The Rock (1996)

This week, the dads storm Alcatraz with The Rock (1996), continuing Cagevember with a Bay Area blast that hits all their shared sweet spots: peak Nic Cage, unkillable Connery energy, and that VHS-era swagger that begs for popcorn at midnight. They kick off by reveling in the pairing and the setting, swapping personal history about first watches and how wild it felt to see familiar San Francisco locations on screen, even while clocking a few geography sins that only locals would notice.

From there they ride the movie’s big set pieces: the nonlethal heist of those VX rockets, the nerve-jangling glass beads that make every stumble feel fatal, and the satisfying nerd-spy teamwork of yanking guidance chips to turn doomsday into splashdown. The dads love the production design around the missiles, then crack up at the underground “Big Thunder Mountain Railroad” chaos that arrives like a theme-park left turn, because of course it does. They also enjoy the movie’s early lab vignette that introduces Goodspeed as a biochemist in over his head, which sets the tone for the scientist-meets-spy rhythm that powers the middle stretch. It’s a lot, it’s loud, and it’s fun.

They linger on Ed Harris’s gravitas and the way his final choices complicate the villain label, then savor the infamous Rocket Man gag, which they admit is ridiculous and still completely unforgettable. The conversation keeps that late-night, two-dads cadence: a little nostalgia, a little eye roll, and a lot of affection for a movie that plays like a recruitment ad and a buddy comedy at the same time. On the scale of Cage chaos, the dads clock this as the “believable” end of the spectrum while still grinning like teenagers who just snuck into an R-rated show. The Rock remains a big, brawny, spectacle of Bay and The Bay that turns nonsense into pure Saturday-night joy.