Impossibly Good

The Mission: Impossible film franchise has been a rollercoaster, with as many downs as ups. Part of the reason was its constant switching of directors: Brian de Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird, and Christopher McQuarrie have each sat in the director’s chair. The switching also applied to the screenplays, penned by a disparate group including David Koepp and Robert Towne, along with Abrams and McQuarrie doing double duty. With Mission: Impossible – Fallout, McQuarrie, who did the fifth movie Rogue Nation, repeats as both director and scribe. He improves on his previous work to give the series its best outing yet.

The plot is a sequel to Rogue Nation, so if you have a chance to watch or re-watch that film before seeing Fallout, it’s helpful. However, Fallout has enough new material that it’s enjoyable even without the primer. The movie opens with a dream sequence where Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is marrying his lost love, Julia (Michelle Monaghan). But then the minister performing the ceremony is revealed as Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), the central bad guy of Rogue Nation. It is an unsettling and explosive beginning.

The remnant of Lane’s organization, the Syndicate, is seeking to secure three plutonium bomb cores. Hunt, along with his team of Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), tries to purchase them first, only to have the cores stolen. With a classic ruse, they manage to get a lead on the cores. Their boss, Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), is about to send the team to Paris to follow that lead when the head of the CIA (Angela Bassett) stops them and insists Hunt take along her agent August Walker (Henry Cavill), who’s been hunting the Syndicate himself. In Paris, Hunt runs into another old friend – Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), the MI-6 agent who helped him capture Lane in Rogue Nation.

Rather than concentrate on the plot, simply let the double and triple crosses whisk you along like a leaf floating through rapids. Each entry in the series has had one jaw-dropping sequence, such as the train-helicopter chase through the Chunnel in the first film, or the scaling of the Burj Khalifa in Ghost Protocol. With Fallout, there are multiple sequences that match that level of intensity. At the same time, McQuarrie leavens the story with a delightful amount of self-deprecating humor.

McQuarrie has effectively become Cruise’s go-to writer/director. They’ve worked together on six projects, the last three with McQuarrie directing as well as writing. (Along with the two Mission: Impossible films, McQuarrie wrote Valkyrie, Jack Reacher, and Edge of Tomorrow; on the down side, McQuarrie wrote and directed The Mummy.) As usual, Cruise did the majority of his own stunts, though one wonders how long the producers will allow the 56-year-old to indulge in that conceit. One relatively simple stunt in Fallout left Cruise with a broken foot that led to an eight-week production shutdown. In all, the film had over 6 months of shooting days, spread out across a full year, which is almost unheard of in the annals of film.

The addition of Cavill helps build the tension in the film. He’s the flint to Cruise’s steel, and sparks fly when they’re together on screen. Bassett is tough as nails in her role, and mesmerizing whenever she appears. With Black Panther, it’s been a very good year for the actress.

McQuarrie’s script manages to go to some dark places while still maintaining a breakneck pace, and the introspective aspects of how Hunt’s work has worn on his soul deepens the characterization. Overall, he’s blended the best elements of the previous five films while avoiding their weaknesses, thereby pulling off his own impossible mission.

Needs More Stirring

For years, the two main comic book publishers were like feuding brothers – you could tell they were related but with two distinct personalities. DC was the older, more mature, and rather staid brother, while Marvel was the younger, wilder, and more inventive one. DC was the first to find success on the large screen, with Superman in the 1970s and Batman in the late ‘80s. It wasn’t until the late 1990s/early 2000s that Marvel characters moved into the theaters with Blade, Men in Black, X-Men and Spider-Man. DC did have the most critically successful series with Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, but then Marvel launched the first part of its massive Universe slate of films beginning with Iron Man in 2008. Disney’s acquirement of Marvel in 2009 helped push the superhero film market into a billion-dollar industry.

While DC has a production agreement with Warner Brothers, it recently hasn’t come close to the success of the Marvel movies, with the exception of Wonder Woman. Neither has it matched the output of Marvel, with four movies for DC to a score for Marvel. (It’s held its own on the small screen, with “Gotham” on Fox and “Arrow,” “The Flash,” “Super-Girl,” and “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” on the CW – you could almost call it DCW.) Marvel has brought interesting and idiosyncratic directors to projects – Kenneth Branagh, Joss Whedon, Shane Black, John Favreau, James Gunn, Anthony & Joe Russo, and Taika Waititi, among others. With the exception of Patty Jenkins who crushed it with Wonder Woman, DC has gone with Zach Snyder.

Justice League could be seen as DC playing catch-up with the Marvel’s Avengers movies, the first two of which grossed over a billion dollars each. But rather than building the platform for its success with individual movies about the characters then bringing them together, DC has switched the order – group film first, with individual movies to follow. It doesn’t work as well. You’re not as invested in the characters, and they haven’t been as sharply drawn.

The Avengers were blessed to have cool bad guys since, just like James Bond, superhero films are only as good as their villains. For Justice League, the big bad is little more than that – big and bad. Steppenwolf is a personality-deficient character that’s only a little better than the evil cloud in The Green Lantern a few years ago – and that’s not saying much. He’s served by a horde of man-sized insects that are more annoying than frightening. It makes you want to grab a can of Raid.

The 120 minute running time doesn’t allow the new characters of Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg to go beyond the broadest brushstrokes. Ezra Miller suffers in comparison to Grant Gustin’s TV version, now in its 3^rd season. He’s relegated to the role of the immature kid thrust into battle. It can be a powerful subplot when done well – think of Jeremy Davies’ Cpl. Upham in Saving Private Ryan, or, in the superhero world, Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch in Age of Ultron – but Miller doesn’t get the chance to fully claim Flash’s superhero status. Hopefully that will be rectified in his solo movie Flashpoint, but that’s three years in the future.

Ben Affleck’s performance as Batman isn’t horrible – think of Val Kilmer’s turn as the character after Michael Keaton moved on rather than George Clooney’s ill-fated outing – and it plays off of Bruce Wayne feeling his age. It comes across better than in Batman v. Superman: The Dawn of Justice. The resurrection of Superman is about the worst kept plot secret in history, especially with Amy Adams and Diane Lane participating in the film.

Snyder had to drop out of the film after principle photography was complete after the death of his daughter. Instead, Joss Whedon took over to finish the film, including extensive reshots amounting to about 20% of the film that pushed the budget into the $300 million range. Some scenes definitely have Whedon’s wry wit on display, where Snyder style is more straightforward, but it’s not enough to lift the film to a good level of excitement.

Yet within the film is a scene that shows what it could have been. Nihilistic bank robbers take hostages and plan to blow up the building, but Wonder Woman streaks in to the rescue. It’s tight and thrilling. As with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the best parts of Justice League revolve around Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman. While I’m so-so on the upcoming origin films, I am looking forward to Gadot’s next turn as Wonder Woman. And therein lies the problem with Justice League.

My lovely wife has (rightly) pointed out that when I make tuna salad, I sometimes don’t stir it enough to fully blend the tuna, Miracle Whip, and relish. With Justice League, the characters haven’t been blended, and because of it, the movie isn’t stirring. And this movie definitely needs more stirring.

Don’t Cry UNCLE

The original series “The Man From UNCLE” was supposed to be TV’s answer to James Bond. It did boast some formidable guest stars, including Boris Karloff, Raymond Massey, Steve McQueen, Yvonne de Carlo, and John Carradine, and featured scripts by writers like Robert Towne and Harlan Ellison. As it went on, though, it slipped more and more into a parody of the genre, with campy villains and over-the-top stories. However, it was in competition with “Batman” and there was no way it could out-camp the caped crusader, so it vanished from the airwaves.

Now it has become another early TV show remade for the big screen, always a risky proposition. For every The Fugitive or Get Smart, you have several  Dark Shadows, Lost in Space, or Starsky and Hutch level movies. It’s hit-or-miss, with a lot more misses than hits. Fortunately for The Man From UNCLE, Guy Ritchie was both in the director’s chair and collaborated on the script (with Lionel Wigram, who also produced with Ritchie, working from a story by Jeff Kleeman and David C. Wilson). Ritchie knows how to blend humor and adventure, as he proved with Snatch and the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes. The story is set in the early 1960s, when the Cold War almost went hot, and Ritchie mines the history and the visuals of that time beautifully.

The characters of Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin are fleshed out a bit more than they ever were in the series. Solo (Henry Cavill) isn’t just a secret agent but also a thief who’s working for the CIA rather than sitting in jail – which basically makes this a remake of “It Takes a Thief” as well. In contrast Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) is a straight-laced and lethally strong KGB agent al a Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love, but played for comedy rather than menace.

In the opening sequence, the two are antagonists as Solo seeks to extricate a young female car mechanic named Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander) from East Berlin. Gaby’s important because her father, a nuclear physicist, has gone missing, and the CIA wants her help to find him. Solo manages the extraction with a great deal of daring do mixed with suavity, leaving Kuryakin embarrassed and itching for revenge. The next morning Solo and his boss have a meeting at a West Berlin café – with Kuryakin and his handler. The two spy agencies have decided to work together to stop an independent group led by the Italian heiress Victoria Vinciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki) from getting their hands on an A-Bomb. After a rough introduction, Solo, Kuryankin, and Gaby head for Italy.

Cavill handles the role of the charming rogue/ruthless spy with aplomb, and can throw away a line with the best of them. Hammer must be thankful for a role that will make moviegoers forget about The Lone Ranger, and he’s a great foil for Cavill while still excelling at the physical demands of the role. Vikander and Debicki both look like they stepped out of an early 1960’s movie directed by Fellini or De Sica, though they’re both better actresses than models from that era. Vikander has passion and fire, while Debicki plays an ice queen on the surface though hot-blooded beneath.

There are as many wise cracks being shot off during the film as there are bullets, but it never slips into parody like the original series. The edge of danger keeps the plot and the quips under control. Special kudos must go to production designer Oliver Scholl and costume designer Joanna Johnston. They perfectly present the early 1960’s world with the sets and costumes.

While it doesn’t transcend its roots as The Fugitive did, The Man from UNCLE does improve on the original rather than just packaging it as nostalgia. It also works as a decent spy adventure, and there are enough twists and turns to make it a fun ride that’s worth the trip.