Mission: Impossible -- Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018)

Henry Cavill, Tom Cruise, and Rebecca Ferguson in Mission: Impossible -- Fallout

Cast: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, Vanessa Kirby, Michelle Monaghan, Wes Bentley, Frederick Schmidt, Alec Baldwin, Liang Yang, Kristoffer Joner, Wolf Blitzer. Screenplay: Christopher McQuarrie. Cinematography: Rob Hardy. Production design: Peter Wenham. Film editing: Eddie Hamilton. Music: Lorne Balfe.

There seems to be a critical consensus that the Mission: Impossible films have gotten better, and that the sixth film in the series, Mission: Impossible -- Fallout, may be the best of the lot. It's the usual improbable if not impossible story of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his doughty crew trying to prevent catastrophe, but it proceeds at a breathless pace. It also features a villain played by an actor who's possibly more attractive than Cruise: Henry Cavill. Is it a sign of Cruise's maturity that he's willing to let himself be upstaged by a younger and handsomer actor? Well, maybe not. Cruise still gets the lion's share of the more spectacular stunts. A seventh film in the series, once again directed by Christopher McQuarrie, is in the works, although filming recently stopped because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

Cast: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Todd Field, Marie Richardson, Thomas Gibson, Julienne Davis, Vinessa Shaw, Rade Serbedzija, Leelee Sobieski, Alan Cumming. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Frederic Raphael, based on a story by Arthur Schnitzler. Cinematography: Larry Smith. Production design: Leslie Tomkins, Roy Walker. Film editing: Nigel Galt. Music: Jocelyn Pook.

Some people think Eyes Wide Shut is a masterpiece; others think it's pretentious hooey. While I incline toward the latter opinion, I have to wonder if Stanley Kubrick had lived to see it fully through its postproduction stage -- he died shortly after submitting a final cut to the studio -- he would have tinkered it into something that inspired less ambivalence. I also wonder if he hadn't yielded to studio pressure to cast movie stars in the lead roles, we wouldn't have found the characters played by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman less glossy and more interesting. And then there are the orgy scenes, too choreographed to be real, although movie orgies are rarely titillating even when they're not digitally altered as the ones in the original release of the film were to avoid an NC-17 rating. The main thing for me, however, is that every time I see the movie I can't remember a few days later what it was all about. Which makes me wonder if it's about anything. 

Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015)

One of the things that make me think Tom Cruise is smarter than his involvement with Scientology suggests is that lately he has been willing to surround himself in his films with actors who are more appealing than he is. In the case of Rogue Nation, they include Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Rebecca Ferguson. He has also shed the tendency to flash the famous toothy grin on any occasion, though his Ethan Hunt in this film doesn't have much to grin about. As the movie begins, the Impossible Missions Force is about to be disbanded and its members labeled "shoot to kill" by CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin). It's a good premise for a thriller, if perhaps an over-familiar one: Make your good guys the target not only of the bad guys but also the other good guys. So off we go on a round of stunts that don't bear summarizing, but McQuarrie's script and direction keep the gee-whiz response pumping for an enjoyable couple of hours. Some critics thought the chief villain, a rogue MI6 agent named Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), wasn't villainous enough, but I have liked Harris's work since I first noticed him as Cesare Borgia's gay henchman Micheletto on the Showtime series The Borgias (2011-2013). He underplays in Rogue Nation, and the decision to dye his hair blond was probably a mistake, but I thought his subtlety was an effective contrast to Cruise's usual tendency to overplay. It has to be said that, at 55, Cruise is just beginning to be a bit implausible in his action sequences, especially the one at the film's beginning that has him leaping onto the wing of a cargo plane and clinging to it as it takes off, Perhaps it's true that he still does his own stunts, but in this golden age of camera tricks and CGI, that seems unnecessary: Audience are going to think it's faked anyway. There may in fact be a nod or two in the movie to Cruise's aging: After the extended underwater swim, Hunt has to be resuscitated, and there are a few moments, played mostly for comic relief by Pegg, when Hunt's disoriented state becomes a matter for concern. A sixth M:I film is evidently in the works. It will be interesting to see whether age plays more of a factor in it.

Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011)

I recently commented here that I didn't respond particularly well to Gregory Peck because, unlike stars such as Cary Grant and Bette Davis, he never surprised me with a line reading or a facial expression. I think the same is true of Tom Cruise, whose range seems to be limited to intensity: He never seems to unclench. That becomes apparent in this fourth installment of the Mission: Impossible series when he shares the screen with a much more versatile star, Jeremy Renner, who can be both intense and casually self-deprecating. I'm not saying Cruise is a bad actor: I thought his performance in Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988) was superior to Dustin Hoffman's Oscar-winning one. All Hoffman had to do was find a shtick and stay with it; Cruise was the one who had to grow and change over the course of the movie. It's just that he built his career on muscular action and a captivating grin that grew into a rictus as his career thrived. This Mission film is, I think, superior to the first three because it doesn't take on more than it can handle. It turns its heroes -- Cruise, Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton -- into fallible beings who screw up but manage to get on the right course at the last minute. It's all familiar super-action stuff, of the kind we've seen and marveled at ever since James Bond hit the screen. Renner and Pegg especially are instrumental in saving the movie from tedium, especially in their interplay in the sequence when Renner is called on to reprise the famous drop to within an inch of danger that Cruise did in the first Mission film back in 1996. This time, Renner has to do it with no restraint, free-falling until a magnet repels his magnetized suit, and both Renner and Pegg play it for laughs, something that director Brad Bird is skilled at providing. The screenplay (by Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec) tries to build some suspense around a secret that Renner's character, Brandt, is hiding from Cruise's Ethan Hunt, but that's just filler between action sequences.

Mission: Impossible III (J.J. Abrams, 2006)

I gave up on the Mission: Impossible series after the first two installments (Brian De Palma, 1996; John Woo, 2000) partly because they featured the world's most annoying major movie star, but also because they lacked some of the things that made the old TV series so entertaining. One of those things is intelligence, by which I mean not just spycraft but also the application of thought, rather than muscle and firepower, to problem-solving. Another is that the TV show was an ensemble affair, with Peter Graves, Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Greg Morris, and Peter Lupus (and various successors) working together to thwart the bad guys. The films, on the other hand, were very much about Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) as a James Bond-style one-man band -- no surprise, since Cruise is the producer of the M:I movies. The other members of the Impossible Missions Force were expendable, with the exception of Ving Rhames, who has been the only other constant in the film series. I was persuaded to take another look at the series after I found myself enjoying Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014), which made me think that Cruise still had some valid claim to his stardom. And since J.J. Abrams has become maybe the world's most successful producer-writer-director, it also behooved me to check out the first film he directed. Abrams made a laudable effort to restore some of the ensemble work of the TV series, bringing on a team including Rhames, Billy Crudup, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q, Simon Pegg, and Laurence Fishburne to flesh out the IMF. It doesn't quite work because Cruise still hogs the film, but there are some good bits from all of the supporting actors, and a nice contribution to IMF lore: the souped-up 3-D printer that churns out one of the famous masks the agents wind up wearing. This time it's a mask of the film's villain, Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and one of the best scenes in the film involves Hoffman playing Cruise playing Hoffman. But there are simply too many climaxes to the movie. I wish some of them had been cut to expand on the film's most enjoyable section, in which the team infiltrates the Vatican to kidnap Davian. I would have liked to see the planning -- the intelligence, if you will -- that went into the scheme. But I liked M:I III more than I expected. I'm told that Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011) and Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015) are better, so maybe I'll eventually get around to checking them out.  

Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)

I remembered only two things about Magnolia from the first time I saw it: the rain of frogs and Tom Cruise's performance. Now it occurs to me that perhaps I should watch some of Anderson's other films again, especially There Will Be Blood (2007), about which I remember mainly the "milkshake" scene, because there is so much more good stuff going on in Magnolia than I remembered. It has that loose, semi-improvised quality that I have come to admire in Godard, while still lavishing all the resources that the backing of New Line Cinema could afford. On the other hand, I think that the abundance of resources may have undermined the film, because it made possible the two things I did remember, the special-effects frogs and the A-list presence of Cruise, at the expense of the detail work that comes to the fore in my rewatching. I'm talking especially about Philip Seymour Hoffman's touching performance as Jason Robards's nurse, John C. Reilly's naive cop, Melora Walters's scattered druggie, Philip Baker Hall's disintegrating game show host, and Julianne Moore's descent into hysteria. That said, I still appreciate both the frogs and Cruise, who lets out the madness that we had only glimpsed before in his work. The performance earned him an Oscar nomination, as over-the-top and supposedly out-of-character performances tend to do. (We would later, in the Katie Hughes era and as his commitment to Scientology came to the fore, come to wonder how out of character this manic Cruise really was.) I think the movie is too long (it runs 188 minutes), and that perhaps some of its segments exist only because of Anderson's commitment to the actors who made Boogie Nights (1997). I'm thinking here of William H. Macy's character, which seems to me like a dangling thread in the fabric of the film -- though it does result in a wonderful scene in which Macy and Henry Gibson compete for the attention of a hunky bartender (Craig Kvinsland). As for the frogs, I refuse to speculate on their "meaning," preferring the reaction of Stanley (Jeremy Blackman): "This happens. This is something that happens."