MASTERCHEF OF MAYHEM

"Con Air" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer knows a thing or two about manufacturing action movies. The films he produced with the late Don Simpson - among them Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Crimson Tide and The Rock have taken over $3 billion worldwide.

Bruckheimer, the masterchef of mayhem, does not dare mess with the successful formula and he uses the most familiar ingredients in his latest offering, the high-octane concoction that is Con Air.

Rule number one: Men are much bigger draws than women at the box-office, so it helps when a movie is populated almost entirely by men. Number two: Ideally, for dramatic tension, put the men in a confined environment for most of the movie - or "a lot of testosterone in a tube", as Bruckheimer put it at Cannes last month.

All the best scenes in Top Gun were in the cockpits of fighter planes and almost all of Crimson Tide was set in a submarine. In Con Air, the principal set is a plane specially designed to transport dangerous criminals from one penitentiary to another. Such a service exists in the US and the movie was inspired by a newspaper article about it.

Number three: A short, snappy title helps, as Bruckheimer well knows, and Con Air, at just six letters spread over two monosyllabic words, is his shortest since Top Gun. Number four: Casting respected actors in unlikely roles adds a touch of class to an action movie, as the casting of Oscar-winners Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery in The Rock proved. So Con Air has, of all people, Nicolas Cage in the lead, this time as the good prisoner who has been paroled and is going home to his wife and daughter and an honest living.

Add in John Malkovich, whose cold-hearted villains in art-house movies make him ideal to play Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom, the ruthless criminal who masterminds the scheme to hijack the high-security plane. For good measure, sign up a couple of cult movie favourites, like Ving Rhames who was the hulking Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, and the ubiquitous Steve Buscemi.

A dash of Tarantino-esque humour won't go amiss either, so have Cage clutch a bunny doll as a birthday present for his daughter and some hilarious lines can follow. Like "Don't move or the bunny gets it". Give the droll Buscemi the movie's best line - when he comments on the irony of the air-borne prisoners singing along with Sweet Home Alabama, a 1974 hit for Lynyrd Skynyrd, most of whose members perished in a plane crash.

To cast the agents dealing with the crisis on the ground, take John Cusack who's too nice to play a villain, and that Irish guy from The Commitments and Deep Space Nine, Colm Meaney, and tangle them up in squabbles over procedure. One token woman would not be out of place, so slot in Rachel Ticotin as a US Marshal on board Con Air, and for good measure, mete out a few lines to the actresses playing Cage's wife and daughter.

Number five: Whatever happens, don't overburden any of the characters with too much dialogue. This is a movie aimed at the summer multiplex audience, which checks in its brains at the popcorn stand and is more interested in explosions than existentialism.

Number six: Ah, yes, explosions! Now you're talking. Pile on the explosions, fist fights, killings and crashes, and the bigger the explosions the better and the more the merrier. Remember, it is de rigueur in action movies to have at least one explosion where the hero (Cage) is running towards the camera while a ball of fire chases alter him.

Number seven: To emphasise that something truly dramatic blind exciting is happening throughout all the many action sequences, underline them with a big, bomastic score and pump up the volume. Hire that Marc Mancina to write the music - he's a dab hand at this kind of thunderous stuff after his scores for Speed, Bad Boys and Twister.

Number eight: To get the glossy look of the movie just right, get an up-and- coming director with a background in making commercials and pop promos. It worked with Adrian Lyne on Flashdance, Tony Scott on Top Gun, Days Of Thunder and Crimson Tide, and Michael Bay on Bad Boys and The Rock. So why not the prolific and award-winning English ad-maker, Simon West?

Number nine: Edit the movie with frantic, razor-sharp cutting, to give the viewer the sensation of a roller-coaster ride that never lets up. Number 10: It ain't over till it's over, so just when the audience think they've seen their last explosion, deliver the ace card in a set-piece finale - like having the plane hurtle towards Las Vegas and threatening to do its bit for the environment by wiping out the gaudiest city in the world. What you see is what you get in the strictly formulaic Con Air and what you see goes in one eye as fast as it goes out the other.