hijacked by said law-breakers, who plan to fly the plane to a non-extradition country. Poe has no intention of allowing this to happen. He’s going to foil the prisoners’ plan, and, one way or another, get the stuffed bunny to his daughter.
Of course, one of the convicts has to go and threaten the bunny, which prompts Cage to deliver the film’s most inspired line. And it’s hardly surprising to learn the star invented the moment himself.
It’s an interesting contrast in styles. Whereas Cage got to fire up the histrionics as the malevolent Castor Troy in “Face/Off,” “Con Air” offered him the opportunity to portray a laconic hero in the mold of Clint Eastwood. He’s the straight man on a plane stuffed with villains brought to cartoonish life by the formidable likes of John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, and Ving Rhames. And yet Cage still gets the film’s biggest laugh when he orders Nick Chinlund’s mass murderer Billy Bedlam, who’s discovered Poe’s personal effects in the cargo hold of the plane, to “put the bunny back in the box.”
Of Dirty Harry and unboxed bunnies
In a recent video interview with Vanity Fair, Cage revealed that he wrote the line, and was specifically drawing on Eastwood when he did so. Per Cage:
“[Y]ou see these adventure films with these big stars like Eastwood, ‘Make my day,’ and I thought, how can I take that tradition, make the ‘make my day’ so ridiculous? What can I come up with that will become my ‘make my day?’ Bunnies are kind of funny. Well, I’m bringing a bunny to my daughter — that was another idea I put in — and that’s why I had the bunny. ‘Cause I wanted to say that line, ‘Put the bunny back in the box.’ It’s absurdity at its finest, but […] if you sell it with genuine emotion and real determination, like this is the most serious thing in the world — and it is, because he has to give it to his daughter who he hasn’t seen in six years. It’s serious, he means it, but it’s ridiculous, and that’s what I love about it.”
Chinlund does not put the bunny back in the box and pays for his transgression by getting impaled on a randomly dislodged steam pipe. This ain’t high art, but it’s the kind of self-aware silliness that made 1990s action movies so deliriously entertaining. After the liquor-swilling misery of “Leaving Las Vegas,” Cage had more than earned these indulgences (and, having taken that award-winning journey with him, we deserved to enjoy them).