In short: Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

Super agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his particularly bored looking cohorts Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames get into yet another McGuffin hunt to protect the world. A shadowy evil mastermind with the usual mad-on for our hero, a handful of returning characters (Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust and Sean Harris’s Solomon Lake) and a threatened ex-wife (Michelle Monaghan again) are there and accounted for.

This six hundredth or so Mission: Tom Cruise movie directed by repeat Cruise crony Christopher McQuarrie suffers badly from contemporary blockbuster syndrome, so it concerns a perfectly serviceable McGuffin hunt that would most probably make for a pretty fantastic hundred minute movie that has been blown up to inexplicable two and a half hours by the kind of franchise universe building rarely anybody will care about, not even this fan of superhero and supercar movie minutiae.

Because this is a Tom Cruise movie, there’s really not much to do with the additional runtime for the film: interesting characterisation is difficult to impossible to do in a movie where every other character is exclusively defined through their relationship to Cruise, and the guy must even be made to look absolutely awesome when he screws up badly. Most superheroes feel more human and relatable there, though ethically, this super spy series has by now totally bought into ideas of saving the little people and not playing the game of weighing single lives against the many, which I don’t have a problem with in the “kill everyone and let god sort out his own” world too many people apparently enjoy living in.

Inside of these parameters, the first and the final act of the film are serviceably fun popcorn cinema, but the lack of actual narrative drive beyond set pieces and the series’ tendency to waste potential awesomeness that could be provided through the on paper great supporting cast (Rebecca Ferguson alone can act circles around Cruise and looks more convincing in action scenes to boot) thanks to its extreme Cruise worship. Which becomes deadly for a middle act whose action sequences are as painfully by the numbers as the ones in here. Spectacles aren’t supposed to be boring.

In short: Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

This time around, aging super spy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team of little buddies (Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames) who are actually allowed to do something in this outing are fighting two enemies: first, a CIA director (Alex Baldwin) who shuts down the IMF with the reasoning that they cause more harm than they prevent. Which, given the fact that the villains in three of the other four Mission Impossible movies were rogue or traitorous IMF agents, has the ring of truth to it.

Enemy number two is a sort of anti-IMF made up of a world-wide network of disgruntled spies disgusted with keeping up the status quo following the leadership of the reptilian Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). As all Mission Impossible villains, Lane is a bit obsessed with Ethan, of course.

Seemingly playing both sides – like a proper spy – is the mysterious Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson).

In an ideal world, this fifth Mission Impossible movie would of course hinge on the fact that its villains are absolutely right – the IMF is a bunch of idiots causing problems it then solves with grand gestures and considerable loss of life, and the status quo it is bound to uphold and its methods to do this are morally unsupportable. This being a modern blockbuster and Tom Cruise vehicle instead, Baldwin’s character is a well-meaning fool, and Lane is a movie villain.

This isn’t something I actually condemn Christopher McQuarrie’s film for, but it is something so remarkably obvious, I couldn’t help but comment on it. Coming to the film the filmmakers actually made, this is a marked improvement on the horrors of the fourth Mission Impossible, featuring interesting villains actually allowed and able to make an impression on the audience – Harris is just great – a twisty plot line that might not hold up to too much logical scrutiny but is very fun when you’re just willing to go with it, and some genuinely great action and suspense set pieces. The opera sequence alone would be worth the price of admission as a piece of high drama suspense filmmaking, but the rest of the set pieces is just as fun, well directed and exciting as it.

Coming to our the “state of the Cruise” segment, I can gladly report that the close-up hogging isn’t painfully egregious anymore, and that the movie actually has quite a few scenes for other actors to shine in during which Cruise doesn’t even make an appearance. A personal appearance, I should say, for everyone here has a curious habit of throwing in a sentence or three about how awesome/sexy/breathtakingly dangerous Ethan Hunt is, even if that’s not a pertinent question at all right then. Vanity’s an interesting thing.

In short: Dune: Part One (2021)

As regular readers will know, I’m not as big of a fan Canadian director Denis Villeneuve as most of the critical caste seem to be. Instead of the intelligent and deep filmmaker others see, apart from the Blade Runner film I’ve mostly encountered movies I found pompous, painfully slow and self-serious, and lacking a spark of humanity, exclusively populated by characters who never smile or laugh and really love staring off into the distance dramatically. And please don’t ask me about what Arrival did to its source novella.

However, this time around, I’ve come to praise Villeneuve and not to make fun of him. Ironically, you can still use most of the points of criticism above against Dune: the characters certainly seem to be lacking in any sense of humour whatsoever, the film moves slowly, and Villeneuve takes things so very seriously indeed it could border on the ridiculous. It’s just that all of this works in the context of Dune in a way it very much didn’t in something like Sicario or Arrival. For once, the heightened tone is actually perfect for the source novel’s still peculiar and wonderful mixture of very old and very new (at least at its time) ideas and themes, something that aims for the mythical while at the same time trying to show how myth is a constructed thing.

Villeneuve is certainly better when it comes to constructing myth than criticising here, but then, pulling things down to Earth was really the job of the second novel and need not concern us with this film (or its sequel).

The film is most certainly a masterpiece of visual worldbuilding, creating the mood and feeling of its far future made out of things taken from many different pasts through fantastic production design, an often pleasantly peculiar Hans Zimmer score, and camera and editing rhythms that take their time to create the heft of reality.

Really, the only thing I’d wish I could change about this Villeneuve movie is the casting of Thimothée Chalamet as Paul; his range seems to lie exclusively between mopey, super mopey, and extra special mopey, which could become a bit of a problem in the second film when the kid’s supposed to be charismatic.

But then, nothing’s perfect.

Three Films Make A Post: Greed has a price.

Werewolf (1995): Tony Zarindast’s originally titled werewolf movie is the sort of thing only a mother (or perhaps a director) will love. The acting’s awkward, the script makes no damn sense at all (the archaeologist bad guys apparently infect people with werewolfery so they can show them off caged, despite having a perfectly fine werewolf skeleton to present and slavery being rather frowned upon in modern times), and the direction…Well, the direction clearly aims for being stylish, but always, absolutely always hits the wrong spot, ending up in turns awkward, bizarre, or just plain inexplicable. I hope you like long, loving tracking shots through a museum while animal noises play in the background, or just as long, loving shots of that darn werewolf skeleton. Additional attractions are Jorge Rivero’s toupee, Richard Lynch, and werewolf make-up in various states of crappiness.

Happy Death Day (2017): Oh, look, it’s a time loop movie! Never seen one of these before. Vile college student Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) is killed again and again by a mysterious masked killer, only to repeat the same day again and again, until she identifies her killer. The problem: she’s such a horrible person there’s nobody she knows who doesn’t have a motive. Speaking of unlikeable main characters, this one makes Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day look like a totally nice guy; and whereas that particular classic actually puts the effort in to show us its main asshole changing into a better person, Christopher Landon’s film doesn’t bother to put any effort into character development. Tree just suddenly isn’t a horrible human being anymore; the mild attempts to explain her character flaws through trauma simple don’t work.

Otherwise, this is a mildly diverting movie that suffers from being neither terribly thrilling, nor funny, nor clever yet also never gets too painful.

The Snowman (2017): Speaking of painful, I don’t hate Tomas Alfredson’s attempt at a serial killer thriller quite as much as most other people seem to do, but that doesn’t mean I’m confusing it with a good or even a mediocre film. There is, after all, nary a scene that doesn’t feature at least one completely inexplicable directing choice or an actor going completely off the rails, with many a scene additionally enlivened by not having any function whatsoever for plot, characters or theme. The violent as well as the more absurd flourishes of the plot really demand to be filmed either in the way of a giallo or of a modern potboiler; Alfredson instead directs them as if they were parts of a thoughtful Nordic style crime movie, at once inadvertently pointing out the stupidity of much what is going on and wasting its potential to entertain. Things are not improved by portentous pacing and a theoretically brilliant cast whose members seem as lost in the pointlessness of the whole affair as I was.


Well, now that I’ve thought about it, I actually do hate this just as much as everyone else does.

Life (2017)

Warning: while I’m not going to go into too much detail, I’ll have to include some structural spoilers; also, this one made me rather cross!

Apparently, there is life on Mars, and an international probe is hurtling towards Earth, carrying some promising samples in its belly (or wherever probes are carrying samples). The scriptwriters were probably afraid to lose the audience right at the start if not something “exciting” happens to begin with, so the probe is a bit out of control and instead of some sane manoeuvre, the crew – as played by the overqualified and desperately underused cast of Rebecca Ferguson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Olga Dihovichnaya and Ariyon Bakare - of the international space station tasked to evaluate the samples has to catch the thing with a robot arm, which improbably works too.

The samples are worth the effort, though, for among them is an actual living alien cell. A cell that quickly grows into many cells, and then into an organism that becomes increasingly big. If you think you know where the rest of the movie is going to go, you are exactly right.

For if there is something that is inarguably true about Daniel Espinosa’s alien on a rampage movie, then it is that is has no original bone in its cinematic body. The plot goes where you expect it to go, the characters are the blandest bunch of nonentities with vague motivations you could get from these actors, the production design certainly suggests the 58 million dollars the movie supposedly cost didn’t go into creativity, and Espinosa’s direction is sort of there, but certainly not reaching any – even small – heights of suspense and excitement.

There are two elements about the script that truly stand out: firstly, it is chock full implausibilities: the crew of a small space station who will potentially work on alien biological material does not know what the final stage in a complete breach of quarantine is; a space station manned for this project has only one person actually qualified to work on the samples in its crew; on the other hand, said space station has a potent hand flame thrower; the so-called quarantine measures make no sense at all, the characters might as well just leave all doors open and invite their alien guest in; nobody ever follows procedures. And it goes on and on that way.

Which are of course all problems I’m not unaccustomed to from my SF horror movies, and willing to overlook (though a film at least trying to sell me on its world usually helps my tolerance here) but then comes in script standout problem number two. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick use the valuable brain space freed by not taking care of details to demonstrate cleverness without being actually all that clever (a tendency that already annoyed me quite a bit in their scripts for Deadpool and Zombieland). First, they pull a Psycho through killing off one of the “name” actors first (so that they can keep exactly the other two you’d expect them to keep for as long as possible), but telegraph it so much it does not feel surprising so much as expected. It certainly doesn’t help that it isn’t 1960 anymore.

Next, the film tries something so clever with a moment involving a leg you won’t have to look long on the Internet to find people who think it is a plot hole, when in actuality, it’s a character helping the creature because he’s lost it. The characterisation is so bland (probably aiming for subtle, and badly missing) the character never reads like actually losing it until he holds a speech about it. The film is much too coy about actually showing how leg met alien and why for the scene to work at all, and it’s no wonder people do misread what’s going on. It probably sounded like a clever little flourish to add, but again, the script doesn’t put the work in for this part of the plot to feel plausible at all and expects the audience to imagine stuff it doesn’t bother to show them.


The last and most annoying example of the film thinking it is clever for cleverness’s sake is, of course, the ending, when Life attempts to pull what it clearly thinks is a very bright little trick on its audience by lying about what its climax is actually about. That sort of thing can work, but a film really needs to have worked for the audience’s trust and patience up until that point, which this one certainly has not, and really only should use this sort of trick if the realization of what is actually going on in the ending will put everything that came before into a different light for the audience. To my great annoyance, Life opts for using this technique to finagle the usual horror movie bullshit ending. Most horror films save that sort of thing for a single shot pseudo-twist because that’s much less annoying than wasting the potential emotional effect of your whole climax, but then most horror films don’t think they are quite this clever when pulling this sort of crap, unlike Life.

Three Films Make A Post: Prey. Slay. Display.

The Girl on the Train (2016): Tate Taylor’s thriller cleverly plays with the – often somewhat problematic – expectations his audience will have concerning female characters in thrillers, not only subverting these expectations and clichés but also making it a functionally important part of the plot.

Apart from this, the film is also recommended for the general flow of Erin Cressida Wilson’s script – that finds time and place to put a human face on characters who usually don’t get that honour, well, apart from the main villain, that is, but there’s just no way to do that for him without destroying the plot – as well as its brilliant leads in Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett and Rebecca Ferguson and for Taylor’s elegant direction.

Belladonna of Sadness (1973): Eiichi Yamamoto’s non-generic anime (if you take anime to mean all types of Japanese animations) is not just a trippy and heady mix of exploitation, enlightenment and pure weirdness but also a perfect way to recognize the po-faced traditional critic who just can’t recognize art when it’s not presented to him (and it’s invariably a him) in three hour slabs of equally po-faced movie directed by a director permanently in tears about the state of the world or by Fellini, and who always feel the need to reassure themselves they are following a deeply dignified path, where no jokes are allowed, and everything is horrible, and grey. Particularly grey. Why, yes, I looked at some of the reviews this type of reviewer gave this one with the new restoration, how do you know?

In other words, this is a film awesome, and beautiful, and bizarre, inappropriate, and bonkers, stupid, and clever, and exploitative, and sad all in equal measures, taking its art style seemingly from a pop art/LSD-inspired idea of Beardsley and running with that while supposedly adapting Michelet. One really rather watches this one than writes about it.

Ludo (2015): This Bengali horror movie directed by two guys going by the definitely not search engine optimized monikers of Q and Nikon is a curious mixture of the crude, the creepy, the highly generic and the original, as probably behoves a movie concerning the adventures four teens encounter with a cursed ludo variant in a closed for the night shopping mall. Visually, there’s quite a bit to like here, while the storytelling is more than just slightly awkward yet does get into my good books by combining the deeply generic and the locally specific to arrive at its horrors.

Tonally, there seems to be a heavy influence of 70s grindhouse cinema in play, mixed with some kicking against Indian cinematic taboos, and interesting monsters. This doesn’t add up to a particularly tense movie, but it is one that clearly goes its own way for its own reasons after a point, something I can’t help but respect.