Mission: Impossible - Fallout

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT

** SPOILERS **

"Hope is not a strategy," August Walker (Henry Cavill) says to Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) quips back, "You must be new." Indeed, if you think about it, we never really see Ethan Hunt eat or drink, so he must be fueled purely by hope as he does impossible things to save the world.

In the relentlessly entertaining Mission: Impossible - Fallout (the 6th Mission in 22 years), Ethan is pushed to his absolute limits as he and the IMF, consisting of the hilarious Benji (Simon Pegg) and the ever-loyal Luther (Ving Rhames) - race around the world to stop two nuclear weapons from killing millions of innocent people. The genius of Fallout, directed once more by Christopher McQuarrie, is in how all of the dangers the IMF has ever faced has been balled up into the personal guilt of Ethan Hunt. He's responsible for all of us, and he knows it. "I'll figure it out!" is Ethan's response every time the IMF asks him what to do, though by then, Ethan has already taken off to perform some type of aerobatic insanity. Bless him, Ethan will go to absolutely any lengths to save us, because that's simply what Ethan Hunt does.

The last three Missions have been a more tightly-woven narrative than the original trilogy from 1996-2006. 2011's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol introduced the Syndicate, a rogue nation of former government operatives led by an anarchist named Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). Ethan and the IMF captured Lane in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, but two years later, the remnants of the Syndicate have reorganized into a new terrorist network called the Apostles. They want their old leader back and they'll detonate three nukes to get him. Of course, the IMF mobilizes to stop them, this time led by Secretary Hunley (Alec Baldwin). Hunley was the IMF's greatest critic until he saw Ethan in action in Rogue Nation; like anyone who gets to see what Ethan Hunt can do, Hunley was instantly converted. Indeed, Hunley delivered an astonishing pro-Ethan speech in Rogue Nation where he called Mr. Hunt "the living manifestation of destiny." Now's he's Team Ethan all the way. However, the IMF always has to be disavowed in some way. New CIA head Angela Bassett thinks the IMF are a bunch of "grown men in Halloween masks" and sends her own man to oversee Ethan, August Walker. If Walker could twirl his infamous mustache, he would have.

The action in Fallout is typical for Mission: Impossible, which is to say it's deliriously breathtaking. With the 56-year-old Cruise once more performing the majority of his own stunts, Ethan soars higher and takes more risks than ever. Ethan and Walker HALO jump 25,000 feet into Paris just to crash a party where the mysterious Apostle leader named "John Lark" is set to meet a broker called the White Widow (the fetching Vanessa Kirby). If you think about it, was the HALO jump even necessary? It's Paris, not North Korea - there are a dozen safer ways to enter the City of Lights. Nevertheless, that sets the stage for a brutal men's room brawl and an incredible motorcycle and car chase sequence all over Paris as Ethan evades the police after capturing Solomon Lane yet again. Ethan then parkours and runs across the rooftops of London chasing after Walker, who is revealed to be the real John Lark, before it all culminates in an absolutely spectacular helicopter chase that concludes with a fight on a Kashmir mountaintop where Ethan is literally dangling off the mountain by his fingertips.

For her part, Kirby delivers a speech about her mother Max, which means she must be the daughter of the original broker of information Ethan encountered in his first Mission in 1996. And the White Widow is powerfully attracted to Ethan, so like mother, like daughter. Also attracted to Ethan is MI-6 agent Ilsa Faust, who was Ethan's partner and foil in Rogue Nation. Ilsa joins the IMF at last, though not after betraying Ethan again, which he naturally forgives because he knows she has "reasons." That's the spy game for you. The best callback of all, however, is the return of Ethan's wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who has been on the run for her own safety since Mission: Impossible III. She's a doctor without borders now, married to Wes Bentley of all people, but when Ethan comes back into her life once again, she knows it's because the world is at stake. She gets him. "I like her," Ilsa realizes, and we agree. Even while four action set pieces are going on at once, George Lucas-style, in one of the best roller coaster third acts ever in an action movie, we're stunned at the emotional punch Julia and Ethan's reunion packs.

Poor Ethan apologizes eight times in Fallout: once to a French police woman who finds herself in the wrong place in the wrong time, once to Alec Baldwin, twice when he runs into a funeral in a cathedral while being chased by the Apostles, and four times to Julia herself. But as Julia notes, Ethan has nothing to be sorry for. Ethan's guilt over the way his adventures have upended his wife's life is expunged and finally, he's free of the secret torment he harbors - the same torment Solomon Lane uses against him in his nightmares. Of course, Ethan Hunt can't ever stop trying to save the world, and the world desperately needs him. But by the end, with Ilsa and the IMF, his team - no, his friends - rallied around him in the hospital after he put it all on the line once more, we regard Ethan with the same admiration that they do. Rest up, Mr. Hunt, and get back out there. The world needs you in Mission: Impossible 7.

The Mummy

THE MUMMY

** SPOILERS **

There's a lot going on in director Alex Kurtzman's reboot of The Mummy, but also not a lot going on. It's weird. Here we have a movie hoping to launch an entire shared universe that tries to be so many things and falls short of everything it could be. Sofia Boutella, the scene stealer from Kingsman: The Secret Service and Star Trek Beyond, is the new Mummy, an ancient Egyptian princess named Ahmanet. She was supposed to be Queen of Egypt, until her father the Pharaoh went and had a first-born son, putting the kibosh on her ascension. Ahmanet's response was to make a deal with Set, the Egyptian God of Death. Set turned her into a mummy a demon who murdered the Pharaoh and the rest of her family, but she was caught and mummified alive. That's how a princess who became a demon became The Mummy. 

Ahmanet was imprisoned far from Egypt, in a tomb deep beneath modern day Iraq. There she's inadvertently found by Tom Cruise, who plays a soldier of fortune named Nick Morton. However, this isn't the usual invincible Tom Cruise we normally see in Mission: Impossible films; this is more like the Tom Cruise from Edge of Tomorrow - an amoral jerk who gets his ass kicked a lot. I mean, a lot. Tom gets his ass handed to him by the Mummy and all her undead underlings throughout the movie. Cruise and a fetching archaeologist played by Annabelle Wallis survive a plane crash when they try to transport Ahmanet's unearthed sarcophagus, unwittingly unleashing the Mummy upon jolly old England. There's also the matter of the Mummy fixating on Cruise; she decided he's her chosen one whose mortal form will be inhabited by Set - all she needs is a dagger with a special ruby buried with a 12th century Crusader knight found in the bowels of London.

Doing his damnedest to make sense of all of this is Russell Crowe, who breathlessly narrates most of the movie's plot points and backstory. Crowe is the Head Explainer of a shadowy organization called Prodigium, which is headquartered beneath the British Museum of Natural History and tasks itself with "recognizing, examining, containing and destroying evil." Specifically evil in the form of gods and monsters, the more ancient the worse better. Crowe himself is one of those very monsters, as he portrays Dr. Henry Jekyll and his sadistic and cockney alter ego Mr. Edward Hyde. As the leader of Prodigium, Crowe's other duty is to set up the future of what's now branded as Dark Universe - Universal Pictures' shared universe of movie monsters. Prodigium's trophies include easter eggs of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, a vampire skull, and probably the Invisible Man (we don't see him in Prodigium, but isn't that the point?).

The Mummy is pure B-movie schlock. Like a real mummy, it's missing some blood and guts, and at 107 minutes, it zips along like it's got somewhere else to be. Ahmanet, emaciated after 5,000 years of mummification, spends much of the movie trying to get her hotness back (#MAHA - Make Ahmanet Hot Again) and become the queen she was supposed to be (#MAGA - Make Ahmanet Great Again.) Despite this, and a couple of perfunctory but neat looking moments like unleashing a patented Mummy sandstorm with a Mummy face right in the heart of London, Boutella's talents are oddly underutilized as The Mummy. Cruise and Wallis have some fun on the run throughout the movie, and Cruise amusingly gets tossed around by Ahmanet in every fight, until he decides to give in to his destiny and become a monster to save Wallis' life. Thus, Tom Cruise becomes not just a monster but, by virtue of becoming the host of Set, Tom Cruise becomes a god. One cool thing about being The Mummy and Set is that when their evil magic kicks in, Cruise and Boutella each have four eyeballs. Makes rolling their eyes at the silliness of The Mummy doubly effective.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK

** SPOILERS **

"Congrats, Jack. I don't give a shit." says the heavy to Jack Reacher before their climactic rooftop fistfight, and we're inclined to agree. In Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, Tom Cruise returns as the titular character, a mysterious former Army Major turned drifter who rights wrongs with clinched fists and jaw. This time, Reacher, who made his way to Washington, D.C. for what he hoped to be a booty call with his replacement in command of his unit, Major Cobie Smulders, finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy within the Army to frame Smulders for the deaths of two of her soldiers in Afghanistan. Somehow, this involves a shadowy network of arms dealers, and even more somehow, it places a teenage girl who may or may not be Reacher's daughter played by Danika Yarosh in harm's way. Suddenly, tough guy loner Jack Reacher ends up on the run with an ersatz family and may have been a deadbeat dad all along. He looks as happy about it as we are.

The previous Jack Reacher film written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie was a solid thriller that established Reacher as the smartest bad ass in any room. In Never Go Back, Edward Zwick, who took over the helm and co-wrote the screenplay, does away with most of Reacher's vaunted brain power. Reacher retains the uncanny ability to spot evil mercenaries tailing him, but that's about all he can do anymore. Reacher spends the whole movie puzzling out the conspiracy against Smulders, and that's nothing compared to the mystery of whether Yarosh really is his daughter, which he never does suss out until Yarosh literally spells it out for him. The previous film also established that Reacher was irresistible to women, but Never Go Back does a total 180 on that. Boy, is Reacher now a dick - rude, sexist, and unappealing - which half the women in the movie including Smulders are at pains to point out. Reacher's a total Jackoff in Never Go Back.

Cruise, who produced Never Go Back, seems inexplicably hellbent on subverting audience expectations of what a Tom Cruise movie is. Cruise spends 99% of Never Go Back willfully suppressing his patented Tom Cruise charm, his face frozen in a scowl throughout the entire movie as if he's wearing an Angry Tom Cruise version of those masks everyone dons in his Mission: Impossible films. Who ever thought Tom Cruise would hold Tom Cruise's smile hostage, and why? In place of charms or brains or a plot audiences can follow and invest in, Never Go Back substitutes running. See Reacher run. Run, Reacher, run. Never Go Back makes Cruise and whomever is with him, usually Smulders, run enough to equal the running in any three prior Tom Cruise movies. Cruise and Smulders seemingly spent their rehearsal time practicing endless wind sprints, rather than creating a believable romantic chemistry. Never Go Back also sets the record for the number of cell phones slipped into characters' pockets in a movie. As you leave the theater, you'll be sure to check your own pockets to see if someone slipped you a burner phone, as you silently promise to never go back if Jack Reacher returns for a threepeat.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION

** SPOILERS **

The Living Manifestation of Destiny

Nine years ago, I disavowed Mission: Impossible. Today, I believe in Ethan Hunt more than ever. Tom Cruise returns for his fifth Mission in 19 years as the ageless, indomitable secret agent Ethan Hunt in writer-director Christopher McQuarrie's Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, a slam-bang, globe-trotting tour de force about friendship, loyalty, and the elevation of Ethan Hunt to mythical status. Like Roger Moore's James Bond in the 1970s, Ethan Hunt is the most famous secret agent in the world, a rock star among spies. "There are stories," a fetching young female agent says to the legend himself upon meeting him. Young lady, you wouldn't believe the half of it, Hunt's wry smile seems to say. By now, Ethan Hunt simply can't be stopped, and McQuarrie's Mission smartly weaves Hunt's forehead-slapping invincibility into the narrative. This is never more apparent when one of Hunt's greatest detractors, Alec Baldwin, the new head of the CIA who seeks to dismantle the Impossible Missions Force, is forced to sing Hunt's praises to the British Prime Minister whom Hunt is about to abduct: "He's a gambler... He can become anyone. He's immune to all counter measures. He is the living manifestation of Destiny." Even 007 can't claim such laurels.

Hunt, of course, doesn't quite see himself as others see him. Or if he does, he's simply too modest to say. There are times when it seems like he forces himself to be the superhero everyone believes him to be, in spite of himself. Once again, Ethan is reunited with his IMF besties, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Jeremy Renner, all of whom he gave Ethan's Special IMF Besties iPhones to at the conclusion of the previous Mission, Ghost Protocol. (Paula Patton, who received the fourth Bestie iPhone, is never mentioned.) All three of Ethan's besties spend much of Rogue Nation debating Ethan's motives and even his sanity at times - Ethan has never quite been so obsessed and occasionally unhinged as he is in Rogue Nation - but one thing they never question is Ethan's ability. Ethan can do anything; Pegg is so certain of it he doesn't for a moment believe Ethan can't hold his breath for over three minutes to perform an "impossible" mission inside a water tank. "Difficult, yeah, but not impossible." Ethan's closest allies see him as an action figure that can weather any abuse, to Ethan's chagrin. But he still does it all unquestioningly. After nearly drowning and being resuscitated, Ethan is never quite as endearing as he is all punch drunk but still not hesitating for a second to engage in a car chase and motorcycle chase. Unlike Bond or Jason Bourne, who primarily work solo, Ethan is reliant on his team, and looks out for them. When he recruits Pegg into his schemes and tries to give him an out after things go FUBAR, Pegg rejects the very idea of abandoning Ethan on the sole basis of his unwavering friendship. Ethan is genuinely touched. 

In Rogue Nation, Ethan and the IMF are once more disavowed and on the hunt (pun unintended) for the Syndicate, which was introduced in the closing seconds of Ghost Protocol. The Syndicate, led by thin-lipped British mastermind Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), are a covert black ops terrorist organization, "a rogue nation, an anti-IMF." (We get it. Easy on the sell job, fellas.)  The CIA believes the Syndicate are a figment of Ethan's imagination, but the IMF know better, because the IMF always knows better. Rogue Nation weaves in recent tragedies like missing Malaysian flights and nuclear meltdowns and lays the blame squarely at the feet of the Syndicate. They're always one step ahead of Ethan Hunt, which drives Ethan as crazy as we've ever seen him. A direct sequel to Ghost Protocol referencing the nuclear missile attack on San Francisco the IMF foiled, Rogue Nation also pleasantly calls back to previous Missions, with a blatant flaunting of a rabbit's foot and Baldwin referring to Ethan's theft of the NOC list in the original Mission as occurring in his first year in the CIA. Rogue Nation also introduces the most formidable and intriguing female character in franchise history, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a show-stealing, ass-kicking disavowed British Secret Service agent who alternates from Syndicate operative to Ethan's ally. There's never really a question who's side she's ultimately on, and it takes a tremendous contortion of logic why the Syndicate never kills her considering how consistently she betrays them in favor of Ethan, but Ferguson is magnetic, more than a match for Ethan Hunt.

McQuarrie delivers the awesome international spectacle Mission: Impossible demands, from a bravura opening airplane heist in Belarus, with Cruise seemingly hanging onto the outside of a cargo plane taking off by his fingertips, a virtuoso, acrobatic action set piece involving three assassins in an opera in Vienna, to a relentless, next-level motorcycle chase in Casablanca outdoing the tremendous car chase in McQuarrie and Cruise's previous collaboration, Jack Reacher. Surprisingly, instead of upping the ante by going balls-out in the London-based third act, McQuarrie takes the opposite tack, going smaller and making the resolution of Rogue Nation about the characters and the personal vendetta between Ethan Hunt and Solomon Lane, literally concluding in a glass box. Ethan doesn't even climb and jump off of any ridiculously tall buildings in this movie! On the line isn't so much the fate of the world as the fates of Pegg, Ethan's best friend, and Ferguson, a woman caught in an impossible situation. More than anything, loyalty and friendship drives Ethan Hunt in Rogue Nation. When it comes to his friends, Ethan Hunt admirably proves nothing is impossible.

Edge of Tomorrow

EDGE OF TOMORROW

** SPOILERS **

Edge of Tomorrow, though burdened with an awkward title*, is the best summer movie surprise of 2014. (Maybe they should have called it The Fault in Our Tom?) The fault in our hero, Tom Cruise, on the outset of Edge of Tomorrow is that he's a craven coward. Cannily inverting what we expect from him as a tight-jawed action hero, Cruise opens Edge of Tomorrow with a bona fide yellow streak down his back. Unfortunately for Cruise, a PR officer for the united Earth military currently losing a war against mechanical alien invaders called Mimics, his cowardice irritates general Brendan Gleeson so much that Gleeson kicks him into the front lines to fight the aliens and very likely die. Die Cruise does, hilariously. And, to his chagrin, over and over and over again.

For you see, and it takes Cruise a while for this to dawn on him, he's caught in a Groundhog Day scenario, forced to relive the same day repeatedly, by virtue of somehow absorbing the power of an alien he managed to kill. This alien power is Edge of Tomorrow's version of unlimited lives in a video game (up up, down down, left right left right, B A). Cruise, who is gifted with an excellent memory and a capacity to learn (very slowly at first - he's a lousy gamer on the outset), gradually realizes what's happening to him with the help of Emily Blunt, the only other human who previously held the same power. Cruise is in very top form; quite frankly, no one is more adept at coolly delivering complex exposition. Edge of Tomorrow plays Cruise's unlimited lives and multiple gory deaths for great laughs, until he finally improves his game enough to be a capable warrior. Edge of Tomorrow seamlessly shifts from unlikely comedy to a taut, sci-fi actioner as Cruise, Blunt and their team of roughnecks in cybernetic battle suits, get good enough to take on the aliens to save the world. Though he may have started as a sucky noob, Tom Cruise is welcome on my Halo team any time.

*The Japanese title, All You Need Is Kill, kicks ass.

Oblivion

OBLIVION

** SPOILERS **

Oblivion has a lot of explaining to do and handles it this way: explain a lot up front, then nothing but questions and confusion for the long middle, then a fast track of rapid exposition at the end. Tom Cruise fills us in on the wild sci-fi concept on the outset: It's the year 2077 and Earth is a devastated but visually spectacular wasteland. It was invaded by alien scavengers called "Scavs" that arrived in a giant pyramid space station called the Tet. The Tet destroyed the moon, wiping out much of humanity. The Scavs invaded, the remaining humans used nuclear weapons, and that was that. Humanity "won". Now, what's left of the human race has relocated to Saturn's moon Titan and is doing just fine, we imagine.

Cruise and his cool, lovely British wife Andrea Riseborough are "an effective team", i.e. glorified "maintenance" (kind of like Wall-E). They were left behind to oversee the giant machines converting the Earth's oceans into energy and repair the battle drones that keep the remaining Scavs on Earth at bay. Two people to watch over a whole planet? That seems strange, but the couple never question this. Cruise and Riseborough live like The Jetsons on a futuristic platform in the sky complete with a sexy glass bottom swimming pool. (We know the Scavs monitor them with binoculars from the ground so no doubt they peep on Cruise and Riseborough having dazzlingly-lit skinny dipping sex up in the sky.) Cruise is the hands-on guy who flies around in his bubble ship and fixes the drones when they're damaged while Riseborough stays behind as mission control, interfacing with their Southern lady overseer on the Tet. They have two weeks to go until retirement (of course), then they can board the Tet and join the rest of the human race on Titan. Wouldn't you know it? Things go horribly wrong.

Despite his space craft having seemingly unlimited range and having a whole planet to patrol as far as he knows, Cruise mainly seems to hang around the ruined remains of New York City. He wanders  the improbably still-standing structures of football stadiums and the Empire State Building, explaining what happened in football games that were played over 60 years ago to his wife who couldn't give a shit. Suddenly, a space craft launched by NASA decades ago crash lands with the crew still in cryogenic sleep, including a beautiful woman Cruise dreams about every night. So Cruise does what any man would do: he brings the much hotter woman whom he secretly dreams of home to meet his wife, who, mind you, is also hot but not as hot. Predictably, Riseborough is not thrilled and wants her gone. Who is this Russian woman, played by Olga Kurylenko? Don't bother asking Kurylenko herself, she has no answers; she barely has anything to say the whole movie. In the words of Leslie Knope, "the female part's a little underwritten."

It pleases Riseborough even less when Cruise and Kurylenko take off together in his bubble ship and have sexy, dangerous adventures. Cruise takes Kurylenko to his secret lake shore cabin in the improbably verdant valley that survived the apocalypse, complete with all the trinkets and classic rock vinyl albums he's been collecting for years. Hey, a guy's gotta have a place of his own. Riseborough is as un-pleased as a wife can possibly be when Cruise has sex with Kurylenko, who tells him up front she's his wife. This is correct: Tom Cruise had a Russian mail order bride arrive special delivery from outer space. Tom Cruise can be the last man on post-apocalyptic Earth and can have two impossibly attractive wives. Cruise and Kurylenko are also captured by the Scavs, whom we are shocked to learn (if we never saw the trailer) are actually humans lead by Morgan Freeman playing Laurence Fishburne playing Morpheus from The Matrix. Freeman is flanked by his trigger happy lieutenant Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who is most famous for playing Jamie Lannister, the Kingslayer, in Game of Thrones. From their scenes together we learn Jamie Lannister is so much taller than Tom Cruise, Cruise for all intents and purposes might as well be Tyrion Lannister.

The third act of Oblivion ramps up the pace with copious amounts of action to make up for its stately middle section of Cruise flying around pondering how he's going to make having two hot wives work. (Maybe if one stays in the Jetsons platform and one stays in the lake cabin, they never have to meet again?) The reveals of all the mysteries the plot set up come quickly and semi-coherently, as we learn there's much more to Tom Cruise, and much, much more of Tom Cruise (Tom Cruise clones!), than we ever thought possible. (Leaving us pondering questions like, if the Tet had already won and wiped out humanity, why do they still have so many millions of Tom Cruises and in their Tom Cruise factory? Who needs that many Tom Cruises?) Finally, Cruise and Freeman pull a Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith in Independence Day - they manage to get on board the Tet and blow it to kingdom come. All's well that ends well, especially for Tom Cruise, who can die heroically in a nuclear explosion and still pop up at the end since there are plenty of Tom Cruises where he came from. Luckily for Tom Cruise, Kurylenko doesn't care at all which Tom Cruise she ends up with. A Tom Cruise is a Tom Cruise and any Tom Cruise will do.

Jack Reacher

JACK REACHER

** SPOILERS **

Jack Reacher, an entertaining Tom Cruise vehicle produced by Tom Cruise starring Tom Cruise as Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, concerns an event that hits close to home for its similarity to recent tragedies: a sniper murders five people in Pittsburgh (including taking aim at a young child, queasily but unintentionally invoking Newtown, CT). The police capture a former Army sniper as responsible, but he asks for a mysterious man named "Jack Reacher" to clear his name. Reacher, a drifter who lives off the grid and wears one outfit he purchased from Goodwill every day, is a former Military Police who only concerns himself with "doing what's right". 

As Reacher, Cruise eschews his Mission: Impossible hero Ethan Hunt's manic tendency to leap off the top of the tallest buildings he can find. Soft spoken, methodical and alert, Cruise relishes being the smartest guy in every room. There's also an amusing runner early on where every woman who encounters Cruise thinks he's the hottest shit on Earth. Unwilling to directly admit the same is Rosamund Pike, the attorney defending the accused sniper. Together, Cruise and Pike investigate a hidden conspiracy behind the seemingly random sniper murders which may or may not involve her district attorney father Richard Jenkins, police officer David Oyelowo, but definitely involves the villainous Werner Herzog. There's also the fetching Alexia Fast involved; her character is named "Sandy", rather unfortunately referencing a second recent tragedy in the Northeast. 

Jack Reacher is notable for the most overt callbacks I've ever seen another movie make towards Oliver Stone's JFK. Verbiage is lifted straight from Stone's famous conspiracy jargon: "grassy knoll", "one pristine bullet", "patsy", and there's even the words "turkey shoot" posted on a sign prominently framed in the center of one scene. Besides invoking JFK, Jack Reacher also homages Lethal Weapon with Cruise's mano e mano slugfest in the rain with Herzog's top henchman Jai Courtney (who looks a little like writer-director Christopher McQuarrie's friend and collaborator Bryan Singer). McQuarrie helms Jack Reacher with a confident stride and a fondness for characters exchanging smart, snappy patter, while sprinkling in startling bouts of pleasing action and a rather extraordinary car chase. If you're sold out of seeing Django Unchained and have to choose a default movie to see instead, make it Jack Reacher. 

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL

** SPOILERS **

It seemed impossible to enjoy another Mission: Impossible movie after the miserable experience of Mission: Impossible III. Leave it to Tom Cruise and director Brad Bird to accomplish the impossible against all odds. After directing some of the finest animation of the past two decades with The Simpsons, The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is Bird's doozy of a live-action coming out party. Bird injects new vitality into Mission: Impossible, delivering a rollicking, eye-popping joyride and the best sheer movie experience of the Mission: Impossible franchise. They didn't make 'em like this before!

After breaking out of a Russian prison, Cruise's unstoppable agent Ethan Hunt is once again hunted by friendly forces, as the Impossible Missions Force is dismantled, with the President instituting "Ghost Protocol" (so says Tom Wilkinson, the latest in the parade of old men in suits Ethan Hunt takes marching orders from). Hunt, Simon Pegg's comic relief hacker Benji, and new additions Paula Patton and mystery man Jeremy Renner are all that's left of the IMF. Rocketing from Moscow to Dubai to Mumbai in the best 007 tradition, Ghost Protocol is thankfully devoid of the previous Missions' inane spy double talk (no mention of a rabbit's foot!), bewildering character betrayals, over-heated plots, and those stupid masks that fool everyone (to Pegg's chagrin). Ghost Protocol is leaner and meaner but so much bigger and badder.

Ethan and the Ghost Protocoled IMF must hunt down a terrorist (Michael Nyqvist, the star of the Swedish The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo films) who wants to launch a nuclear missile to destroy San Francisco. That's awesome: an actual, tangible threat for Ethan Hunt to stop instead of a computer disc or a deadly virus. In addition to some pleasing character work from Renner, Patton, and Pegg, and a terrific turn as a deadly assassin by Lea Seydoux, Ghost Protocol pays nice homage to the best aspects of its franchise predecessors: Ving Rhames cameos, not too upset that he's not risking his life this time around, while the fate of Ethan's wife Michelle Monaghan is deftly dealt with.

Bird utilizes IMAX to the nth degree, showcasing astounding action set pieces, such as the centerpiece nail-biter of Cruise climbing the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai with just magnetic gloves. The noticeably older, weathered Hunt, who never met a building he didn't want to jump off of in the three prior films, was actually terrified at the prospect of this latest insane stunt. Ethan Hunt must be growing as a person. Finally. Ghost Protocol indeed proves nothing is impossible.

Knight and Day

KNIGHT AND DAY

** SPOILERS **

Director James Mangold's action-comedy mashup Knight and Day is a bit of a throwback; it's a modern day version of a Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn-style madcap spy adventure. Hapless everywoman Cameron Diaz is thrust into the bizarre world of secret agent Tom Cruise, who's protecting a valuable MacGuffan - a high tech battery that could power a small city - from falling into the wrong hands. But, as in those old Cary Grant thrillers, Cruise could also be the villain. Diaz gets humorously dragged around the world against her will, sometimes drugged and semi-conscious, as she tries to determine what side Cruise is really on. Cruise and Diaz starred romantically together in 2001's Vanilla Sky. Knight and Day very much insists Cruise and Diaz are falling for each other, yet there's remarkably little chemistry to be found between their combined movie star wattage. The tone shifts from romantic comedy to standard Hollywood car chases and shoot-em-ups. Cruise lets loose his comedic chops early on but seems much more comfortable in his more familiar norm of rappelling, car chases, and shooting people. It becomes impossible to invest in the action when the movie makes it clear Cruise and Diaz are never in any real danger. The legions of villainous gunmen coming after Cruise and Diaz are all incapable of shooting them, even from a few feet away when hefting machine guns. The first act mainly takes place in Boston so it's enjoyable for locals to see Cruise and Diaz run around the city (even if their movements geographically make no sense), before the action shifts around the world to New York, the Azores, Austria, Spain, and South America. Diaz is in full-on romantic comedy mode; Knight and Day never requires her to tap into her action heroine credentials from starring in two Charlies Angels movies. Cruise, on the other hand, is in full-on Tom Cruise Mode. He hasn't been this Tom Cruisey in a movie in probably a decade. The "I'm the guy!" scene in the diner alone is vintage Cruise at his Cruisiest. Knight and Day provides a Tom Cruise impressionist ample all-new material to add to his act.

P.S. A silver 1999 Mercedes Benz SLK Kompressor two-seater convertable is featured prominently in the movie. The audience is lead to believe that a person the size of Paul Dano can be trapped in the trunk. That is impossible. I drive that exact same car all the time. The trunk of the Kompressor is so small, and more than half of it is taken up by the cradle built to hold the roof when the top is down, that there is no way a person can fit in that trunk. I mean, come on! I hope someone was fired for that.

Valkyrie (***)

VALKYRIE

“The last time I saw Hitler, we had dinner and laughed about it.” – Abe Simpson

The end titles of Valkyrie inform us that numerous attempts were made by conspirators in the Nazi High Command to assassinate the Fuhrer. The plot lead by Tom Cruise apparently came closest to achieving that goal. Since history records… hold on, let me look this up… the Allies won World War II (I'll be damned!), Valkyrie by its very conception immediately places itself in a situation where we march towards an inevitable conclusion where the protagonists can't possibly succeed. This different from something like Titanic; we all know the boat sinks but we didn't know if Kate and Leo would get off the boat together. In Valkyrie, there was no doubt that A) Cruise and his friends would fail and B) since this is Nazi Germany, their Nazi hearts would not go on.

Tom Cruise delivers a performance quite unlike anything he's done in the past. Donning an eye patch to cover his missing left eye, lacking a right hand and two of the fingers on his left, Cruise is a stiff-upper-lipped powder keg that never quite goes off until the end, when his one good eye is staring at the business end of Nazi rifles. Cruise never once flashes his trademark grin. He delivers his dialogue in rasps and whispers. His one moment of levity was how he recruited Eddie Izzard to the Kill Hitler Cause by dropping his fake eye in Izzard's drink.

Cruise becomes the leader of a secret cabal of the some of the finest actors in movies today, including Terence Stamp, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, and Tom Wilkerson; all tightly-wound in their Nazi best. They're the Justice League of Germany, banded together to bring down the greatest super villain of the 20th century. Valkyrie is effective in showing that these were flawed, frightened men trying to do what they thought was right. Some of them saw the removal of the Fuhrer as an opportunity to ascend to power, others were simply trying to do what was best for the Fatherland. There's an amusing line during one of their many secret back-room arguments about how badly their plot was going; that the Allies would hardly be inclined to negotiate with them if they're already in Berlin before they got their act together. Whatever their intentions were, these men were simply not up to the task they set out for themselves, nor did it seem like they could have stabilized Germany if they had succeeded in killing their Fuhrer.

The plot itself was a crackerjack, fiendishly clever in its intricacies. Step one, the actual Kill Hitler part, involved low-tech explosives in leather satchels and basically hanging out with Hitler in his bunker. Step two was infinitely more complicated. This required Cruise and company to take control of High Command, bluffing everyone who runs panicked into their office, while tricking the SS into performing the coup and controlling the army for them.

Valkyrie's last half hour was its best, as Cruise personally dropped da bomb on Hitler and flew back to Germany to assume control of the country. Except Cruise blew it. He didn't get the job done, all the while behaving in the most suspicious manner possible. His folly becomes more exponentially more pitiful (“I saw the blast!”) when it becomes clear Hitler was barely harmed by the explosion. Then the SS figures out they were being played and the jig was up. Cruise and the Justice League watch powerlessly as all their lofty, well-meaningness comes crashing down on their heads. If Peter Sellers were alive, no doubt he would taken the same material in Valkyrie and come up with a hilarious satire. As such, Valkyrie was a comedy of errors without any comedy

Hitler himself (David Bamber) was a disappointment. If there's one bit of praise one can give Adolph Hitler, it's that he was charismatic. This is a man who gave rousing speeches that inflamed the hearts and minds of Germany to follow him in a racist, genocidal quest for world domination. You'd never know it from the way Hitler was portrayed in Valkyrie, as a withering old mope brushing the bangs from his forehead. Sure, things were going badly for him by 1944 and Hitler likely would have lacked the verve of a decade prior, but the opportunity was missed entirely to showcase why Hitler was the Fuhrer. At the end of Valkyrie, Hitler delivers one of his famed radio addresses to reassure Germany that he was alive and the plot to kill him failed. Instead of being inflamed in rage and righteousness, he sounded like grossvater offering every Nazi a piece of Werther's Caramels.

Mission: Impossible III (**)

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III

Impossible Man

The Tom Cruise Stunt Show Spectacular is a tough gig for the action hero always on the go, but it does come with built-in breaks:  See Tom rappel from a building in Berlin, blow up a helicopter, take a five minute break to go to a funeral, teach a seminar on the finer points of rubber mask making, dress up as a priest and break into the Vatican, get married in a hospital, bang his new bride in a supply closet, fight off helicopters and fighter jets and get blown into a car on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, pause for a moment of reflection and male bondage, escape from IMF headquarters after being double crossed, put on a funny hat and wig, get double crossed and captured again, run the Shanghai Marathon, fight off a migrane, kill the villain, and creep out half the guests at his engagement party.  Maybe not in that order; Tom tends to make things up on the fly.

Third time around for watching the Tom Cruise Stunt Show Spectacular, otherwise known as "Mission: Impossible III" and I'm officially tired of it.  I'm tired of rappelling, of rubber masks “fooling” everyone, of switcheroos and double crosses, of Marcellus Wallace as the funny black sidekick.  I'm tired of “impossible” missions.  Most of all, I'm tired of Ethan Hunt, whoever he is. 

Seriously, who is this guy?  Three movies over ten years and all we know about Ethan Hunt is he likes to jump off of buildings while wearing tight black T-shirts to show off his biceps and pecs. I thought this time around the point was to find out what makes him tick.  We find out he has a pretty young wife, Michelle Monaghan, at home in Virginia who he lies to all the time.  They don't talk about anything.  He has no conversation and neither does she.  His response to every person, problem, or situation is either a steel-jawed glare of death or a big goofy grin of death.  

Any time he actually has to talk to or deal with another human being, you can see all Ethan Hunt is thinking about is how he can end the conversation as quickly as possible so he can jump off the nearest building and shoot someone. And then he ends the conversation as quickly as possible, jumps off the nearest building and shoots someone. He's an adrenaline-junkie/cipher.  He's a lousy secret agent.  He's not a person, he's nobody.  Worst of all, he makes other people who could be interesting into nobodies. 

On this impossible mission, Ethan Hunt has a team of people helping him out, including Jonathan Rhys-Myers, Maggie Q, Simon Pegg  and Keri Russell.  They find the long shadow Ethan casts and fight amongst each other to stand in it.  Ving Rhames has had his spot in Hunt's shadow staked out for three movies, so there's not that much room left for the new kids.  Keri Russell is the only one killed off, but she makes sure to thank Ethan before she goes. I miss her right away.  

These characters might be interesting; they're trying to be.  They have stuff they want to say.  Ethan doesn't want to hear it.  For instance, in the Shanghai leg of the Stunt Show, Maggie Q and Rhys-Myers are sitting around in their van waiting for Ethan to jump out of a building.  (Ethan Hunt is the only guy in the world who climbs to the roof of a building so that he can jump off it into another building.  Then he exits the second building by jumping out of it.  Even Spider-Man thinks it's excessive.)  Maggie Q starts praying in her native language, something Asian, probably.  Rhys-Myers finds it interesting and so do I.  He asks what she's praying.  She agrees to teach him.  Before anything else can happen -- 

CRASH!!

Ethan Hunt:  What're you guys, doing?  Praying?!  No time, man!  No time!  Look, I'm jumping out of a building! 

Listen, IMF noobs, Ethan Hunt isn't a real character, so don't you try to be either.  You're better off following Ving Rhames' route and wait for the eleven seconds in between Ethan's killing people or rappelling to crack some jokes.  

The villains aren't much better off.  Phillip Seymour Hoffman isn't a real character, either.  Even though he's barely in the movie, Hoffman looks tired all the time, like he just spent fourteen hour days shooting Capote and now he's gotta go do this shit where half his dialogue is asking about a rabbit's foot.  This villainous arms dealer is so bad ass, he gets captured like a punk in the middle of one of those black-tie cocktail galas the Vatican is world-famous for throwing.  

Right after he gets captured, Hoffman goes into his “I'm gonna kill you and the person you love most, your mirror” speech.  Then he gives another later on, same speech, but this time, he means it.  Then he is dead.  Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls survived being hit by a bus but not evil Capote. Doesn't matter anyway, he wasn't the real villain.  He's not a Golden God.  Ethan Hunt might have figured it out sooner if he weren't so busy shopping for nylon-fiber lines that can hold his weight while he plummets.

All of the rappelling and shooting and explosions were executed well; there was just so much of it and it was numbing and un-memorable.  The women in the movie were largely wasted.  Ethan's wife asked a lot of questions at the end when he freed her.  They were good, logical questions.  “Why are we in Shanghai ?” “Why did Capote try to kill you?”  The hundred million dollar question: “Who the hell are you?” she chose to omit.  Maybe she married the right guy after all.