By Colin Covert
FILM: Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation
DIRECTOR: Christopher McQuarrie
ACTORS: Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Jeremy Renner
One of the many talents of Tom Cruise is the ability to elevate a ho-hum movie format into a goodie box of creative surprises. To me, that’s a skill that even tops doing his own stunts. Cruise has sometimes been a cocky 7 out of 10 as a performer, but as a movie-developing producer he’s dependably a 9.5. His Mission: Impossible series has transformed traditional action espionage into high-concept team stories with a crew of clever protagonists, snappy dialogue and gravity-defying stunts.
The new edition, Rogue Nation, is immersive, unpredictable and crammed with more sharp plot hooks than a fishing basket. It’s one of the best wide-release movies of the summer.
Over 19 years — a term far beyond the longevity of any Bond star — Cruise has played undercover agent Ethan Hunt like a dashing freshman on campus. In his 50s now, his charisma and physicality are still good as new. Hunt’s ageless charm never seems to reach beyond his closest Impossible Missions Force allies, though.
The unit’s spotty track record in saving the world has the CIA (led with tongue-in-cheek smarm by Alec Baldwin) trying to disband the IMF in secretive US Senate meetings. Under investigation, Hunt is forced to abandon Simon Pegg’s anxious tech wizard Benji, Ving Rhames’ icewater cool Luther and Jeremy Renner’s analytical Brandt.
Those are badly timed farewells, since a global threat called the Syndicate is about to launch an international splatterfest that only Hunt and his associates can confront.
Rogue Nation takes us from Belarus to Morocco to London, where Hunt clings to vehicles moving at redline speed. Now he’s hanging onto a transport plane taking off, now screeching sideways in a wheel-smoking BMW, now racing alongside a dozen enemies in a lethal game of motorcycle chicken. Cruise doesn’t put on airs of berserk strength and invulnerability. One of the film’s funny touches is seeing Hunt survive each new catastrophe just barely.
He’s not always pushed to the edge of death by hand-to-hand combat. Often he goes there himself. An instant after a near-drowning, he motors across Casablanca with a comically worried Benji in the passenger seat. “Sure you’re OK to drive?” Benji bleats. “A minute ago you were dead.”
How nice to have a hero with no superpowers, just skills and courage.
Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise’s creative partner on Valkyrie, Jack Reacher and Edge of Tomorrow, handles both the script and direction with stylish spin. You can’t guess where the mystery is headed scene to scene, but everything makes sense.
The film has a sophisticated feel, introducing an unidentified, unpredictable femme fatale who could be Hunt’s ally or archenemy. Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson is vibrant in the role, standing out here like Charlize Theron did in Mad Max. Ferguson earns our support whether she’s outfoxing the IMF, the weirdly reserved Syndicate nemesis played by Sean Harris, or Simon McBurney’s manipulative MI6 chief (the film’s bad guys are all British as marmalade).
Her eyes shining with intelligence, Ferguson is a performing equal to Cruise. To orchestrate the emotional tension between the characters, McQuarrie repeats the glorious “Turandot” theme we first encounter in a Hitchcock-style assassination at the Vienna opera house. Even the film’s musical motifs are swanky.
Baldwin’s CIA bulldozer spends most of the running time trying to pull the plug on the IMF’s adventures, but not many viewers will agree. They’re Tom terrific. — Star Tribune (Minneapolis)/TNS
A minor win for the little guy
By Colin Covert
FILM: Ant-Man
DIRECTOR: Peyton Reed
ACTORS: Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Corey Stoll
In its visual focus, the weight of its characters and its storytelling ambition, Ant-Man is the tiniest superhero fantasy in the Marvel universe.
The hero is the little guy incarnate, a shape-shifter growing in strength by shrinking in size. His biggest concern is the safety of his moppet daughter, not the galaxy. The engine of the self-satiric plot is a corporate heist, not an epic alien invasion flattening a metropolis. Other Marvel champions face interlocking challenges to their safety and sanity.
This hero’s top worry is getting stepped on.
The lead character enters the film not by floating down from Asgard, taking a superhuman serum or being bitten by a radioactive spider. He just walks out of prison on release day.
Nice guy Scott Lang (the ever-likable Paul Rudd) was locked away for a multimillion-dollar theft. It was, he repeatedly explains, burglary not robbery. A computer whiz outraged by his money-grubbing employers, he turned digital Robin Hood, returning the ill-gotten wealth to the good people they cheated. Still, a crime is a crime. His good deed put him behind bars and into familial headaches as his ex-wife (Judy Greer) married her cop boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale) and denied Scott visitation to their cute-beyond-words daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson).
His efforts to provide child support payments reveal a streak of cat burglar skills apparently developed in prison. Those talents persuade retired science genius Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) to recruit Scott for a small-scale caper of his own. Very small-scale.
Wearing Hank’s mechanised shrinking suit, bite-sized Scott soon leads an ant army. Don’t shiver if you have insect-phobia, these are computer-created to look less hairy and scary than the real things. They are not the creepy-crawlies that invade your kitchen, but pleasant, helpful aides happy to put a sugar cube in your tea.
Scott befriends a flying ant, imaginatively dubbed Antony, riding it into battle against bad guys who are out to seize the Pym Particle, an invention of Hank’s that could unhinge the world.
While director Peyton Reed includes long periods resembling wide-angle macro photography of half-inch Scott, much of the film is devoted to comedy. Part of it seems inherited from the script created by the project’s originally planned director, Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead). Who but Wright would have crafted a micro-scale battle to a pounding soundtrack of The Cure’s 1989 song Disintegration? Or the fight on a moving Thomas the Tank Engine toy, whose smashing conclusion is the film’s action high point?
Rudd and co-writer Adam McKay (Anchorman), among the team that revised Wright’s story, seem to have created the amusing trio of Scott’s quirky criminal sidekicks. Michael Pe?a, hip-hop hero TI and David Dastmalchian are each distinctively funny. Pe?a’s habit of jitter-jawed storytelling sets off riptides of dialogue flashbacks that are solid gold comedy.
Beyond that, Ant-Man is an ant-i-climax. It doesn’t rise to the screwball audacity of Guardians of the Galaxy. Or Antz. Or A Bug’s Life. But it’s an endearing exercise in style — a playful, small-scale crowd-pleaser that parodies its bombastic Marvel precursors. — Star Tribune (Minneapolis)/TNS
Atmospheric dread, but problems too
By Martin Tsai
FILM: Pay the Ghost
DIRECTOR: Uli Edel
ACTORS: Nicolas Cage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Veronica Ferres
In Pay the Ghost, Nicolas Cage and Sarah Wayne Callies play spouses estranged since the disappearance of their young son while trick-or-treating on Halloween, and though a year has passed since Charlie (Jack Fulton) vanished, college professor Mike (Cage) continues to pass along his latest conspiracy theories to a detective (Lyriq Bent).
Police have treated this as a missing-persons case, despite all the ravens hovering overhead suggesting that they follow another lead: Charlie complained about a shadow outside his window and proceeded to draw it for his art class. He asked, “Dad, did we pay the ghost?” before he was gone in 60 seconds. Since then, his beloved scooter scoots all by itself.
Like so many of Cage’s films made in the last five years, Pay the Ghost seems to be aimed at audiences overseas, where he may be a more viable box-office draw. British author Tim Lebbon’s short story that serves as the basis for the film appeared in the anthology October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween. Although the film preserves the premise, its release has been timed more than a month ahead of Halloween.
The story hints at the depth of its literary roots, with an elaborate exposition drawing on Halloween’s Celtic origin and the tradition’s propagation in the colonial settlements of 1679 New York. But none of this is explored in depth in the film, something that would have enhanced Mike’s character development given his academic background.
Whatever research Lebbon and screenwriter Dan Kay might have undertaken ultimately comes off like the product of a historical walking tour of New York. Other details don’t add up: A struggling academic who just got tenure, Mike inexplicably lives with his family in a two-story brownstone in Lower Manhattan that only millionaires could afford. If he does come from wealth, why not consider ransom as a possible motive for Charlie’s abduction?
Mike is supposed to be a suspect in the investigation, but the film isn’t entirely convincing about this, either. To be fair, Cage is convincing, for the most part. (As Mike confers with a colleague, Cage does seem like he’s merely feeding her lines.)
Tidbits that would make the film interesting have been squandered. Instead, we get the standard-issue haunted-house fodder. The ghosts manifest in so many different ways that it seems like the movie is grasping for straws.
Director Uli Edel, whose filmography ranges from the Oscar-nominated foreign-language film The Baader Meinhof Complex to the Madonna disaster Body of Evidence, credibly creates the atmospheric dread. But that can go only so far. –LA Times
DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha