Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One (2023)

As I walked out of the theater for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One (a movie title with far too much punctuation), a woman sitting in the hallway asked me, expectantly and warily, “Is it any good?” With a hasty sigh, I assured her, “It’s fantastic,” realizing only then that the movie had taken my breath away. “Lots of action?” she asked, and I promised, “You have no idea.”
 
I hope she enjoyed it – indeed, I almost stuck around to see if she had, because as much as I’ve hemmed and hawed with blockbuster movies lately, as much as I’ve been besieged by fatigue and corporate horse-trading, Dead Reckoning is the first theatrical release in a long time that felt like an absolute blast: ten out of ten, no notes.
 
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is back, on the trail of two halves of a mysterious key that will unlock one of the world’s deadliest weapons. His newest mission reunites his old friends Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) with the disavowed MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) against the shadowy Gabriel (Esai Morales), his assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), and pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), caught in the middle of a case that goes back to Ethan’s first days with the IMF.
 
Your mileage may vary on the first two Mission: Impossible films, but there’s no question that the series well and truly hit its stride with 2015’s Rogue Nation, the fifth in the franchise and the first pairing Tom Cruise with director Christopher McQuarrie. Dead Reckoning is McQuarrie’s third outing with the IMF, and if there’s a pocket he’s firmly in it. Since McQuarrie’s arrival, Mission: Impossible has been a racecar in the red, constantly accelerating and delivering consistent thrills that somehow, time and again, find a way to make a tense situation even more nail-biting. What’s not to love about an action film so confident that its first trailer consisted merely of a single stunt and the relentless insistence that, yes, Tom Cruise really drove a motorbike off a mountain? 
 
And even while we’ve seen that stunt over and over again, there is nevertheless a charm and an intensity in the film finally reaching that moment – and then overpowering it, again and again, in a climactic sequence that protracts the audience’s anxiety by making a certain situation unfathomably worse and worse. As a third act setpiece, it’s a definitional moment for the film, which packs all its character beats and espionage plots into one orchestral symphony of chaos aboard the Orient Express. Agatha Christie, eat your heart out; Poirot’s mere murder inquiry can’t hold a candle to the finale of Dead Reckoning. 
 
At two hours and forty-three minutes, Dead Reckoning has a runtime that would make any lesser action movie buckle. Even Dial of Destiny, which I more or less loved, felt a little baggy at two-thirty-four, yet Dead Reckoning clips along, even through preposterous scenes of outlandish didactic dialogue. Buoying even clunky exposition like “The only thing that’s real is this conversation,” what sells the film is the earnest investment we feel between these characters, the genuine care they have for each other. I rewatched the films about two years ago, and even so the chemistry between Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg did more heavy lifting for me than my memory of their friendship in the preceding films. If they’re being playful with each other, we know things will be fine, but the script deftly maneuvers into those moments where conversation becomes deadly serious, raising the ante to a painful degree.
 
Even in a franchise where anyone could be wearing a rubber mask, where death is often just a fake-out, the tension in this film is almost unbearable. The audience knows that Ethan Hunt – that Tom Cruise – is bulletproof, and yet I found myself wheezing with fear each time he flirted with sudden death. McQuarrie is a master magician in this sense, fully immersing the audience in the cinematic illusion of danger. In my review of Fallout, I had said that McQuarrie seemed constantly to be asking, “But what if it were on fire?” And that impulse to ratchet up the stakes persists into Dead Reckoning; there’s a car chase, yes, but the car has no doors, and its occupants are handcuffed in a way that makes driving a challenge – and, of course, there’s a baby carriage in their way. My audience was laughing and gasping in equal measure, a rapturous burst of applause just when things cleared up, only to reveal the light at the end of the tunnel to be, quite literally, an oncoming subway train.
 
That pesky Part One in the title gave me some degree of pause. I thought we’d cleared that hurdle back in the days of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, and yet we have films like Across the Spider-Verse and Dune taking a year’s hiatus without fully concluding their narratives. There’s so much more to come in Dead Reckoning, Part Two, and yet McQuarrie hasn’t given us half of a story. He’s given us a full film (and then some), albeit with a major door left open for the sequel. That’s not to say that I couldn’t have easily gone another three hours – I could have – but at least this time I don’t feel like my attendance at the next film is taken for granted. Rather, Part One more than earns the right to expect me to come back for more. 
 
Back when Fallout debuted, I called Mission: Impossible “the little franchise that could.” But after 27 years and seven outings, I think it’s safe to say that it’s the persistent and consistent franchise that shows everyone else how it’s done.
 

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, some language, and suggestive material.” Directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Written by Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen. Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, and Henry Czerny.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

In a word, wow. I’m a week late to the Mission: Impossible – Fallout party, and while I would have liked to have seen the film in an entirely packed house, the fact is that Fallout is such a punchy film, so aggressively laced with adrenaline and bombast, that I suspect it’d work just as well on an airplane headrest as in a half-packed IMAX auditorium. It’s a film bursting with energy, firing on more cylinders than you knew a film could have, with a clever knack for surprise. The more hyperbolic in the review community are calling it one of the greatest action films of all time, and while that’s a bridge I’m not ready to cross just yet, I’ll say it’s an appropriate accolade because Mission: Impossible – Fallout is one of the finer action films in recent memory.

In the fallout (see what we did there?) of Rogue Nation, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is still working to dismantle the terror network organizing in the wake of Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). After his team (comprised of Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg) loses a cache of plutonium to Lane’s successors, Ethan is assigned a CIA escort (Henry Cavill) to make sure the weapons are recovered. Little does Ethan know that former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) is also chasing the plutonium, in a globetrotting chase that will lead Ethan closer to Lane than he imagined.

As someone who still hasn’t seen the first three Mission: Impossible movies (and with no legitimate reason for not having done so), I’m always a little surprised to think that this is a 22-year franchise with six films, a consistent lead, and an ability to persist without getting bogged down in reinventing itself or in lingering slavishly on the past. It is, in a sense, the purest version of a franchise, shaving off what didn’t work in the last installment and inheriting only a bare skeleton on which to hang a powerful action story. With returning director Christopher McQuarrie (the first time the franchise has brought back a previous helmsman), there are nods back to Rogue Nation, but the story is constructed in such a way that Fallout may as well be a standalone.

And boy does it work. The action setpieces are remarkable, literally breathtaking in a way that lets you temporarily forget the indestructibility of Tom Cruise (both on screen and, evidently, in real life, thanks to his much-ballyhooed refusal of a stuntman). These action scenes are refreshing for their clarity, astonishing in their choreography, and addictively compelling for their ability to raise the stakes like a cinematic Shepard tone. There’s a second-act car chase in Paris that feels like The Dark Knight had a baby with The French Connection, which includes also a motorcycle chase, a shootout, and a marine getaway for good measure; just when you think the fever has pitched, McQuarrie finds a way to raise the mercury with another twist. It’s as if McQuarrie, pulling double-duty as screenwriter, looked at each bad-as-it-can-get moment in the film and asked, “But what if it were on fire?”

Fallout is a movie that feels like anything could happen, but all under the umbrella of certainty that the good guys will prevail and, in fact, that they always already have it in the bag. Between the rubber face-changing masks, the continual double-cross reversals, and the sheer unstoppability of Ethan Hunt (who can, if the occasion requires, pilot a helicopter with no training or reorganize a hostage extraction with minimal time to prepare), Fallout is a movie that just feels right, leaving an audience with a big dumb grin. It’s a movie that doesn’t need a lot of frilly analysis because the movie is very no-frills in its approach to earnest straightforward action. There are a lot of moving parts in the film, with action sequences evolving and morphing even as the plot splinters and diverges. At one point, just when things start to go smoothly and umpteen new challenges arise, Cavill bursts out, “Why do you have to make everything so f—ing complicated?!” If Fallout is overly complicated, it’s in service to the immense satisfaction to be gained once Ethan barrels through the problem with a direct and unilateral solution that takes not a single human life. Ethan Hunt is an American James Bond, yes, but he’s also at home in the superhero genre because of his abiding belief that no mission is worth the life of a teammate; his super power is that aforementioned jack-of-all-trades ability to roll with any punch and salvage any mission gone awry.

The real thrill, then, is not in whether Ethan and the IMF will save the day, because of course they will. It’s in how much will be thrown their way, how much they have to overcome, and how creative a solution they’ll devise to get there. It’s in the payoff when you discover all the steps that have led to this moment, all the ways Ethan has prepared to get what he needs and how much he’ll have to improvise along the way. It’s a lot of fun; I can’t overstate how compulsively fun this movie is and how thoroughly it earns all the moments you want to stand up and cheer, little frissons when Chekhov’s gun gets to fire. If Sicario was the unlikely franchise, Mission: Impossible is the little franchise that could, and it’s earned its day on the hill.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout is rated PG-13 for “violence and intense sequences of action, and for brief strong language.” Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Starring Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, Michelle Monaghan, Vanessa Kirby, and Alec Baldwin.

American Made (2017)

Lest 2017 go down as the year that the otherwise bankable Tom Cruise made a disappointing go of universe building in The Mummy, late in the game comes American Made, which sees Cruise reteam with director Doug Liman, both of whom made a rather good show of it in Edge of Tomorrow (later renamed Live. Die. Repeat. for the DVD crowd, a worse title for the fact that it sounds more like a shampoo tutorial than a science-fictional Groundhog Day). American Made ends up a strong outing in the “hapless intelligence agency” genre, almost as if the Coen Brothers had directed American Hustle.

Cruise stars as Barry Seal, a TWA pilot bored of his repetitive career and too weary even to pay attention to his wife Lucy (Sarah Wright). That’s all about to change for Barry, though, as he meets CIA agent Schafer (Domnhall Gleeson, doing a spot-on American accent), who recruits Barry for reconnaissance flights in Central America. Ever the capitalist, though, Barry, finds his way into smuggling drugs and guns for the cartels and later the Contras, all the while earning more money than he knows how to spend.

Tom Cruise is seldom anything less than engaging on screen. He’s a charismatic presence, a real charmer, but he’s also got a manic glint that makes him a little bit unpredictable, a touch dangerous. Recently he’s used that to great effect in the Jack Reacher films, and he sent up the sociopathic end of the spectrum as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. Here we see a man who is increasingly over his head, in scenarios that are entirely his fault, without the ability, the resources, or the intellect to ask for help. When we first meet him, Barry creates a little turbulence from the cockpit just to liven up the red-eye flight. It’s horrifyingly reckless and self-destructive, but there’s an infectious gleam in Cruise’s eye, an impish madness that invites us to play along. And as we saw in Edge of Tomorrow, Liman knows how to harness Cruise into a performance that bends that mad twinkle into something of comedic value, playing a touch against type as someone who’s not fully in control of a situation. Ethan Hunt, let’s just say, would never have gotten himself into this mess.

As the puppet master of said mess, Gleeson is fascinating. Indeed, I had a very difficult time to believe that Schafer, General Hux, and Tim Lake were all played by the same man within five years, let alone that he’s also the poor chap at the center of Oscar Isaac’s robotic machinations in Ex Machina. I’ve already mentioned his flawless concealment of his native accent for the nondescript voice of Schafer, but what’s truly compelling is the way he manages to make a smile sinister, imbuing subtle menace with every raise of the eyebrow, as if to indicate that things could go very badly for Barry Seal if he utters so much as one incorrect word. From behind that mighty beard – truly not since Aaron Eckhart in Sully has facial hair been so capacious – and in between impromptu dance moves, Schafer presents with the lean and hungry look of Cassius, the frantic desperation to escape blame. As if we needed one more reason to be excited for The Last Jedi, Gleeson proves himself a creditable supporting performer.

Although largely not advertised as such, the true-story nature of the film gives it an uncanny sense of madcap possibility. One almost expects the film to reiterate halfway through, “This is all still true.” (However, a crucial news broadcast, for one, actually aired after the events of the film but is rejiggered for dramatic effect.) But the truth, as they say, is often so much stranger than fiction, and the film gives Barry’s wild exploits just enough allure, wrapped in just enough of the American dream, that the film should also come with a “don’t try this at home” disclaimer. Despite the sparkle of the lifestyle Barry creates for himself, the film is careful to remind us that Barry is either too dumb or too ambitious to know when he’s in over his head – he acknowledges that he leaps before he looks, but it’s done in that disarming Cruise brand of self-deprecation. Nestled between blockbuster season and Oscar season, American Made shouldn’t be drowned out in that middle ground; it’s mind-boggingly true without losing the sense of fun I look to have at the box office.

American Made is rated R for “language throughout and some sexuality/nudity.” Directed by Doug Liman. Written by Gary Spinelli. Starring Tom Cruise, Domnhall Gleeson, and Sarah Wright.

The Mummy (2017)

Going to see The Mummy, ostensibly the first film in Universal’s monster mash-up “Dark Universe,” is a bit like going on a first date with an overeager suitor. After a number of headscratching decisions regarding the opening course, said suitor quickly begins planning out your entire future together, only for you to slam the breaks on and say, “Hang on a minute, we’ve only just met! What was your name again?” By the end of the date, you’re asked, “Shall we do this again for the next few years?” while you struggle to form a response that won’t insult by asking your suitor to change everything that brought you two to this moment.

Put another way, and I don’t imagine this has been said by too many people very recently, I would have rather spent the foregoing two hours with Brendan Fraser.

(Note: there’s some degree of disagreement about whether or not the identity of Russell Crowe’s character is a plot spoiler. I had thought Universal had long ago announced this, but I’ve seen critics be cagey about it. I’ll say that it’s not revealed until about halfway through the film, although Crowe appears here and there in the first half, and if you’d really rather not know, skip the plot summary and just imagine it says “Tom Cruise meets a mummy.”)

Tom Cruise stars as Nick Morton, soldier of fortune and antiquities looter in present-day Iraq who stumbles upon – or rather, quite literally falls headlong into – the hidden tomb of Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), the forgotten princess of Egypt who was mummified after a string of wicked misdeeds. Morton falls in with Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) and her shadowy employer Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe), who have their own designs on the unearthed sarcophagus.

I’ll not say that The Mummy is a travesty; I won’t get angry about it or inveigh against it. I’ll say, however, that The Mummy is clunky and mechanical and, like its eponymous villainess, more than a little bit lifeless. Perhaps it’s a case of over-trailer-itis, which seems to be going around these days, and indeed more than three-quarters of the plot of The Mummy, in precise chronological order, is contained in the trailers, such that the only real turns of the plot left for the film proper involve how exactly Tom Cruise gets himself out of this pickle. (The climax of the film, meanwhile, is its own little bundle of problems, about which I’ll say more later.)

Take for example the centerpiece action sequence, a plane crash that was done with a surprising amount of practical effects. And if you’d seen the trailers, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a page out of the Mission: Impossible playbook, but where it’d be a rousing thrill over there, here it’s somewhat leaden, devoid of much suspense (again, partially because the trailers outright revealed who survives the crash, and how). At least one horror/thriller set piece ends up being just a product of a character’s imagination, while death itself becomes quite impermanent – par for the Mummy course, I grant you – resulting in a film that feels bereft of consequence and ultimately void of significance.

Unfortunately, the things in the film that feel of the most significance are the elements one senses are being introduced, with all the subtlety of a flashing “detour ahead” sign, to set up future films in the Dark Universe franchise. The director, Alex Kurtzman, had done the press rounds in December talking about making these aspects – including a secret organization, Prodigium, which is essentially a monster S.H.I.E.L.D. – organic to the story of The Mummy, and I have to say on that front the film fails spectacularly. It is, in fact, akin to entering another film entirely; Tom Cruise leaves the plot of The Mummy, enters the Prodigium plot, and then returns to The Mummy without that second act doing much more than introducing a plot-sized bottle of continuity glue to hold the franchise together. The worst of it is that the Prodigium plot is actually a little bit interesting, a bit unpredictable, and a bit audacious for a film that otherwise plays so safely by the numbers. That is not, however, to say that the Prodigium plot works particularly well as the second act of The Mummy, overladen as it is with exposition that continually reminds us of the inorganic, grafted-on quality of this subplot. Russell Crowe turns up, monologues a bit about the film we could have been watching, and then ushers us away to our regularly scheduled movie, already in progress.

Then the film ends – or rather, doesn’t end, because every plot thread that’s tied up gets unraveled almost immediately, and you can hear any one of the six screenwriters saying, “Hold up a second, we might want to use that in another film.” (Six screenwriters! No wonder this film feels more like a collection of bits than a singular narrative.) The film is trying to end, but the corporate demand for a franchise results in, appropriately enough, a Frankenstein’s corpse of a creature that isn’t permitted to fade away. Consequently, The Mummy ends up being more Iron Man 2 than Iron Man, forgetting that it was the insular success of the first film that allowed the series to bend toward franchise, in all its best and worst excesses. Then there’s a bit that feels unfinished and deferred to another film when you realize that one of the main characters closes the film in shadow and obscurity because something has very probably changed about that character’s face, but you’ll have to come back for another film to see what precisely that change looks like. In yet another way, then, this Mummy refuses to wrap up.

The Mummy would have been in a better place had it decided what it wanted to be. Is it a Tom Cruise action vehicle? Is it a horror film about ancient evil? Is it an espionage thriller about monster hunters? Or is it an origin story for a shared universe that, quite honestly, not many audiences were requesting in the first place? And although it shares next to nothing except a core concept with 1999’s The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser, this Mummy emerges all the worse for the comparison because of how fluid, energetic, and frankly well-crafted the former Mummy flick was. I still carry fond memories of the 1999 Mummy and wish I’d been watching that film instead. It had a sequel, yes, but it also had a singular plot leading to a singular ending. Rick O’Connell, we hardly knew ye.

(And what does it tell you that, nearly 20 years later, I still remembered Rick’s name but had to look up the name of Tom Cruise’s character a scant day later?)

The Mummy is rated PG-13 for “violence, action and scary images, and for some suggestive content and partial nudity.” Directed by Alex Kurtzman. Written by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, Dylan Kussman, John Spaihts, Alex Kurtzman, and Jenny Lumet. Starring Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis, Jake Johnson, and Russell Crowe.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)

Back in 2012, I really enjoyed Jack Reacher as a surprising find amid the end-of-year fare that December. It didn’t do much in the department of the new, but it excelled in the field of competency and cleverness. Four years later, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back takes a clear and safe path down the middle of the middling road, erring on the side of generic without ever living up to its own promise.

Journeyman Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) roams the country looking to right wrongs, but when he arrives in Washington, D.C., to liaise with Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), he discovers that the major has been imprisoned for espionage. Suspecting that a game is afoot, Reacher strikes out on his own to pursue the truth about Major Turner and about the young girl (Danika Yarosh) who may be his daughter.

Four years ago, it seemed fairly obvious that Jack Reacher was the launching point for a new film franchise – although it seemed very much of a piece with Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible work, Jack Reacher was something of a scrappy American James Bond rather than the polished and unflappable Ethan Hunt. Equally good in a fight or a moment of deduction, there was much to like about Jack Reacher, even if the character wasn’t particularly distinctive in and of himself. But, as they say, he could have been a contender.

Instead, the sequel features Jack Reacher in a very generic plot, a half-hearted thriller in the espionage mystery subgenre, which doesn’t have much in common with the original film, nor does the protagonist actually drive the plot. Indeed, the film might better have been titled Jack Reacher: Ladies Night Out, because the three women – Smulders, Yarosh, and Madalyn Horcher, who plays a sergeant who assists Reacher – end up doing most of the heavy lifting as far as investigation and deduction go. (In fact, I suspect one might enjoy the film more if we think, as I tried to do, of Smulders as playing Maria Hill in a SHIELD-themed spinoff of The Winter Soldier. Henry Jackman’s score here certainly reminds one of such.)

When he’s in action mode, Jack Reacher is compelling enough, but it’s tough to hang a whole film on running/jumping/punching (just ask Pacific Rim), especially when it’s pretty much all that Reacher does of consequence in the film. And it’s a particular shame in this film when there’s an opening scene that introduces the character in pitch-perfect fashion – it’s the opener you’ve seen in trailers for months now, and it establishes the character in fairly succinct order. He’s a ferocious brawler with a sly sense of humor and a head for meticulous planning. Now that’s a character in charge of his own film, and a character who ought to enjoy a long and prosperous franchise.

We certainly get the former, plenty of action shots in which Tom Cruise punches someone so hard he leaves a bloodstain on the wall behind him. As action setpieces go, Never Go Back is probably worth going back, but it lacks the deductive ingenuity that made Jack Reacher such a surprise. Much of those investigative elements are given to other characters, leading one to wonder what Jack Reacher’s actually doing in this movie. Here, Reacher is reduced to following orders (something the character isn’t, I presume, known for doing) and roughing up ruffians who pursue him.

What he doesn’t do is command the screen in the way that he did four years ago. If we’re going to disregard the subtitle’s advice and come back for more in a third outing, let’s not give Reacher a sidekick or a love interest or even a commanding officer. Just turn him loose and let him do his thing. And let’s be smart about it, though “smart” is seldom the operating word in a sequel.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence and action, some bloody images, language and thematic elements.” Directed by Edward Zwick. Written by Richard Wenk, Edward Zwick, and Marshall Herskovitz. Based on the novel by Lee Child. Starring Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, and Danika Yarosh.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

I think I missed a memo, because in the last few years, Ethan Hunt has managed to become the American James Bond (Jack Ryan might have had that title long ago, but I was one of only a few who liked his most recent appearance). It’s a bit of a surprise that a franchise which began nineteen years ago is having something of a resurgence in the last five years, but if the series continues to be as good as its latest outing, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Tom Cruise may end up giving 007 a run for his money. (He’s already played the part longer than anyone played Bond, besting Roger Moore’s 12 years.)

After a Senate hearing disbands the IMF, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) finds himself cut off in the middle of a global search for the invisible Syndicate, a network of terrorists whose existence is doubted by nearly everyone. With the scantest of leads, Hunt seeks help from his tech-savvy comrade Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) while continually crossing paths with the mysterious Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), whose true allegiance is perpetually in doubt.

The James Bond comparison is really and truly invited by Rogue Nation (perhaps more than its immediate predecessor, Ghost Protocol), which begins with a Bond-style opening sequence in which Ethan boards a plane mid-flight from the outside. This audacious stunt, which Cruise performed himself, sets a tone for the film that roots Rogue Nation in an era where action films tried to show moviegoers something they hadn’t seen before, rather than aim first to outdo the competition or just outthink the audience.

As I said of Ghost Protocol, the joy of these films is that they don’t focus so much on transcending the genre as they do on playing very well within the established conventions of the espionage narrative. What’s even more refreshing is the way the films recall the early Bond films’ one-and-done format, without baiting the audience back for a sequel or relying on their memory of a small detail from movies past. As someone who hasn’t seen the first three (but who now wants to, desperately), it’s striking how well the film introduces its main characters, some of whom have been around since 1996. I hadn’t met Ving Rhames’s Luther before, but I had a good sense of who he was and how he fit into the story because the film has a very acute sense of narrative integrity, respecting its audience enough to give us a complete experience.

Rogue Nation is spectacle cinema doing what it ought to do with neither pretension nor laziness. With each Mission Impossible film directed by a different person, I think there’s less of a burden to outdo oneself or someone else, and more room to focus on the quality of the experience itself. Director Christopher McQuarrie, reuniting with Cruise after the very compelling Jack Reacher, has a knack for stories told well without compromising clarity, and the surprising sense of humor from Edge of Tomorrow (which he cowrote) is present also in Rogue Nation, punctuating moments of tension with unexpected moments of delight.

I had gone to see Rogue Nation because an action film always looks better on the big screen, and I’d had such a good time with Ghost Protocol that I wanted to give the franchise another look. Now that Mission Impossible is two for two, it’s probably time for me to go to the back catalog, because now I have a brand that I trust. If nothing else, I have something to tide me over until Ethan Hunt’s British counterpart returns to theaters, and something to which I can look forward when the inevitable sixth Mission Impossible film debuts. That’s my mission, and I do choose to accept it.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is rated PG-13 for “sequences of action and violence, and brief partial nudity.” There are quite a few action set pieces with chasing and fighting, but it’s mostly bloodless; there’s a somewhat intense scene where a character is deprived of oxygen for minutes at a time. A woman removes her top, but it’s seen from behind with no visible nudity.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Edge of Tomorrow is literally Groundhog Day with space aliens; more accurately, it’s Groundhog Day meets Aliens, right down to the inclusion of Bill Paxton and a kickass female lead in a robotic suit.  It’s a fine popcorn film, engaging without any real dead spots and bankable in the best Tom Cruise tradition.

Cruise stars as Major Bill Cage, a military spokesman who is shanghaied into service on the front lines of a conflict between humanity and the invading “Mimic” aliens.  His first day of combat goes disastrously, but his newfound ability to “reset the day” and travel back in time brings him to legendary soldier Rita Vrtaski (Emily Blunt), who trains him to become a better fighter and take advantage of his time traveling powers to end the war.

Regardless of what one makes of Tom Cruise personally, the man is one of Hollywood’s more reliable action heroes.  His recent work has been consistently entertaining, due in large part to his charismatic on-screen personality.  Here that quintessential Cruise persona gets inverted a bit; when we first meet Cage, he is essentially a deserter, more at home selling a war than fighting it.  Cruise plays these early scenes very well, and he does a comparably good job with Cage’s transformation into a battle-hardened soldier.

In some ways, though, he’s still playing a version of Tom Cruise.  Don’t get me wrong – I very much like that character (he was plenty of fun in the underrated Jack Reacher), but it’s not really news.  What Edge of Tomorrow does give us that we haven’t seen a dozen times before is the commanding performance of Emily Blunt as the “Angel of Verdun.”  It’s a performance that does recall Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, especially with the mechanical exoskeleton iconography.  It’s not, however, a metaphor for her own resilience as was the case in Aliens; instead, Blunt humanizes Rita and saves her from the worst fate of all – the stereotypical romantic subplot.  And honestly, thank God – where Groundhog Day relegated Andie MacDowell (also playing a Rita – coincidence?) to the object of Bill Murray’s desire, Edge of Tomorrow flips that and gives us a hard-as-nails woman who is uninterested in Cruise’s amorous affection for her.  It helps that she’s incredibly immersed in the role, which could make its own successful feature in and of itself.

The film is surprisingly funny, which will definitely bring up those Groundhog Day vibes, and it’s to director Doug Liman’s credit that the film never feels uneven in that regard.  What holds it back from being a truly great film and restricts it to the province of popcorn blockbuster is that a lot of the film does feel somewhat undercooked.  We have two very compelling protagonists, but the villains are a bit underdeveloped; aside from a neat and original look, they’re really only there to fill the antagonist quota.  We don’t know what they want or why they’re on earth, which wouldn’t be too bad except for the fact that the film reminds us a few times that these questions are lingering.

Similarly, the members of J Squad (the military troop into which Cruise is drafted) aren’t very well crafted, functioning mostly as bodies when in combat and comic relief when not.  There’s value in comedy in the midst of a war film – see above for the unexpected humor in the film – but there are a few jokes that don’t feel earned and especially a few deaths in the supporting cast that never quite resonate because a) you’ve seen them die plenty of times before in rejected timelines, and b) you have to remind yourself, “Okay, they said he died, but which one was he again?”

All of this is not to say that Edge of Tomorrow is a bad film.  It’s at worst serviceable and at best a fun and entertaining flick that does enough things right to justify its own existence.  If I had to do it over again, I would.

Edge of Tomorrow is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, language and brief suggestive material.”  There are a lot of military combat sequences between armored humans and tentacled alien monsters, though they’re closer to the frenetic shaky-cam of video games than the brutal gore of Saving Private Ryan.  We see one bare bottom, Tom Cruise gets a rather funny three-quarters of an F-bomb, and a suggestive pick-up line (more of a shrug, really) is quickly and mercifully defused.

Check back on Thursday when The Cinema King assesses The Fault in Our Stars!

Jack Reacher (2012)

Somewhere in the aftermath of the infamous couchjump heard round the world, Tom Cruise became a bankable performer with a penchant for entertaining action flicks.  Jack Reacher is the latest in a set of diverting pictures, even if it’s not the most inventive movie you’ll see this month.

Cruise is the titular protagonist, an army cop turned drifter who lives off the grid in order to cherish fully the freedom for which he and his comrades have fought.  After an army sniper is arrested for the killing of five civilians, Reacher comes to Pittsburgh to close an old case and accepts the offer of attorney Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike) to investigate further before running afoul of a criminal enterprise run by the weary survivalist “The Zec” (Werner Herzog).

Christopher McQuarrie pulls double duty as screenwriter (adapting from the Lee Child novels) and director, and it’s apparent that he’s the same man who brought us the script for The Usual Suspects.  Jack Reacher is similarly structured, with small moments (like bullets falling on the floormat of a car) repeated and explained later.  But unlike Suspects, Jack Reacher doesn’t rely on a last-minute game-changing gimmick, opting instead for a more straightforward approach that lets us discover the clues just a few seconds after Reacher does.  The dialogue is snappy, with Reacher rattling off one-liners like an American James Bond.

The plot turns on Reacher’s observations, including a few deductions that might impress even old Sherlock.  And Cruise does a good job as the passive action hero, without much of a personality but with enough natural charisma to carry off the script’s cleverer lines.  Cruise manages to make Reacher an engaging figure without sacrificing the enigma that otherwise makes his character a cipher.

Herzog is a particularly great choice for a villain, with his hoarse whispers conveying menace and malice tempered by his overwhelming ennui.  When The Zec retells his backstory, Herzog’s droll delivery imbues the dialogue with subtle terror that most other character actors would have overplayed or at best managed unsuccessfully.  Pike, though, is unfortunately interchangeable with most other actresses, serving as a generic sounding-board against which Reacher can be exceptionally bright.  Her chemistry with Richard Jenkins, who plays her father, is a success, but she doesn’t do much in the film until she’s cast in the damsel-in-distress role – a shame, since Pike seems to be just shy of the A-list.

In the third act, though, a near-cameo from Robert Duvall proves always welcome.  Playing a grizzly ex-Marine, Duvall is a good combination of “familiar face” with “begrudging sidekick,” turning an action movie trope into a reunion with an old favorite.

Jack Reacher isn’t fantastically inventive, its rejection of flashy stunts and show-off writing meaning it probably won’t be overly memorable in a few months.  This is no Mission Impossible, for example, where the only person smarter than the main character is the screenwriter, who can’t help but show off cleverness.  What saves the film from obscurity, though, is the smart script paired with Cruise’s performance as the hero. 

Jack Reacher is clearly the start of a prospective franchise, to which I say – more of this clever writing done without bombast is welcome.  Jack Reacher is, like Taken, a film that chooses to do well rather than to do flamboyant; if you want flash, stay home, but if you want a no-frills cerebral action film, reach for Reacher.

Jack Reacher is rated PG-13 “for violence, language and some drug material.”  There are several fight scenes and shootings; most are bloodless but still moderately intense.  There’s an F-bomb or two, a few scenes set in a bar, and a mention of cocaine.

Monday at the Movies - January 2, 2012

Welcome to the first installment of "Monday at the Movies," the first of what should be a more frequent way of updating the blog without the time-consuming aspect of full reviews. Full reviews aren't gone by any means, but they'll be more infrequent and saved for special occasions (good or bad). Check back each Monday for a look at what The Cinema King's been up to and what he's thought during his travels.

(This post will be a bit longer than usual, since I'm playing "catch-up" on the movies I've seen in the last month or so. Christmas is a great time for the movies.)

Fail-Safe (1964) – I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m in love with Sidney Lumet’s work, and this was a bit of an unusual choice for a New Year’s Eve movie choice. But as always with Lumet I wasn’t disappointed. The film’s treatment of measures to prevent an accidental attack on Moscow in the height of the Cold War still carries all the tension it must have fifty years ago, due in large part to Lumet’s capacity to induce anxiety via his careful manipulation of the camera. High marks also to Henry Fonda, who brings his trademark integrity and earnestness to the role of the troubled President of the United States, who has to convince the Russians that the bombers are not sanctioned while wrestling with a number of impossible moral conflicts – which are then asked of the audience at the film’s startling and alarming conclusion. While the film becomes a bit heavy-handed when the President deplores the policy of mutually assured destruction, Fonda’s intense delivery sells it in a way akin to Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). If this film doesn’t grip you and hold on until the very end, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) – Stieg Larsson’s runaway bestseller gets a stellar treatment here in the hands of director David Fincher. The book was addicting like very few I’ve ever read, and the film doesn’t disappoint. Fincher keeps the plot moving (despite a few tweaks from the novel) in a quick and cerebrally engaging way, but the real star here is a career-making performance from Rooney Mara as the troubled hacker Lisbeth Salander, who embodies the character and all her subtle quirks opposite a typically stoic Daniel Craig. The suspects in the disappearance under investigation – Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, Joely Richardson – all do good work, especially Skarsgard who never disappoints (see Pirates of the Caribbean, Thor, and Mamma Mia for a sense of his range). I’m willing to forgive Trent Reznor for stealing last year’s soundtrack Oscar from Hans Zimmer, because the music here is suitably unsettling, creating a mood perfectly complementary to the visuals Fincher crafts. The film might leave some cold because it’s not standard Hollywood/awards season fare, but it’s a movie which requires thoughtful engagement and a critical understanding of the “man’s inhumanity” theme that pervades the work.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) – I can’t remember the last time I saw a straight action film, one that didn’t play games with the audience or deliberately try to subvert the genre with a series of improbable twists. Pixar veteran Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) does a fine job with this fourth Mission: Impossible film, which fortunately doesn’t require the first three installments to make sense. The acting doesn’t accomplish much beyond providing bodies to live out the film’s action sequences; it’s impossible, for example, to forget that Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise and not Ethan Hunt. But those action sequences are something else indeed, thrilling and exciting in the best escapist tradition. Kudos to Bird for yanking the breath out of my lungs even in moments when I knew that they wouldn’t kill the star, and if the franchise continues like this (even with Jeremy Renner, who seems to be groomed for taking the reins) I may have to accept this mission.

Panic in the Streets (1950) – This, my first experience with the legendary director Elia Kazan, wasn’t a knockout. The premise is promising: investigators have 48 hours to find the murderers of a plague victim before they infect New Orleans with the disease. Richard Widmark is more than capable as a public health official, and a young Jack Palance is appropriately ominous as the murderer, but the film suffers from a split focus, never finding a balance between pursuer and pursued. There are long stretches of film where we don’t see Widmark, for example, a problem which drops a lot of the tension in the film. Compounding this problem is a dated and distracting misunderstanding of germ theory, which makes some of the film’s twists a bit, shall we say, inaccurate. Perhaps in the 50s it held up better, but as the second installment in a TCM double feature with Fail-Safe, Panic in the Streets didn’t raise much commotion for me.

Rango (2011) – I had extremely high expectations for director Gore Verbinski’s first animated film. And being a big fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the inclusion of Johnny Depp as the star was icing on the cake. Unfortunately, I think my high expectations were insurmountable for the film, which ultimately disappointed me. The story of a thespian chameleon who becomes the sheriff of the town of Dirt, Rango flirts with the western genre without ever doing anything productive with that sporadic flirtation. Depp’s voice acting is first-rate, giving life and nuance to Rango, and the other voices (Isla Fisher, Ned Beatty, Bill Nighy, and Timothy Olyphant channeling Clint Eastwood) do good work, too. But the story is a bit weak, overladen with scatological humor and other jokes that try too hard. I’d love to have seen what the film would have looked like in the hands of a more capable screenwriter (i.e., someone from the Pixar stable).

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) – Not everyone was in love with Robert Downey Jr.’s second outing as the master detective, but I was – although not initially. Downey and Jude Law still have excellent chemistry as the eccentric Holmes and his straight-man partner Watson, but the scene stealer here is not Stephen Fry as Sherlock’s brother Mycroft (who’s quirky but doesn’t quite gel) but Jared Harris as archenemy Professor Moriarty. Harris is a calm yet psychotic counterpart to Holmes’s intellect, evenly matching our detective at every turn. While the first half of the film struggles to find its footing, the second half rebounds from the uncertainty with a compelling Holmes-v-Moriarty cerebral match that spans several nations. It might be spoiling something to say that the film adapts “The Final Problem” among others, but it’s not spoiling anything to say that director Guy Ritchie does a good job adapting the source material to his own unique style and sensibilities. The standout feature, though, is once again the vast amount of infectious fun that Robert Downey Jr. seems to be having, and I can’t wait for the next film.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!