Macho manoeuvres

"The Rock" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

Dedicated to the memory of producer Don Simpson, who died while it was in production, The Rock is the latest movie from the successful producing team of Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, who specialised in glossy, music-driven spectacles such as Top Gun, Days Of Thunder, Bad Boys and Crimson Tide. The second film directed by Michael Bay, who moved from commercials and music videos into movies with Bad Boys, The Rock is an apt summation of the Simpson/Bruckheimer partnership and their biggest, loudest high-octane action movie to date.

Metallic blue is the key tone of the early, rainswept scenes of The Rock, which introduced as the villain of the piece Brigadier General F.X. Hummel (Ed Harris), a decorated military hero and a veteran of Vietnam, Grenada and Desert Storm. Disgusted that so many of his men were "left to rot outside Baghdad" - and that so many others died in operations so covert that their families received no benefits and the men were buried without military funerals - Hummel decides that the time has come to get the attention of the US authorities and "elevate their thinking".

With a crack team of commandos, Hummel takes over Alcatraz Island, holds 81 tourists hostage and threatens to launch a battery of warheads charged with lethal poison gag on San Francisco. The FBI calls upon the knowledge of two men to avert the crisis: a chemical weapons expert (Nicolas Cage) with no experience in the field, and an imprisoned British spy (Sean Connery) who escaped from Alcatraz when it was a penitentiary.

Seeping with enough paranoia to fuel a political epic by Oliver Stone, The Rock is a deeply cynical picture in which nobody even shrugs with surprise when a series of revelations alleges that corruption and cover-ups are rife in the US system. That's very much a secondary element of a movie designed as one raucous and relentless theme-park ride which barely pauses for breath as it piles one setpiece atop another; given that the movie is largely set in San Francisco, director Bay clearly could not resist staging the biggest set- piece of all, a spectacular car chase, on the city's steep streets. Everything about this movie is over the top - even when the grungy-haired Connery gets a badly-needed haircut, the hairdresser is an outrageously camp caricature. With its themes of cross-generational conflict and clock-ticking tension, its key use of an enclosed environment and a world in which women are peripheral, and its bombastic score, The Rock is in many ways similar to - but in all respects superior to - Simpson/Bruckheimer's Crimson Tide. Thanks to Connery, Cage and Harris, the card-board characters are invested with an edge of credibility and the humorous employment of pop culture references flows much more naturally than in Crimson Tide. Be warned that the violence turns utterly gratuitous in the finale when the villains meet horrible deaths.

"Eye For An Eye" (18s) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs

It's something of a shock to find Sally Field giving a credible performance, but in Eye For An Eye she is surprisingly, restrained as a middle-class suburban housewife whose world is turned upside down by the rape and murder of her, teenage daughter. The police identify the killer (Kiefer Sutherland) but the trial collapses on a technicality and Sutherland walks free. Despite the pleas of her husband (Ed Harris) Field can't shake off her obsession with the murderer, and decides to take the law into her own hands.

Field seems to have the first option in any grieving mother roles that become available in Hollywood, but it's to the credit of director John Schlesinger that she gives, by her standards, a subtle performance in the leading role. In subject matter, storyline and especially in its finale, An Eye For An Eye bears a suspicious resemblance to Schlesinger's previous yuppies-in-danger thriller, Pacific Heights. Predictably, on the question of the morality of breaking the law, to take your revenge, the script has its cake and eats it, condemning vigilantism but letting Field get her eye for an eye in the last reel. Schlesinger directs efficiently, and most of the over-acting is done by Sutherland, whose always limited range seems to be becoming even narrower as he gets older.

. Directed by the late Nigel Finch, Stonewall will have its Irish premiere next Monday in the Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin, as one of the highlights of Dublin Pride `96. The film is set against the 1969 riots in Greenwich Village which marked the emergence of the gay rights movement. Tickets for the evening are £10 each and available from the Screen cinema, Gay Switchboard Dublin and the Dublin Pride `96 office.