Review: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

Ah, the resilience of a franchise. Some can survive anything: from the poor decision-making skills of a shitty 20th Century Fox Executive to a drift in Tokyo to a series of seemingly endless JJ Abrams nonsense. No one thought that Mission: Impossible would be among those still standing after the great collapse in the 00s, least of all me. Yet here we are.

Rogue Nation one-ups the previous entry, Ghost Protocol, in a department that was sorely underserviced: the plot. A newly disavowed IMF tussling with its own Hydra/Spectre organization and uncovering its evil plan through globetrotting and barely seeing something to completion is more interesting than a group of agents learning to trust each other while a nuclear threat looms in the distance (and doing those other two things as well). McQuarrie's hand also means that dialogue is snappier, loftier, and less reliant on what was more than likely conjured up on the set.

It loses against Ghost Protocol's big set pieces, sadly. A quiet fistfight in the rafters above Turandot, while fun, isn't as creative as the Kremlin infiltration. The opening plane robbery, while impressive, loses a lot of points when cheapened by an obvious digital effect. And a deep dive into a cold computer server followed by a car chase, while McQuarrie's bread and butter, is 100% not the Burj Khalifa centerpiece.

Along with setting up the franchise's new formula of Heist Sequences broken apart by Dialogue Scenes (and essentially siphoning the Marvel CU's spirit), Ghost Protocol created a back door waiting for Tom Cruise any time he wants to take it. There's a chance that, seeing the end of this era of his life biting at the heels of his very tiny feet, he decided to stay in the franchise as long as he is able to do some of his own stunts. This lack of meta-baggage is unique to this series, imbuing it with a strange immortal glow and frees us all up to have a bit of fun. Well, fun as long as certain people keep their dick-beaters off of it.

At times, it's difficult to tell if Mission: Impossible is a smarter James Bond or a dumber one. Bond is an infectious agent burrowing through a sinister host, bringing down a corrupt entity that underestimates him, with brute force. Hunt is a man groping blindly in the dark, succeeding partially through cunning, luck, and having more than two friends. Mission: Impossible does things that James Bond would never consider doing, but the way things are going now for that series, it ends up being mostly a good thing.

It remains a tough act to follow. Considering the future, what the hell could possibly be next? There are only so many times you can pull the "We're like a family!" trick, and how many Middle Eastern countries could there possibly be? Seven? I don't envy anyone in this position. However, this is why you make more money than I do.

Review: Jack Reacher (2012)

Yay, he's back!

New York Times Bestseller trash turns to gold under the right helmsman, and we live in an age where that is becoming increasingly common as long as your name isn't Ron Howard or Edward Zwick. Auteurs who used to scream "God is dead!" at us in the 90s now work for Apple and Taylor Swift. It's both good and awful.

Jack Reacher's story sets out to do nothing more than tell an easy-to-reckon mystery with a few zingers and thrills along the way. My relationship with the series of books doesn't extend beyond doing an awesome job shelving them at Borders, and knowing from my grandmother that Tom Cruise is all wrong for the title role because he is "too fucking short." The good news is that McQuarrie, in the 12 years he's been writing various cinematic failures, keep all of his tools sharp and ain't afraid to use any of them.

His objective touch works wonders on the film's few big action set pieces and they steal the movie away from fairly unremarkable genre trappings. Enough for most people should be the car chase in the center with absolutely NO music attached to it, just shifting of the gears and the roar of the engine, but the film shines in quieter moments as well (there is a scene at a shooting range with an added sense of impending dread, seemingly for very little reason). The film is bolstered by smaller decisions that, on paper, sound much better than they come across. Werner Herzog does a fine job as the Man at the Top, but can only do so much when confined by the material. In general, that's a pretty good rule for determining the quality of this film. Nice, not perfect.

Ultimately, Jack Reacher functions as a surprise in that it exceeds well beyond its own grasp, and as a sign of man breaking free of his One-and-Done status, I'd be a fool not to take it.

Review: The Way of the Gun (2000)

Christopher McQuarrie didn't cut the cord entirely to Bryan Singer (good thing -- how else can you meet Tom Cruise?), only enough to unlearn some fairly awful filmmaking habits. Public Access, a film with two ideas stretched to feature length and The Usual Suspects, a film lacking about as much atmosphere as What Lies Beneath and one you'd only watch after finishing Tarantino's First 4 in a weekend, were apparently enough to give him the hootzpa to direct his own film. Good thing he smart, dawg. Well, to a degree... I'd like to hear him explain Jack the Giant Slayer.

The Way of the Gun could be set in the same universe as Pulp Fiction, in a world filled with liars and bastards who live at the expense of total squares and take breaks shooting at each other to talk in smoky bars and dark parking lots. Where the tradition of the treasure hunt runs strong and the Game ends in a draw. Where Order is only an implication.

McQuarrie wisely tells the story without a lot of flash, opting for a coldly procedural presentation. But the story he tells, a simple kidnapping scenario, is complicated by half-stated motivations and a surprising amount of verbal metaphors. A zany pre-credits scene establishes the absence of morality but stands apart in terms of tone, and the soberly staged modern western action scenes that come quickly afterwards end up being an empty promise. With such a killer opening Twenty, it takes a bit of a readjustment to fully absorb the slow-paced chess game that follows, where two inscrutable characters have obtuse conversations the likes of which could only be written by a former private investigator. We are left to figure out a lot of the world's economy by ourselves. What happened in Baltimore? What is this family business? How did everybody meet? Why aren't Diggs and Lehman keeping their romance more secretive? Just where the hell are the cops? And so on.

For being a drama set in a harsh world with very little joy, there is a great amount of joy you feel watching all accounts getting settled through extreme violence and misery. McQuarrie is surely destined to stay at the forefront of our lives for- hey, where'd he go?