Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has retired from the field agent life, and now teaches the next generation of IMF superspies. He does this for love, for between the last film and now, he has not just apparently dropped a certain thief, never to be mentioned by the movie, but is also now very happily engaged to nurse Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who does know nothing of espionage or his true job.

Because that’s always the way, Ethan is drawn back into field service for a rescue operation of one Lindsey Farris (Keri Russell), his former favourite spy pupil who has gotten herself into a spot of bother. Somehow some quiet observations has resulted in her getting kidnapped by the insane international arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Ethan and his team – this time around Ving Rhames and Maggie Q with a bit of hometown help from Simon Pegg – manage to extract Lindsey, but she dies from an explosive capsule implanted in her head. Ethan’s out for revenge now, and while he’s at it, he might as well also grab a dangerous biological agent in Davian’s possession.

Davian’s not a man to be thwarted or threatened, however, and what’s a better move to make than threaten a superspy’s loved one? Further complications, including yet another traitor in the IMF, do of course ensue.

In Cruise years, we have now reached the point where he had acquired most of the needed acting tools for the kind of star he probably always wanted to be, and has allowed directors to tune down the frequency of shots of him grinning smugly for no good reason. Because we haven’t yet reached the 2010s, trying to come over like more of a human being – if an utterly perfect one who is good at everything, inhumanely hot, and so on, and so forth – is apparently of interest, too. Doing this by giving him a fiancée in one of those jobs Hollywood people would probably describe as “grounded” and “human”, and then threatening her is probably the least original way to go about that, apart from teaming him up with a monkey or a little child, but damn me if J.J. Abrams doesn’t do this efficiently as well as effectively. In part, the trick works as well as it does because Michelle Monaghan is really, really, good at projecting humanity back at unlikable male stars that isn’t actually coming from them, convincing us that something must actually be perfectly alright and decent with those guys. It’s a curious ability, but it works.

At least, this is the only one of the Mission Impossible movies that actually manages to make me root for Ethan instead of just watching the crazy plot contortions and absurd plans, explosions and shoot-outs he’s getting into while raising eyebrows at his boring perfection. So, while humanization by threatened significant other may be a primitive move, it does at least work.

Also livelier than in the movies before is the villain. On paper, Seymour Hoffman doesn’t actually have that much more to do than his predecessors, yet his precise performance and the greater pull of the plot sell him not just as an actual threat but also as a great counterpoint to Hunt, again making a protagonist who isn’t generally likeable more so by contrast.

The action set pieces make as little sense as we’ve grown used to from the series, but make up for that by a general sense of awesomeness and Abrams’s typical ability to shoot loud and obnoxiously conceived scenes as if they were sensible and natural. That he’s actually good with the spy bits of the superspy formula is another point in Mission Impossible III’s favour, leaving this a fine way to while away a few others.

Three Bad Films Make A Post: Be careful what you pray for.

We Summon the Darkness (2019): When the best thing a script has going for it is the “ingenious” (ha!) twist of its three girl villain crew not being murderous Satanists but televangelist Christians faking the Satanism of their murders so their televangelist boss/father can win more money for his bank account, which is to say, something painfully contrived and pretty stupid, it’s pretty fair to call the resulting film forgettable.

Well, at least the cast – apart from Johnny Knoxville as miscast as a said televangelist as any time he is asked to act – is game, but their efforts can’t win out against a script that’s really not as clever as it apparently thinks it is, and a general air of my old enemy, boring competence on the filmmaking side (as provided by director Marc Meyers).

The Turning (2020): Of course, compared to music video director Floria Sigismondi’s attempt at yet another version of Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw”, Meyers’s film is an absolute masterpiece by the sheer virtue of at least knowing what it wants to be about. Sigismondi’s film sure is pretty to look at, but even the striking production design and the technical high standard of the production don’t add up to actual atmosphere, thanks to a script by the guys responsible for the Conjuring movies that’s – as expected with this writing pedigree - full of badly placed jump scares, clichéd and soulless other scares, characters who strictly act the way they do because it’s in the script and ends in a total clusterfuck of plot twist nonsense you have to see to believe.

It’s too bad, for actual writers and a director using style as substance instead as an attempt to hide the vacuum could have made quite an interesting modern interpretation of the material here. Well, I say modern, but for reasons the film never gets around to make clear, this is also a period piece set in the 1990s. Oh, well.


Fantasy Island (2020): But hey, I’m pretty sure Sigismondi at least had some kind of ambitions for her film, whereas Jeff Wadlow’s (also responsible for the atrocious second Kick-Ass) attempt at turning the old TV chestnut “Fantasy Island” into an anthology horror movie never even managed to convince me that it at least had the mandatory ambition to simply entertain its audience. There’s really nothing on screen here that suggests any talent or effort having gone into the thing at all. The cast is either acting far below their abilities (Maggie Q and Lucy Hale, Michael Rooker) or floundering in roles they are utterly miscast in (Michael Peña as Mr Roarke being the most obvious example here); the plots are like Twilight Zone episodes from the 80s version of that show, but written by idiots; jokes flounder, plot lines meander, nothing of interest or import happens; horror has left the building; somewhere, a dozen reviewers fall asleep.

In short: Slumber (2017)

Doctor Alice Arnolds (Maggie Q) is working as a researcher and therapist in a sleep lab. She does have the appropriate childhood trauma to cause her interest in this kind of work, as mandated by movie law, for when they were children, her little brother jumped to his death while sleepwalking. Or really, as it will turn out when a family, the Morgans, come to her for help with a shared sleepwalking problem that finds all of them sleepwalking and doing creepy and potentially violent stuff, was killed by the demon known as the Nigh Hag.

For a while, Alice tries to keep to a scientific and medical view on the family’s problems, but as strange things are happening all around the Morgans, she is soon starting on a way that might cost her life or at least her career.

Jonathan Hopkins’s Slumber is a very entertaining entry in the sub-genre of sleep paralysis horror. It’s not the most carefully plotted film, and its monster design – once we get to see it – certainly isn’t very good at all, but there are quite a few things to recommend it. Firstly, it does contain at least three truly creepy scenes concentrating on what the night hag makes the Morgans do in their sleep, suggesting a shadow of abuse, self-mutilation and violence hanging over an apparently perfectly functional family, very much giving the impression of something praying on unconscious – or at least unspoken - psychological issues and tensions the supernatural is only bringing to the surface. Hopkins is also quite adept at staging dream sequences that feel like dreams, with strange and somewhat disturbing non-sequiturs, a talent that (surprise!) comes in very handy in a film about a dream demon.


Secondly, there’s a pretty fantastic scenery-chewing outing by Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy as an elderly, drugged up, former night hag victim with a fascinating taste in clothing, and some neat eye-mutilation scars that turns a Joe Exposition role into pure, if absolutely grotesque, joy. Somehow, whatever it is McCoy is doing (having fun, it looks like, at the very least) doesn’t break a film full of earnest, competent performances by everyone else but enhances it considerably.