Review: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Runtime: 111 minutes

It's extremely rare that film franchises get better with age, yet Tom Cruise's 19 year-old Mission: Impossible series continues to see significant improvements. Four years after Brad Bird's Ghost Protocol, Ethan Hunt is back and shows no signs of given into fatigue. Screenwriter-turned-director Christopher McQuarrie has taken control of the fifth Impossible film, and despite some missed opportunities, he's created a stellar spy adventure that keeps Cruise and co. gleefully on track. 

Despite the presence of a new director and new screenwriters, the latest installment - subtitled Rogue Nation - has quite a bit in common with its predecessor. Like Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation begins with the IMF (Impossible Mission Force) becoming compromised, albeit under different circumstances. Despite the nuclear disaster averted at the end of Ghost Protocol, the IMF has drawn the ire of Senator Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), who convinces the Senate to disband the cover ops organization. While agents like William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) begrudgingly go with the flow, Hunt goes MIA. He's convinced that there's an organization known as The Syndicate, the sole purpose of which is to instigate acts of terrorism across the globe. 

While Hunt and his co-workers have faced various obstacles before, Rogue Nation gets great mileage by introducing the less tangible roadblock of uncertainty. Is The Syndicate real? Is Ethan Hunt going out of his mind after years working for the US government? Some of these questions have easy answers that aren't worth pondering, but their inclusion does highlight an effort on McQuarrie's part to bring something new to this outlandish adventure series. 

Yet the biggest and best question mark comes not in the form of an existential dilemma, but a person. Specifically, Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust, whose allegiance seems to change on a whim. The series has made good use of female characters in the past, but none have felt as complete as Ilsa. Frankly, by the end of Rogue Nation, I was ready for an entire movie dedicated solely to her exploits. Obviously no one's out to win awards here, but the actress does make quite an impression as woman who's equal parts Bond girl and Ingrid Bergman. 

In fact, despite Ethan Hunt's lone wolf status through the first chunk of the film, the film fares best when it works to incorporate as much of the supporting cast as possible. Cruise can play this role in his sleep and still be convincing, which leaves quite a bit of room for the rest of the cast to really make their mark. Of the returning cast, Pegg is easily the most enjoyable of the lot, playing the frenzied sidekick to Cruise's laser-focused leading man while still remaining grounded. Renner's role has much less to do this time around, but the actor manages to land a few solid quips, especially in his scenes opposite Baldwin. 

This being a Mission: Impossible film, however, the real question is: but what about the stunts?? Even though Mr. McQuarrie's experience behind the camera is limited, he and his technical collaborators have done an excellent job of providing Rogue Nation's required spectacle. If anything, McQuarrie overloads the film's first half with excellent set pieces, the crown jewel of which involves an assassination attempt set in the rafters of an opera house. The film's marketing has made a big deal of Cruise actually hanging off of the side of a plane, but by the film's end, that oddly weightless bit of stunt work is a distant memory.

The downside of overloading the film's first half is that McQuarrie compensates by padding the second half. The second hour takes far too long to reshuffle the deck, and McQuarrie's exception handle on the pacing goes too slack for what's supposed to be an high stakes adventure. There are also narrative developments (or rather, lack thereof) that mar Rogue Nation's ambitions. Overall, The Syndicate doesn't feel like much of a major threat (other than as some vague, amorphous "evil" entity). McQuarrie's concept of his villains far outstrips his execution, which struggles to move beyond square one. Ghost Protocol built to a definitive struggle to thwart a specific plot, while Rogue Nation's climax involves trying to get the bad guy because, well, he's probably planning on doing something bad...in the next few months (????).

Second act misgivings aside, McQuarrie deserves a lot of credit for taking the reigns of such a big action movie franchise and making a mostly seamless transition to the director's chair. Despite a few dramatic outbursts between characters, this is breezy, lightweight material that has been expertly assembled. From the opera sequence to a climactic chase that has visual nods to the finale of The Third Man, Rogue Nation is a well-oiled machine that knows how to deliver. McQuarrie knows he isn't reinventing the wheel, but at least he's trying his hardest to make the best damn wheel he can. If the result is a film like Rogue Nation, then he's more than accomplished his goal. 

Grade: B

Review: "Edge of Tomorrow"

Director: Doug Liman
Runtime: 113 minutes

Throughout the course of Edge of Tomorrow, Tom Cruise's William Cage relives the same few hours an exhausting number of times. The character's physical and emotional exhaustion, however, likely won't be mirrored by audiences. Though perhaps not quite the standout of the summer it's been hailed as, Edge of Tomorrow takes its Groundhog Day-meets-any-alien-invasion-movie-ever premise and turns it into a dynamic adventure that places just enough emphasis on character while never going overboard with the VFX-driven spectacle. 

If, after seeing the trailer(s), you've been wondering why someone of Tom Cruise's age is being shipped off to war with an alien force along with the young recruits, Edge of Tomorrow (thankfully) has an answer. As we learn in an early scene, William Cage is a media personality for the global forces that have united to wipe out the invading Mimics. He has no combat training, at least at the start of the whole mess. This makes his position - on the front lines of an assault that makes D-Day look like a cake walk - especially nerve wracking. Yet after an encounter with a rare form of Mimic soldier, Cage meets certain death...only to wake up again on the afternoon before the battle. 

Rather than milk the time-loop scenario for attempts at tension, Edge of Tomorrow smoothly moves along to its next stage. Enter blade-wielding badass Rita (Emily Blunt), who, in one of Cage's episodes, reveals that she may know the key to breaking out of the loop.

From this point, the plot takes on a 50 First Dates sort of structure, albeit from a platonic standpoint. Rather than waste time constantly reestablishing the same details, director Doug Liman and editor James Herbert have a great deal of fun jumping forward through time. Once it becomes known that the only way for Cage's time loop to reset is for him to die, the film even works in some comedy that adds a welcome dose of levity to the convoluted sci-fi set-up. 

And, by making the character a reluctant soldier, the film outfits Cruise with a role that suits him rather perfectly. No one is going to mistake this for career-best work, but the 51-year-old actor proves he can still carry this sort of high-concept, big-budget tentpole on his relatively small frame. Matching him move for move is Blunt. Thankfully refraining from a romantic subplot (what with the age difference....not to mention the aliens), Edge of Tomorrow allows its female lead to take charge. She may be subject to Cage's ability to rewind time, but Rita is not without her own agency. On paper, pairing Cruise and Blunt together seems like head-scratching casting, but the two actually have a genuinely interesting student/teacher dynamic that serves the film well.

In fact, one of the most surprising aspects of Edge of Tomorrow is just how much time it devotes to Rita training Cage, rather than indulging in the flashy action. Many of the repeated action scenes, which involve our heroes figuring out movements on a step-by-step basis, are skillfully strung together as montages. For all of the visual chaos happening on the main battlefield, the camera remains focused more on human faces and bodies, rather than on explosions and wild stunts (that said, watching Rita spin through the air with her massive blade is pretty cool). 

With so much of the story focused directly on two people, Edge of Tomorrow makes up for the ways in which its own structure occasionally undermines narrative suspense. Cage's ability to reset time gives the story flow a bit of a video-game feel, where surprises can happen, yet not with actual or immediate consequences. Yet even as Cage and Rita inch forward into the future to wipe out the Mimic menace, the film peels back emotional layers in a surprisingly effective way, without getting bogged down in the drama. By keeping one character's memory aware of every time reset, Edge of Tomorrow ensures that there's a legitimate investment in both the central relationship, as well as the eventual epic quest to end the war. 

The film is also a technical triumph, albeit in a less obvious way than many similar sci-fi adventures. The color palette is limited, yet never dull, and the visual effects are slickly integrated. Especially impressive are the Mimics, which move in freakishly fast leaps and bounds, their metallic bodies constantly shifting in proportion. 

Yet even in the more effects-heavy finale, Edge of Tomorrow never shifts focus away from its characters. Though the sense of permanent consequences may never quite settle, the attention to Cage and Rita's relationship anchors the film in an unexpectedly touching way. Limon and co. obviously understand this quite well. Rather than get lost in the spectacle, Edge of Tomorrow stays grounded in the intimate side of its epic story. It's a testament to how a summer tentpole can succeed when it knows what aspects of the story to emphasize.

Grade: B/B-

Review: "Oblivion"

Director: Joseph Kosinski
Runtime: 126 minutes

Rather than try to prove his critics wrong with his second film, director Joseph Kosinski seems perfectly content with delivering more of the same. Just like 2010's TRON: Legacy, Kosinski's Oblivion delivers some entertaining moments and stunning visuals, yet is hindered by a disappointingly thin screenplay. Despite its problems, it's difficult to suggest seeing Oblivion anywhere outside of the theater, where Kosinski's visuals do the best job of distracting one from the flawed writing. 

Set some 60 years into the future, mankind is recovering from a devastating attack that occurred in 2017. Most of humanity has been evacuated to one of the moons of Saturn. Left behind are Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough). They're part of a crew designed to repair drones that protect energy-gathering machines from the scattered remnants of the alien horde. As Harper informs us in the opening voice over, humanity won the war against the alien attack, yet lost Earth in the process. The pair are guided by Sally (Melissa Leo, appearing strictly on fuzzy video monitors), the head honcho of the ship that will eventually take Jack and Victoria off to join the rest of humanity. 

However, the situation becomes complicated when a craft crashes on Earth containing human passengers. The lone survivor is Julia (Olga Kurylenko), who eerily resembles a woman from Jack's strange dreams of the pre-invasion Earth. Julia's introduction to the plot is, at first, one of Oblivion's high points. Yet it doesn't take long for Kosinski and co-writer Karl Gadjusdek to begin stumbling through the remainder of the plot. 

Where the film starts to come apart is in the script's desire to tackle so many different story ideas that audiences have seen before in science fiction. Once Kosinski and Gadjusdek start piling on the twists and revelations, Oblivion's narrative becomes fractured, and the pacing is thrown off (the second hour feels far too long in comparison to the first). Rather than carefully select a few tropes to tackle, Oblivion tries to throw so many ideas together that the narrative becomes jumbled as it charges into what should be a heart-pounding conclusion. Certain developments lack weight because Kosinski's storytelling simply goes through the motions. This is most evident when, just before a major moment in the story, Kosinski decides to try and create the world's shortest love triangle, rather than just stick to the character relationships that have already been established (empty as they are). 

Compounding the narrative problems is that the role of Jack Harper is too thinly written, and Cruise doesn't bring any sort of spark in his performance to make up for it. It's the sort of role he's played far too many times, and as a result his work here isn't terribly engaging. There's no real sense of who Harper is outside of his job, and Cruise's performance doesn't inject the role with any personality. Thankfully, the supporting cast put in some effort with their roles, albeit with varying degrees of success. Melissa Leo proves that she can be enjoyable even when she's never even seen in person, while Kurylenko is solid as the woman responsible for Jack's disillusionment with his mission. However, the standout, if there is such a thing here, is Andrea Riseborough. More than any member of the cast, she's able to take even the most functional lines and imbue them with a liveliness that suggest that she should have been the film's hero. Though she has just as little to work with as anyone else, Riseborough is the only member of the cast who fully sells her material. 

Yet other than Riseborough's solid work, the only other standouts of the film are technical. And, to be fair, there's a lot to be said for Oblivion's technical accomplishments. As with TRON: Legacy, the settings and landscapes are gorgeously rendered, giving the film an incredibly polished look. Sets are also nicely rendered, balancing the sleek modernism of Harper's outpost with the cluttered remains of Earth.  The film is also carried along by first-rate sound work, and a knockout score from French electronic group M83, which helps keep the film from becoming totally stagnant, even with the flow of events is disrupted. 

Unfortunately, these technical achievements aren't enough to rescue Oblivion from being more than a workman-like mishmash of different concepts. The material is simply too flat to begin with. While Kosinski has conceived some fantastic visuals, he has delivered them without any sort of flair so as to really make them pop. Whatever flaws there are, Oblivion could have been a stronger experience overall if it had been able to create at least a few genuinely rewarding cinematic moments. While there are scenes that are exciting or intriguing, there's nothing about the execution to make them stand out. Kosinski has crafted impeccable visuals, yet seems to have stopped there, content to let them speak for themselves. As it turns out, they have precious little to say. 

Grade: C

Review: "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol"

Attention, Pirates of the Caribbean (and others), let Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol serve as an example that it is actually possible for an action/adventure franchise to improve with age. After two ho-hum adventures in the 90s, the Tom Cruise-led spy series went into hibernation, only to re-emerge in 2006 in the surprisingly rousing Mission Impossible 3, directed by J.J. Abrams. Now, almost six years later, the series has another entry, this time under the direction of Pixar alum Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille), and though it lacks the fine-tuned kineticism of Abrams' film, it still stands as an improvement over the first two films in the MI canon.

Opening an indeterminate amount of time after the Abrams film, Ghost Protocol finds Cruise's Ethan Hunt in a Serbian prison, while team mates Benji and Jane (Simon Pegg, returning, and Paula Patton, new) have just been struck by failure and tragedy in Budapest. After reconnecting, the group finds themselves blamed for an attack in Russia, resulting in the shut down of their organization, leaving the team with limited connections. At the same time, they must find a way to stop a nefarious terrorist (but really, is there any other kind?) from acquiring the launch codes to all of Russia's nuclear missiles.

When it comes to plot, Ghost Protocol is easily at its weakest. The opening of the story proper involves Hunt's team breaking him out of prison, and the feeling of the whole sequence lacks a sense of drive. By the time the narrative chessboard is properly sorted out and ready for play, it feels like too much time has been wasted on a plot that's not as complex as the runtime (2 hrs 15 min) would have you believe. All it does it tie back into a surprisingly important subplot that allows for the film's ending. On whole, it feels contrived, and not necessarily well-earned. Thankfully, the middle section of Bird's film is where everything actually comes together.

The Russian-set scenes are fun, and there's some decent humor drawn out of a clever device that Ethan and Benji use while infiltrating the Kremlin. But where the film finally hits its stride is in Dubai, with a massive string a set pieces and fight scenes staged in and around the Burj Dubai, aka the world's tallest building. When Hunt climbs out to scale the glass and steel exterior and the camera (on a crane) follows him out and hangs in the air, it's difficult not to tighten your grip on your armrests. And even when the Dubai scenes finally come to a climax set on the city streets during a sandstorm, the action still engages, despite the silliness of the set-up.

But Cruise isn't the only star. Pegg's Benji, previously used as Hunt's back up back at HQ, finally gets to play both sides of the field. Meanwhile, Paula Patton's Jane Carter adds some much-needed female punch to the proceedings, and emerges as one of the film's highlights. Last is Jeremy Renner as Brandt, an analyst with a (possibly) hidden agenda, who gradually gets his own moments to shine. If the film's conclusion is a little drawn-out, then, at least it's plenty of fun to watch. It may not match the previous film, but Ghost Protocol stands as proof that being an old franchise and being an outdated franchise aren't traits that have to walk hand in hand.

Grade: B-