Still don't think that West has the sophisticated craft or magic touch of Tony Scott or even Michael Bay and mostly just skates by on pure diet visual/sonic copycat techniques right down to the huge epic dolly pans and Top Gun era romantic ballads/electric guitar licks but it's hard to deny a movie so blatantly ridiculous in conception (its "somehow they managed to get every creep and freak in the universe on this one plane'' premise practically an open parody of the Bruckheimer formula/style, Bruckheimer auteurism?) and a cast of all-timer slimy character actors this game for it.

There's an argument to be made that no bench has been assembled to cook on this magnitude in a while including, amongst too many to name, John Malkovich ranting about his "penal lore", Ving Rhames' as the militant black supremacist going "yeehaw", Danny Trejo as Mr. Rape (no way this character makes it into a movie even a few years later), Steve Buscemi as a Hannibal Lector-esque serial killer that makes the "Manson family look like the Partridge family." (The tense cross-cutting to the scene where you're meant to wonder whether he's going to chop up a little girl and wear her as a skinsuit is one of the most bad-taste things I've ever seen in a pop summer movie like this.)

It also gets that bump that all crass, commercial garbage from this era gets now where you can't help but go "Look at all the analog FX craft tho!" Its poetry is entirely giant practical squibs/fireballs and insane one-liners ("the next wings you see will belong to the flies buzzing over your rotting corpse") and it seems 100% conscious of that; giving you the loosest, most efficient cliche set-ups and launching them at you with a winking attitude and a breakneck ADHD pace all as an excuse to get to its pure 90s macho action movie magic moments...

Like say, Nic Cage's long-haired Alabama army ranger John McClane (and all-around morally-upstanding guy who protects the needy and helpless via righteous ultraviolence) Cameron Poe strutting away muttering "I'm gonna show you God does exist," before exploding the Las Vegas strip off the face of the Earth. Never has a movie seemed more self-aware of its cable TV programming destiny, and Bruckeimer's entire deal of making the overtly tasteless absurdity physically tangible could not have been summed up better than Cage's delivery of: "on any other day, that might seem strange."

Full discussion on ep 285 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.