I was prepared to like Con Air and, happily, I was not disappointed. The overall impression of watching the 1997 action classic is a lot like riding the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith at Disney World: a sandblasting assault on your senses to a thrashing rock-music soundtrack. Con Air is bombastic and overblown, but always entertaining. I enjoyed it tremendously.

Con Air follows the travails of army ranger Cameron Poe [Nicolas Cage on freewheeling form] as he is sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter after defending his wife’s honour in a drunken brawl. After eight years, Poe becomes eligible for parole; a brief plane journey home with some violent criminals is all that lies between Poe and his reunion with wife Tricia (an underused Monica Potter) and daughter Casey. The plane is hijacked by the violent criminals, with bravura turns from John Malkovich as criminal mastermind Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom, a sparky Dave Chappelle as armed robber Joe “Pinball” Parker, and Steve Buscemi as serial killer Garland “The Marietta Mangler” Greene, who has virtually no dialogue yet steals the entire film. Can Poe wrestle back control of the plane, prevent further loss of life and make it back to his family in one piece?

What I most enjoyed about Con Air is how straightforward it is. Director Simon West sensibly realises that, in the best action films, the plot is simply the connective tissue between the fight scenes, and he doesn’t overcook things. The film’s entire premise is set up before the opening credits roll, and exposition is kept light throughout.

And what fight scenes they are. A jet takes off with a convertible tied to its rear! It crash-lands into the Las Vegas strip! Cage and Malkovich duke it out on top of a moving fire truck! Just when you think the film can’t throw anything else at you, someone says “Call in the attack helicopters!” and a fleet of aircraft hover into shot.

The one-liners zing faster than the bullets punching the hold of the plane. “Looks like you missed your connection,” announces Malkovich, before immolating a traitorous fellow con. “Make a move and the bunny gets it,” Malkovich says, holding Casey’s stuffed toy at gunpoint. (Malkovich has all the best lines.) Modern action films are often overly serious – I’m looking at you, Tom Cruise – but Con Air is enjoyable precisely because it is ridiculous. I can’t think of another action film as campily self-aware or entertainingly silly.

The film isn’t perfect: there are racial and transphobic slurs, and the female characters are basically just plot points. But the casting of Cage is an inspired touch: he brings levity to a character who might in other hands be a flat-footed demonstration of masculinity’s worst excesses. I can’t think of another action lead who’d play the role with the vulnerability on show when he breaks down in tears during Poe’s reconciliation with his wife. (I welled up.) Cage’s famously flamboyant acting style also works well in a movie that is, for want of a better word, hammy (how else can you describe a film that features John Malkovich holding a bunny rabbit at gunpoint?)

At its heart, Con Air is a quixotic fantasy about the responsible expression of masculinity, in which rapists have the misogyny knocked out of them by bare-chested hunks with free-flowing hair, and law and order can be restored by the efforts of one heroic man acting alone. Poe always identifies on the side of the authorities despite the fact the system imprisoned him unjustly. (In his jail cell, an American flag hangs from the bunk bed.) When Poe is trapped on the plane with a gang of marauding criminals, he instinctively works to thwart their efforts, becoming in effect a proxy for law and order itself.

I don’t agree with Con Air’s masculinist world view, but I certainly enjoyed the stunts.