John Malkovich, Nicolas Cage and John Cusack in Con Air. Photo / Supplied
"One wrong flight can ruin your whole day."
That's the tagline for one of the greatest (and cheesiest) action movies ever made, Con Air.
The film follows Cameron Poe, a highly decorated, honourably discharged United States Army Ranger, as he leaves prison after seven years.
But Poe's trip home doesn't go to plan when his prison transport flight gets hijacked by the nasty criminals on board.
Starring Nicolas Cage, John Malkovich, John Cusack and Steve Buscemi, the thrilling movie is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.
To mark the milestone, we've tracked down some little known facts about the film:
John Cusack has been quite open about the fact he did Con Air purely for the money and doesn't like to reflect on the movie too much in interviews.
"The ones that suck I tend to blank out," he told The Guardian about his film credits, "It's like I never even made them.
I use those kinds of films to get leverage," Cusack said in 2007.
"You wouldn't think Con Air had anything to do with Max [his 2002 movie about the friendship between a fictional art and his student, Adolf Hitler], but in my career it does. It's doing Con Air, or doing romantic comedies, that makes Max possible. The bad stuff you just try to make as good as you can."
Nicolas Cage didn't just play the character of Cameron Poe on the big screen, but he also helped shape what sort of character he'd be.
The actor said in an interview that Poe "wasn't a very real person" when he saw the script, so he made some changes.
"I decided he had to have been a Special Forces guy, so it would be believable that he could fight and kill so easily," Cage said.
"And I wanted it to make sense that he would stay on that aeroplane even when his own sense of self-preservation would be pushing him to get off when he has the chance. So, his background and sense of honour keep him there to help his sick friend.
"But I wanted something more: I got one of the guards who are captured by the cons to be changed to a woman character. This creates a threat of rape. Poe couldn't leave her unprotected. No decent man could, but I wanted to emphasise that by making him a Southerner, they have a strong sense of chivalry when it comes to women. So, making him a Southern former Special Forces guy made him a much more believable character to me."
Actor Danny Trejo plays Johnny-23 in Con Air and said being part of such a big male cast led to a rather competitive environment behind the scenes.
"The only problem: the biggest case of testosterone I've ever been in," he told The A.V. Club.
"It was 30 guys all trying to be bad-asses. It was so weird. If you would spit, somebody would spit a little farther. Pretty soon, you've got 40 people trying to see how far they can spit. If you did a push-up, somebody would do two, then three, then four. It was like a competition of who was the baddest ass. It was funny."
So which actor often came out on top?
"Nicolas Cage," Trejo revealed. "That guy, when we did Con Air, he was in great, great shape."
*Warning: This clip contains explicit language.
The most dramatic scene in the movie is when the plane carrying the convicts crashes into The Sands casino in Las Vegas.
You'd be forgiven for thinking the crash scene was mocked up on a sound stage, but it actually happened.
"The Sands was going to be demolished anyway," Jerry Bruckheimer explained.
"They blew up the tower on their own. We arranged to blow up the front of the building."
The filmmakers knew they would only be allowed to shoot the scene once so they set up 14 cameras to capture the crash.
"We brought in a real C-123K and gutted it to make it as light as possible," special effects co-ordinator Chuck Stewart said about the stunt.
"We also built a 250-foot track and created a cable system to pull the plane into the front of the casino. We thought the cable system would ultimately give us more speed. We originally figured it as a five to one ratio and pulled the plane with a heavy truck, thinking that for every 10 miles an hour we got out of the truck, the plane would go about five times that speed. Even when empty, the plane was so heavy that the cable snapped and broke a couple of times. It took us a few tries, but the plane finally ploughed into the front of the hotel."
Danny Trejo, who plays Johnny-23 in Con Air, didn't have to act too much to be a convincing felon.
The actor spent most of the 1960s in maximum security prisons for armed robbery and drug offences and narrowly avoided the death penalty.
"I went to the hole looking at three gas-chamber offences," he told The Guardian in 2012.
"After the Cinco de Mayo riots at San Quentin, in 1968, they said I threw a rock and hit the lieutenant in the head. But you know what? I did hit him in the head with a rock. But I wasn't throwing it at him, I was throwing it at a group of guys and he happened to be hit.
"So we all had gas-chamber offences, and we were taken to the hole and I remember saying: 'God, if you're there, everything will turn out the way it's supposed to. If you're not, I'm f**ked'."
The charges were later dropped on a technicality.
Trejo said in a different interview that the thrill he gets from acting is similar to pulling off a heist.
"For somebody who's used to adrenaline, it's the same rush," he said.
"Like the rush when you do armed robbery. You have total control. When the director yells 'Action!' it's right there, only the gun's pointed at you this time. It sounds like a strange analogy, but that's the life I came from and that's how I relate to it."
Nicolas Cage happily admits that he's "not one of those macho guys," but nonetheless the actor agreed to film his own stunts because he "didn't want to spoil the illusion" in the movie.
"Whether I wanted to or not, I did most of my own stunts," he said.
"They wanted to see my face on camera with the explosions five feet from me, and the flaming helicopters dropping behind me, and the ball-bearing bullets flying over my head. So there was a level of intensity, fear, you might say. To be honest, it was scary."
There have been persistent rumours about a potential Con Air sequel for about five years now, but nothing has been confirmed.
Director Simon West said in 2014 that he'd be keen for a follow-up to the 1997 film, on one condition.
"I would do it if it was completely turned on its head," he told ScreenDaily.
"Con Air in space, for example - a studio version where they're all robots or the convicts are reanimated as super-convicts, or where the good guys are bad guys and the bad guys are good guys. Something shocking. If it was clever writing it could work."
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