Stanley Goodspeed, who lives in Washington, D.C.,
is a biochemist who works for the F.B.I. Soon after his fiancée Carla Pestalozzi announces
that she is pregnant, Stanley gets a call from F.B.I. Director James Womack. Womack tells
Stanley that San Francisco's Alcatraz Island has been taken hostage, along with eighty-one
tourists, by Marine General Francis Xavier Hummel who, for years, has been protesting the
government's refusal to pay benefits to families of war veterans who died during covert
military operations. The death of his wife Barbara on March 9, 1995 drove General Hummel over
the edge, and now he's holding hostages in order to get his point across. Stanley is needed
because General Hummel has stolen some VX gas warheads and has announced that he will launch
them onto San Francisco unless his demands are met. Stanley knows how to disarm the bombs, but
he needs someone who knows Alcatraz well enough to get him inside. That man is former British I
ntelligence Agent John Patrick Mason, who has been in prison for the past thirty years without
a trial because he was accused of stealing the private files of J. Edgar Hoover. In 1962, John
became the only inmate ever to escape from Alcatraz, and he stayed out of Alcatraz long enough
to father a daughter named Jade Angelou. Despite his extreme hatred of the F.B.I., John agrees
to help Stanley. When John and Stanley are sent into Alcatraz with a Navy S.E.A.L. team, General
Hummel's men kill the entire S.E.A.L. team, leaving Stanley and John to work on their own to
rescue the hostages. [IMDB.com]
Directed by:
Michael Bay
Written by:
David Weisberg
Douglas Cook
Mark Rosner
Partial Cast:
Sean Connery (John Patrick Mason)
Nicolas Caage (Stanley Goodspeed)
Ed Harris (General Francis X. Hummel)
John Spencer (FBI Director Womack)
David Morse (Major Tom Baxter)
William Forsythe (Ernest Paxton)
Michael Biehn (Commander Anderson)
Vanessa Marcil (Carla Pestalozzi)
Jim Caviezel (Rear F-18 Pilot)