How this ended up on my list I'll never know. Probably it was the starring presence of Nicholas Cage, Ed Harris and Sean Connery, certainly it wasn't the directorial skills of Michael Bay.
Basically an over-the-top action-thriller, filled with preposterous San Fransisco car chases and obligatory jumps, the same as every other movie in the 70’s and 80’s only done bigger and louder, the high-speed comedy of little-old-ladies and paralympians crossing, the estranged father-daughter, the newly pregnant wife, video-game inspired obstacles, macho-pissing-matches, dead in the water dialogue, the obvious cues - “Shakespeare” and “Sun Tau” on the bedside shelf of Mason (so that you know he's smart AND dangerous), a political prisoner released to help Dr. Goodspeed disarm deadly strings of green-gas-bath beads in VX rockets, "The Rock" refers to Alcatraz, the film takes some liberties with the labyrinthine nonsense mines, tunnels and ore-carts/railways under Alcatraz. To quickly sum it up I'd have to call it "The Sum of All Cliches" and "entirely preposterous".
I think I would have liked it when I was 12. But nobody should have to see it after that.