/tv/ - Movies and Television

>>358788
He was listed on the flight plan

Only the first movie was any good
The rest have like one cool setpiece that define the movie, and that's it.

The Mission Impossible Booster Shot

Tom Cruise runs and runs, but is this cinema?

By Armond White

Vain movie stars used to be mocked for believing their own hype. Now, estimable, redoubtable, sincere Tom Cruise not only believes his own press; he manufactures it. In the era of Fake News, his new film Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is handed down like a Covid edict. We must take the jab, obey, and be happy about it. As with Covid, national media load The Final Reckoning upon us with Red Alert, Breaking News finality. This eighth installment of the M:I franchise is supposedly the last, but it's unseemly as a Covid booster shot.

Don't call it a rehash, but The Final Reckoning (which follows 2023's Dead Reckoning, Part One) transmits a serious case of déjà vu. No wonder star and producer Cruise and his director Christopher McQuarrie include flashbacks to all the previous M:I films. This time, as covert agent Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Missions Force, Cruise endeavors to wrest control of the Entity, an artificial intelligence system sought by bad guy Gabriel (Esai Morales), then retrieve its source code from ex-CIA agent William Donloe (Rolf Saxon). Ethan/Tom goes from aerial stunts to underwater stunts with lots of IMF team blather in between.

You have to fool yourself to sit still and enjoy any of it as fresh or inventive. The purpose of hype is to make us accept the predictable as surprising or fascinating, while admiring Cruise's personal derring-do.

Ever since Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise's films have imposed a sense of duty on audiences - a different purpose than other meaningless, direct-to-streaming content with zero purpose.

Conservatives mistook the patriotic tone of Maverick's military subject to mean that Cruise was working as an America First filmmaker, but The Final Reckoning suggests a more craven motive - it's unmistakable when Ethan/Tom boards an aircraft carrier christened George H. W. Bush, hinting at the film's RINO dedication. It may be necessary to rethink the recent hero-worshipping of Cruise, whose action-star exploits (running, running, running as in Minority Report's "Everybody Runs" ad) seem as overwrought as a politician's election campaign. What cabinet position, and in whose administration, is he after?

Although Cruise has regained tabloid popularity - he's no longer the consensus media's punching bag - the fact is, athletic, gung-ho, indefatigable Ethan is insufficient. The tumbling punching-bag role doesn't show Cruise at his actorly best - e.g., his grieving father/cop in Minority Report and his self-sacrificing citizen and family man in War of the Worlds. The Final Reckoning achieves no convincing emotional exchange; character actors Hayley Atwell, Angela Bassett, Esai Morales, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, and Ving Rhames interact with Ethan/Tom as two-dimensional stock figures.

The emphasis on stunts seems to compensate for some personal insecurity that is irrelevant to a movie's appeal. Cruise's puffy, aged Boy Scout face doesn't match the soulful grace of Chaplin or Keaton, or the anomic determination that Keanu Reeves brings to the John Wick films. And his M:I feats, despite mimicking the crowd-pleasing overture sequences of the James Bond-Indiana Jones series, don't provide the same exhilaration. Despite apparent strenuousness and risk, they seem unattached to the banal narrative that follows.

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Cruise's running mate Christopher McQuarrie has polished his craft since his directorial debut in 2000 in the abhorrent, Tarantino-esque The Way of the Gun. But he still effects violence without feeling. The Final Reckoning's two big set pieces (the airplane switch-off and the aquatic expedition) demonstrate elaborate, dangerous planning. But is this cinema? At Cruise's behest, McQuarrie's stunts imitate the most primitive filmmaking - not the awe-inspiring magic of Georges Méliès but the Lumière brothers' rudimentary documentation of action. We're brought back to the hard sell of 1950s Cinerama with basic visceral sensation. And it's for the same reason: Cruise and McQuarrie compete with streaming the way Cinerama competed with television (and eventually lost).

McQuarrie's feats lack the comic timing, composition, and emotionalism that cartoonist-director Brad Bird brought to the thrilling Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (Ethan/Tom spider-walking the Burj Khalifa skyscraper and outrunning a dust storm, Paula Patton's womanly catfight with Léa Seydoux). McQuarrie's "real" action is not superior to digital f/x. Watching actual bodies and objects moving through space (the air or water) is literal-minded rather than fantastic in the ways that made silent movie masters Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin funny and sublime.

If not for the desperation that greets Cruise's crusade to save the theatrical movie experience, moviegoers might have paid more attention to film artists who help make this millennium a golden age of kinetic creativity. Recently Michael Bay's 6 Underground and Ambulance, Chad Stahelski's John Wick: Chapter 4, Stephen Chow's The Mermaid, and Zack Snyder's Justice League have reinvigorated the action movie. Going beyond mere spectacle -as in John Wick Chapter 4's magnificent fight up and down the staircase at the Rue Foyatier in Montmartre - they've made the form newly sublime - and funny.

The last Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park movies - all made without the Spielberg touch - have no flair. The Marvel movies, whether by the Russo brothers or not, never did. The Bond films became nihilistic, and the post-Snyder DC films are notable only for being poor, unoriginal corporate gestures - counterfeit versions of Snyder's resonant mythologizing. The politicized fantasy and horror films by Ryan Coogler and Jordan Peele are merely pathetic. Only Bay, Stahelski, Chow, and Snyder create ingenious, breakneck visions of force. Cruise and McQuarrie have proven that their oversimplified mission to save us from Hollywood ineptitude is impossible.