"Mission: Impossible - Fallout" is Great Summer Fun, Just Nothing New

My dear mother, who has never seen any of the films in the Mission: Impossible series, asked me the day before I went to see Mission: Impossible - Fallout if I thought she’d like any of the earlier movies.  I told her that, at the risk of jinxing the new film, I’d say that the M:I series was possibly the only more-than-three film franchise of which I could think in which each new movie was better than the one that came before it.  Fast forward to the next evening, and as I’m sitting in a theater waiting for Fallout to begin, that word “jinx” creeps back into my mind. I wonder if, without realizing it, I’ve just placed an undeserved burden on the movie I’m about to see.  Nah, I think to myself - it’ll be great. Well...

Mission: Impossible - Fallout is a pretty darn good action movie.  That much is easy for me to tell you without any him-hawing. Every few years, you may see Tom Cruise’s Energizer-Bunny-like media blitz on all the talk shows leading up to one of these movies, and get jazzed up to go eat popcorn and slurp on an Icee and be taken on a wild cinematic ride, and once again, he and his production team deliver on that bargain.  However, I have to admit that, after running the experience through my mind for about a day and a half after seeing it, the jinx about which I was worried definitely materialized on this one.

The story (if you care about that sort of thing)?  Cruise’s IMF uber-agent Ethan Hunt and his usual band of cohorts are now pursuing some stolen plutonium cores that are in the possession of an anarchist terrorist group bent on making their own nukes.  Hunt’s team loses a chance to recover them and are saddled with CIA overseer August Walker, played by mustachioed Superman himself, Henry Cavill, as they continue trying to recover the goods. Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames are still on the team, Alec Baldwin in back as “The Secretary” (y’know, the guy who will disavow all knowledge, blah, blah, blah…), and not one, but TWO of Hunt’s previous lady-interests return - British spy Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) from the last film and Hunt’s ex-wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) from the third movie.  Hell, even Rogue Nation’s main bad guy Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) is out of Supermax/Gitmo spy-prison and causing more trouble!

As with all the movies in this series, not everyone is who they initially seem to be, and some of them may (or may not?) be working one side, or the other side, or both sides of the game.  There are rubber-mask tricks, burly hand-to-hand brawls, and multiple government agencies out to get our heroes. There’s also ultra-high skydiving into Paris, a helicopter battle through the mountains of Nepal, car chases and motorcycle crashes - all things you’d expect in one of these movies, and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie stages them all spectacularly well.  His camera work for the chase scenes throughout Paris affects the audience’s equilibrium in a way to be almost roller coaster-esque, and Cruise continues to be able to defy Father Time and convince me that he’s not REALLY fifty-five years old while doing all of this.

Yet I kept waiting for the set piece that each of these films has, a stunt or process that Hunt must perform that almost feels sci-fi-ish.  Fallout didn’t have one of those - no hacking computers while suspended from wires in silence, or infiltrating underwater centrifuges without breathing gear, or suction-cup climbing the world’s tallest building.  Just a hanging from a helicopter… Yawn…

I’m also not sure if it’s just my imagination or if there’s something actually to it, but after just the one viewing of Fallout, I find myself wondering if Tom Cruise’s agelessness is finally fading away.  I couldn't decide if the almost-blank stare he displayed on a few occasions during the film was an acting choice or merely a sign of the plastic surgery finally preventing him from emoting as he’d like.  Eh, I could be wrong.

McQuarrie is now the first director to make more than one of these movies (he wrote and directed Rogue Nation as well), and as such, Fallout becomes what is probably the first “direct” sequel in the series.  All of the previous entries in the franchise have been pretty much free-standing, not necessarily requiring any familiarity with previous entries to be able to enjoy the newest film. This one, however, is so dependent on the events of Rogue Nation that I can’t imagine being able to feel the stakes as strongly as you would without having seen the previous picture.  Some of the fun of these movies is that newness in each film, and while the story here becomes richer and deeper for having the setup of Rogue Nation, some intangible level of… oh, what’s the word I want here?... “freshness” is missing.

Now I’ll advise you, Dear Reader, to go see Fallout.  It’s Tom Cruise doing the thing he’s done so superbly for more than twenty years, and it’s the best non-superhero/non-spaceship action movie of the summer.  After I finish this essay, however, I’ll call my mom and ask her if she’s watched the first Mission: Impossible film yet. Knowing her as I do, she probably has, and is probably eager to plow through the rest of them.  I think I’m going to advise her to take her time going through the other five films, though, saving the (slight) letdown of this one for last. While Fallout was well-made action movie fun, and I certainly enjoyed it, I just wish it felt as new as all the other ones did.

"Batman V Superman: Dawn (and morning, and midday, and afternoon) of Justice"

In my nearly half-century of life, I have spent more than my share of time and money on comic books.  There are Marvel Comics fanboys and there are DC Comics fanboys.  I have no loyalties - I am a comics slut and give my love freely to ‘em all, and then some!  This admission means, of course, that I am instantly and unashamedly incapable of giving an objective review of the first movie depiction of DC Comics’ “Holy Trinity” of superheroes, namely Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.  Like many geeks, I have been longing for such a movie the majority of my life, so it would take a pretty atrocious film of these characters meeting and doing battle to earn a horrible review from me.  Is this an atrocious film?  Absolutely, positively not.  So, is it a fantastic film?  Absolutely, positively not.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, a mouthful of a title if ever there was one, is directed by Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen), who also directed this film’s predecessor, Man of Steel. The movie opens with that film’s climax, but showing us the mass carnage of Superman’s (Henry Cavill, back again) battle over Metropolis from ground level this time.  The seemingly World War III-ish destruction from that film is not glossed over, and serves as the impetus for this one.  Bruce Wayne’s (Ben Affleck) financial empire has holdings in Metropolis, and he is there that day, seeing his property and, more importantly, his employees, being crushed by the aliens engaged in a death-match all over the city.  Who’s to blame for all this?  Sure, Superman saved the world, but a world now with a few hundred thousand fewer people alive.  Congressional hearings are held, CNN spends large chunks of airtime debating the issue, and lots of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump voter-types go wacko in voicing and showing their opposing fervor on the subject of this “alien” who may be our salvation or our doom. That thought drives both Bruce Wayne and Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) to decide we’d be better off without him, and each begin making moves to act on that belief. Let the battle begin!

This movie is breakneck-paced from the opening titles to the closing credits. With a two-and-a-half hour running time, and so much material to cover, Snyder gives us a visual orgy of explosions and costumes and vehicles and heat-ray-emitting monsters that would make Michael Bay blush.  We bounce around disjointed events from around the globe, and the movie hopes we can keep up and string them all together in our minds to see the overall picture. We’re beaten over the head with Hans Zimmer’s score (credited along with something/someone called “Junkie XL,” whatever that is), and see enough CNN on-air personalities that we’re absolutely certain that Warner Bros. owns them, too.

On the other hand, the pace also prevented Snyder from wasting time retelling us things we of which probably didn’t need reminding. Wayne is driven to almost-psychosis over the mayhem and destruction he witnessed, and the movie conveys just enough to convince me of that and moves on.  As he did with Superman’s origin in Man of Steel, Snyder does not bog us down in the minutia of Batman’s beginnings, as he’s confident in our knowledge of the broader strokes of how Batman came to be.  Sure, he gives us two minutes of Bruce Wayne voicing over a dream/remembrance of his parents’ deaths early on, but that’s it, and it’s enough.

But is the movie good or bad? Well, The Good - the majority of the cast’s headliners do excellent work.  Henry Cavill has Superman down-pat now, and while his performance in Man of Steel was probably more personal and touching, that movie was meant to be more emotional than this one (an actor’s gotta do what he’s given to do, right?).  Affleck is fantastic as Bruce Wayne AND as Batman, instantly shaming all those haters who went wild upon his casting announcement two years ago.  Oh, he may get some ribbing for adopting the Christian Bale gravel-voice while wearing the cowl, but that’s actually explained as a plot point and shouldn’t be held against him.  As stated, Wonder Woman makes her debut, played by Israeli actress Gal Gadot, and if you don’t applaud when she appears in costume for the first time, then I don’t want to talk to you.  She doesn’t have much opportunity to take over any scenes, and given Godot’s previous work, that may be a good thing (I guess we’ll find out if she can REALLY act in next year’s Wonder Woman solo flick), but she sure as Hell LOOKS the part, and that’s enough for me so far.

Now The Bad - Chris Terrio and David Goyer’s screenplay doesn’t do Lois Lane (Amy Adams, also back for more) any favors, and Jesse Eisenberg was a horrible Lex Luthor.  Lois, while portrayed to be more independent and less bumbling that almost all previous incarnations of the character, is still basically a catalyst for rescue situations, and disappointing, given Adams’ talent.  The Luthor character is the movie’s biggest and most glaring disappointment, though, being played as something akin to Eisenberg’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, but with Parkinson’s or something.  Every time he was on screen was like nails on a chalkboard to me, and while one is supposed to be somewhat turned off by a movie’s villain, Eisenberg’s performance turned me off in the wrong way.

The overabundance of characters and plot points, of course, serve as seeds that will someday bear fruit as spinoff films and a Justice League movie. Yes, the two minutes or so that teases the soon-to-be-members of the Justice League feels shoehorned into the narrative (and may literally have been, as rumors have it that the sequence was filmed many, many months after principal photography wrapped), but I understand the purpose the sequence serves, and it didn’t take me out of the movie.  A less geeky viewer may find his or her experience somewhat different.

The movie is far from perfect, but it’s far from a failure, too. I can understand how a more casual moviegoer would find the movie’s pace almost too frenetic to allow him to keep up with all these characters and their possible motives.  I can tell you with all-but-certainty that the half-hour of excised footage that Snyder and Warner Bros. have promised us for the three-hour R-rated Blu-ray release of the film is sorely missed.  Batman v Superman doesn’t make any pretense about being “Hamlet,” however - it’s a superhero movie.  It’s a flick about dudes (and dude-ettes) in brightly-colored spandex blowing stuff up and bashing the crap out of each other, and setting the table for more such movies to come. If that’s your cup of tea, as it is mine, then you may enjoy it as much as I did.

The (Gorgeous, but Empty-headed) Man From U.N.C.L.E.

There are times when I go to a movie knowing it will be something akin to dating a supermodel - it’ll look fantastic, but there really won’t be all that much beneath the surface.  Sure, we all want things in which we invest time and money to have deeper qualities than mere beauty, but who in his (or her) right mind would turn down the chance to look at Kate Upton for a couple of hours? It’s not like you’re committing your life to her, and Hell, there might even be a few laughs involved.
That allegory can more often than not be used to try to describe Guy Ritchie’s movies.  None of his films will ever take a place alongside other landmark pieces of cinema, but they’re pretty much all lovely to look at, and (with the exception of Swept Away, of course) can be pretty darn entertaining.  His Sherlock Holmes reboots from a few years back may have been rather soulless, but they sure looked good, and thankfully had two leading actors with great chemistry to provide witty banter that provided enough entertainment to gloss over the story’s flaws.  The Man From U.N.C.L.E. follows this trend to the letter.
The movie (it really should be “MEN From U.N.C.L.E., shouldn’t it?) is, of course, a retread of the television series from the 1960s, and regrettably one that I have never-not-once had the opportunity to see.  It capitalized on the James Bond/Cold War-spy genre that was duplicated and ripped off by so many movie and television productions of the day, and made stars of Robert Vaughan and David McCallum.  Thankfully, this reincarnation avoids the trope of "updating" the source material and leaves the story set in the Cold War-60s and follows the joint CIA/KGB team of Napoleon Solo (Man of Steel’s Henry Cavill) and Illya Kuryakin (The Lone Ranger’s Armie Hammer) as they meet, team up, and attempt to prevent a criminal organization from producing an atomic bomb. They romp around East Berlin.  They romp around Rome.  They romp around the evil super-villain’s island lair.  They save the world.  Simple.  How complicated a plot do you really need? 
What makes Man From U.N.C.L.E. enjoyable is Ritchie’s obvious love for the style and look of early-60s cinema, which is glaringly obvious throughout the movie.  First and foremost, the muted colors and rainbow lens-flares, evoking the beginnings of the time when the majority of movies, not just the occasional spectacle picture, would be made in color.  The clipped dialogue spoken by the characters, the location shooting, and those oversized, yellow subtitles all harken back to the heyday of Fellini and Antonioni.  The music he uses throughout, the European pop of the day and Daniel Pemberton’s score, are great undertones to both the action and the scenes bridging the action. Ritchie’s editing pace is something of a trademark of his, as well, and he keeps this movie moving along at almost breakneck speed, never allowing the audience to linger on anything long enough to realize it may be missing something. Ritchie’s technical skills make this movie pleasant to watch, despite its shortcomings, which sadly are primarily found in the two things for which people primarily watch movies - the story and the actors.
Ritchie and his producer Lionel Wigram wrote the screenplay, and it oh-so-very much could’ve used another pass or two from a more competent screenwriter. Sure, the plot doesn’t NEED to be overly complicated, but I kept waiting for something that wasn’t stereotypical Our Man Flint-type stuff to happen, and it never did.  Even the villain’s ultimate fate was so underwhelming that I found myself expecting her to pop back up before the credits rolled, but no, that was actually her end…
Cavill plays Napoleon Solo as Chris Parnell played James Bond in Saturday Night Live skits, with all the lower jaw-jutting, smug smile-wearing, lady-killer strutting arrogance you would expect from someone making light of Sean Connery in his glory days.  Hammer doesn’t do all that much better, spitting out his something-akin-to-Russian accent with a bit more “Moose and Squirrel” than one can forgive, and the supposed sparks he shares with Gaby (Alicia Vikander), the East German defector they have along for the ride, cannot be taken seriously.  Vikander is the trio’s saving grace, being the only one seemingly having a real experience, and not one right out of a “Bullwinkle” cartoon.  Hugh Grant, as the British Intelligence operative who will become the team’s supervisor, is also great in his limited screen time, but when is Hugh Grant NOT fun to watch?
The overall effect of all this is to leave one with the impression Guy Ritchie merely staged a spy-themed GQ photo shoot, which is not in and of itself a bad thing.  As stated earlier, looking at pretty things can be entertaining.  Seeing The Man From U.N.C.L.E. may even leave you with the same feeling you might have if you were ever so fortunate as to have that chance to date a supermodel - you may very well come to the end of it knowing you enjoyed it, and that it was beautiful, but you sure can’t remember a thing it had to say.

"Man of Steel" lives up to the hype

As one raised a Southern Baptist, and who has lived in the heart of the Bible Belt his entire life, I’ve always thought I have a fairly good notion of how I believe people in general would react to evidence of, or contact with, an extra-terrestrial intelligence.  The short answer is that I don’t think folks would handle it very well at all (the Robert Zemeckis film Contact depicted that possibility more believably than any other film of which I can readily think).  So many of us are unable to conceive of anything greater than ourselves or our image of God, or even worse yet are conditioned by religion and societal norms to consider such thinking as heresy, that having evidence to the contrary dropped in our laps would most likely result in some pretty ugly reactions.  This is the premise from which director Zack Snyder (Watchmen, 300) and screenwriter David S. Goyer (Christopher Nolan’s three Batman movies) approach their telling of that story with which we all are so familiar, how an alien baby came to Earth, adopted it as his home and became its champion and protector.

Man of Steel (an interesting title, not even mentioning the name he’ll have assigned to him by humanity) begins with a prologue depicting the few days leading up to Krypton’s demise, with Russell Crowe as Jor-El, an eminent Kryptonian scientist, and his wife Lara, both of whom have bucked their society’s notions of reproductive morality and produced a child the old-fashioned way when Jor-El deduces that Krypton is doomed to destruction due to environmentally-disastrous practices.  We see General Zod (Michael Shannon), commander-in-chief of Krypton’s military, attempt to assume control of the government and save their people in his own way.  This vision of Krypton is one we have not been shown in previous iterations of the Superman story, as the twenty minutes or so of the prologue gives us so much more of Krypton’s technology, government, wildlife and landscape than Superman: The Movie gave us thirty-five years ago that we can feel more sense of loss when this civilization comes to an end. 

The film, however, doesn’t go sequentially from there to baby Kal-El crawling from his spacecraft into a Kansas cornfield.  No, it quickly jumps to young-adult Clark Kent (Henry Cavill, an excellent casting choice), already grown and off into the world, attempting to find some sense of self.  Since we all know the Superman story, we really don’t need to have it all spelled out note for note again, and to their credit, Snyder and Goyer don’t even try.  We revisit important moments in the Superman/Krypton/Kent family mythos via flashback when those moments apply to current happenings in the film, a brilliant move on the filmmakers’ part.  As Clark comes to critical points in the plot, he’ll recall life-lessons instilled in him by his adoptive father Jonathan (Kevin Costner, whose understated acting style is the perfect tone for conveying fatherly wisdom), and his Earthly mother, Martha (Diane Lane, in some fairly-impressive aging makeup in later scenes).

The second and third acts are of how Clark’s existence, but not his identity, is revealed to the world by the arrival of Zod and his henchmen, having escaped from banishment to another dimension before Krypton’s destruction.  Zod’s vision of “saving” Krypton’s civilization require Clark/Kal-El’s death, and subsequently, Earth’s destruction, leading first to mankind’s question of accepting Kal-El as trustworthy, then to an all-out battle for Earth’s survival.  I liked how the movie takes a little time, even during all the carnage, to show how we might would go from hostile distrust of a being such as Superman to even accepting him, using a few Army officers’ coming to grips with him as a metaphor for society in general.

Oh, and Michael Shannon as Zod is fantastic, folks.  Shannon always has a borderline-psychopath look in his eyes, and he must be aware of it, as he always seems to find some way to utilize that physical characteristic to some advantage in whatever character he’s playing. Mania does not always necessarily equate to evil, and Zod honestly believes he’s pursuing a noble cause, and that his zeal in pursuit of that cause makes his actions just.  I think Kal-El/Superman even realizes this on some level and knows he must destroy Zod, anyway.

I suppose my only complaint (and I’m a little reluctant to use that word) is Amy Adams being cast as Lois Lane.  I’ve not been very happy with any of the actresses cast in that part in any of the previously-produced Superman films, with Kate Bosworth being the biggest joke of them all, and I was hoping Adams would break that streak for me, as I’m such a fan of hers.  Alas, the streak continues, but I’m not totally sure if my hesitation in accepting her is any fault of her own, or am I just unsatisfied with how David Goyer wrote the character.  The character isn’t anywhere near as annoying as Margot Kidder’s Lois, and is even written as having some empathy and restraint, but she still whines and cries a bit too much.  But, I guess if this is the biggest quabble I have with the movie, there must not be very much to quabble about.

Man of Steel is most certainly a product of the time in which it was made.  It seems that superhero films of this day and age must portray their primary characters full of angst and self-doubt, and loved ones will die, and there must be orgies of carnage and property destruction, and sure, those qualities are all present here.  That said, I found all of them appropriate here, and without any sense of stereotype.  First Contact, when that time comes, WILL result in mass hysteria and destruction in some form or another, so seeing New York City (and let’s face it, gang – that’s what “Metropolis” is) almost razed to the ground when aliens do battle there sorta makes sense.

While the term “reboot” has been applied to this film, that term often is self-defeating.  Sure, by definition, it means that it’s a new starting point for a potential series of stories, yet it seems that most folks never, ever allow themselves to forget the history of the source material, or keep that history from skewing their opinions of the new product, generally to the negative.  I admit I’ve been guilty of this myself on occasion (Casino Royale in particular), but I’d like to believe myself objective enough to overcome such gut-reactions.  Seeing this film with fondness or nostalgia for the Christopher Reeve films of the 70s and 80s, and expecting something similar would be a great mistake on a viewer’s part.  This movie is a science-fiction film at heart, and I suggest you see it with that mindset.