Mission: Impossible - Fallout continues to set a high bar for action movies

It’s an indication of the maturity of this franchise; six movies spanning more than twenty years that with this latest episode Tom Cruise and his team allow themselves the luxury of a sequel. There’s enough depth of storytelling, character and generic tropes in Mission: Impossible – Fallout to create a spectacularly satisfying stand-alone film which also fits neatly into the existing M: I canon.

In Fallout we have the return of the villainous Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) from the fifth film and his Syndicate goes even further back to the original TV show. The enigmatic Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) features again from the fifth movie, Mrs Hunt (Michelle Monaghan) is back from the third one and a cameo in the fourth, and of course the ever reliable Luther (Ving Rhames) is on his sixth outing. There’s new blood as well. Not least the shamefully underused Vanessa Kirby as The White Witch, and Henry Cavill in perhaps his best role as the menacing Walker.

At the heart of it all of course is Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, along with Rhames the series’ only ever-present. There’s a body of material to be drawn on here especially in Hunt’s characterisation. The end of the film, for example, relies on a skillset you may have forgotten from the second movie. He’s been doing this for more than 20 years so what keeps him going? The wording of the trademark mission message ‘should you choose to accept it’, makes an interesting subtext. Why does he continue to make that choice?

Although no less dynamic, Cruise manages to make Hunt a little more thoughtful here. As a colleague pointed out Cruise, now 56, approaches each of Hunt’s action stunts with a slight reluctance as if he knows his knees and ankles are going to pay for it in the morning.

The one thing that remains impossible however is the plot. Mission: Unfathomable might be a better title. This time the IMF are looking for three missing plutonium cores which can create three nuclear bombs capable of massive devastation. It doesn’t really matter who has them at any given time or why anyone wants them; the cores are a plot device and they do their job superbly. The quest for the cores keeps the plot moving along at breakneck speed.

Everyone has a motive, sometimes more than one, and everyone is out to double-cross everyone else or so it seems. Don’t worry, every 20 minutes or so screenwriter Chris McQuarrie stop for quite an elegant re-cap exercise. Although I completely understood why Henry Cavill asks at one point ‘Why do you have to make this so bleeping complicated?’ Or words to that effect.

In these days when big budget movies, no matter how honourable their intentions at the start, all tend to end up as a soupy morass of CGI, I’m thinking about Wonder Woman for example, it is refreshing to see the Mission: Impossible franchise continue to rely on good old-fashioned film making skills.

The cinematography (Rob Hardy) and editing (Eddie Hamilton) are absolutely superb and the locations are expertly chosen. I’ve said before in reference to this franchise that it relies on Ian Fleming’s concept of ‘thrilling cities’; exotic background locales which make the foreground action so much more interesting. Locations have seldom been so well used as they are here. And all of it happens under the inestimable supervision of Tommy Gormley, the first assistant director, who makes the cinematic train run on time and here is also, deservedly, credited as co-producer.

The combination of all of this is a film which feels real even though you know it can’t possibly be. The action sequences are jaw-dropping; writer-director McQuarrie gets that car chases depend on what you miss not what you hit for excitement, and the helicopter finale is simply the best I’ve seen. Throughout all of this McQuarrie, for me a much underrated talent, relentlessly maintains the film’s forward momentum.

At a whisker under two and a half hours we are entitled to the occasional lull but it never feels slow. McQuarrie the screenwriter has written a perfectly structured screenplay for McQuarrie the director to take advantage of it.

At the core though is Cruise; the real stellar force of this franchise. The vanity of the Impossible Missions Force is that team members can be swapped out at will, as they were in the first two films. But we all know there is no franchise without Cruise. After six movies he brings gravitas to Hunt and provides a surprisingly emotional foundation for an action movie.

Why does he choose these missions? I don’t know. Will he choose another one? I’d bet on it.

The Rock is in a hard place...and the audience will love it

One of my favourite genre movies is Tremors (1990) in which a small Texas town finds itself under threat from a swarm of giant sandworms. It’s a creature feature but what makes it so good is that director Ron Underwood knows it’s a creature feature and knows what the audience expects. So he uses all the genre clichés – or tropes if you’re getting fancy about it – but does so in such a way that they inform the story rather than inhibit it. The makers of the early Final Destination films did exactly the same thing.

Which brings us to Skyscraper, the second movie of the summer to star The Rock. Two Dwayne Johnson movies in one summer – what a time to be alive. Like Tremors, Skyscraper knows its foundation myths and while this is film fairly and squarely aimed at modern audiences, it has its roots in the past. There are traces of Seventies disaster movies, there is an obvious nod to Die Hard (1988) and there is even a passing glance in the direction of Orson Welles epic finale to The Lady from Shanghai (1947). But all of these improve rather than restrict the storytelling.

Johnson is Will Sawyer a former hostage negotiator turned security consultant who gets the chance to bid for the job of his life, the contract for The Pearl. This is the world’s largest building and is as hi-tech as all get out. Sawyer and his wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) are having the time of their lives in Hong Kong but, as you would expect, there is a catch.

His erstwhile boss has something that the bad guys need. It’s a computer drive but, if I’m honest, I’m not sure what it does or why they need it. Anyway this is our McGuffin and everyone wants to get it. The bad guys decide the best way to do this is to set fire to the building.

The problem is that his wife and kids are in The Pearl and while everyone thinks it’s empty Johnson has to get inside the burning building, ideally around the 100^th floor, above the fire line, and save the day.

That’s it in plot terms. David Mamet says drama hinges on two things; what does a character want and why does it have to be now? In screenwriting terms these are known as ‘stakes’ and Johnson’s stakes are impeccably established. He wants to save his family and he needs to do it now before they are burned alive.

Skyscraper pretty much hits the ground running. Johnson’s character is established in a pre-credit scene in which a situation goes a bit pear-shaped and he ends up losing a leg. The consequent prosthetic plays a huge part in the rest of the story – Sawyer’s artificial limb is like Thor’s hammer, Captain America’s shield, and Indiana Jones’s whip rolled into one.

It’s this level of invention that makes Skyscraper such fun. The plot runs on train tracks, calamity after calamity is heaped upon our hero and armed only with his wits, enormous quantities of duct tape, and his trusty prosthetic, Sawyer has to save the day.

One of the joys of the film is, in these days of over-reliance on CGI and animation, it relies almost entirely on physical effects. Those are real stunts with real stunt people and while there is a lot of green screen for background, there is real physical effort going into this. In addition, the cinematography by Robert Elswit is superb. Elswit is well known in indie circles for his work with Paul Thomas Anderson but, as his work on the Mission: Impossible franchise shows he is something of an action specialist. You can almost feel the heat and smell the smoke here.

Johnson does what Johnson does, and he does it very well; he is the right man in the wrong place at the right time. His physicality is incorporated into the characterisation but even so, the requirements of the role push him to the limit. And, in keeping with most of his movies, he does not hog the action. The female characters in his films tend to have a good deal of agency in the outcome of the story and Neve Campbell is no exception here.

Skyscraper isn’t perfect, the breadcrumbs in the script are a bit obvious, but it is tremendous fun and harks back to a simpler cinematic time while at the same time making the audience gasp with novelty and excitement.

Sicario 2 is a very solid sequel

With the loss of four of the key principals from the first outing – the star, the director, the cinematographer, and the composer – this sequel may appear to be hampered coming out of the gate. However, although it lacks a lot of the nuance and political subtext of Sicario (2015). Sicario 2: Soldado is still a very solid piece of filmmaking which is well worth the price of a ticket.

Although Emily Blunt, Dennis Villeneuve, Roger Deakins, and – tragically – Johan Johannsson are gone, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro are back and in fine form. The most important thing about this second film however is the screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. He is being described in some quarters as the master of the modern Western. Certainly with both Sicario movies, Hell and High Water (2016) Wind River (2017), and the current Kevin Costner series Yellowstone to his credit that seems a fair description.

Having written the 2015 movie, Sheridan had originally conceived the story as a trilogy so this is properly a second instalment rather than a sequel as such. The first film dealt with the war on drugs but now the Mexican cartels have moved on to people smuggling and, we are told, they control most of the illegal cross border trade between Mexico and the United States.

As federal agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) points out people trafficking is a no-brainer for the cartel; they don’t have to grow or process the crop and, if it fails, they will come back for another attempt usually at a higher price.

When a terrorist atrocity in the United States is linked to bombers who were smuggled across the Border, the US government intends to make people trafficking a terrorist offence. Graver is thus given carte blanche to do whatever it takes to stop the cartel so he turns to prosecutor turned hit man Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) to take on the job.

Brolin and Del Toro plan to kidnap the daughter of the cartel boss – the man responsible for the deaths of Del Toro’s family – and make it look like the raid was planned by another cartel. With the gangs then at war the US government should be able to step in and clean up.

If you are familiar with Sicario you will appreciate that such an apparently straightforward plan is destined to become mired in betrayal, bad luck, and political cowardice. The upshot is, without giving too much away, is that Del Toro and the girl are stranded on the Mexican side of the border deep in cartel territory.

Given America’s current immigration scenario the release of this film could hardly come at a more appropriate time. The difficulties of the Trump administration are referred to only obliquely but they provide an interesting backdrop for the story to play out.

Sheridan’s script does a great job of world-building, especially at the start, as we become aware of the tangled web and full extent of the people trafficking operation. The action moves along crisply carrying several story strands at once and managing to tie them together fairly effectively. There was one, for me, unnecessarily sentimental episode at the end of act two which was tonally awkward but otherwise it is highly efficient storytelling.

The action scenes are similarly well-handled, director Stefano Sollima is best known for his Italian crime series Gomorrah (2014) which covers similar territory. However, and this may seem a small quibble, although the violence is brutal at times there is very little moral dimension to it.

In the first film we had Emily Blunt as the audience’s eyes and ears to take us through this moral maze. Without her Sicario 2 deals in absolutes; it’s them and us and the implicit rightness of the US cause means Brolin – good as he is in the role – doesn’t have to have a single moral qualm about his actions.

Despite this lack of layering Sicario 2 delivers on every other level and sets things up nicely for an eagerly-anticipated final instalment of the trilogy.

Ocean's 8 hits most of its marks...so why don't people like it?

There was a fairly high profile article on the BBC’s entertainment website which asked whether Ocean’s 8 was a waste of talent. Leaving aside the obvious and inherent click-bait I still couldn’t help but wonder about the question.

Not about whether it was true but mostly why no one had asked the same of Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Ocean’s Twelve (2004), or indeed Ocean’s Thirteen (2007)? The latter two qualify as a waste of celluloid never mind talent, but there is a whole load of cinematic snobbery in the enquiry.

Ocean’s 8 has no grander ambition than to entertain which, for the most part, it does. Its USP comes from being a gender-flipped version of the Ocean’s Eleven series. Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett take the George Clooney and Brad Pitt roles, Clooney’s Danny Ocean having died sometime in the past 11 years. The cause of death isn’t mentioned but I’m going for a combination of shame and embarrassment after Ocean’s Thirteen.

However by the BBC’s lights we’re invited to see something inherently unworthy in a predominantly female cast. It’s okay for Clooney and Pitt and Matt Damon to exercise their ludic tendencies but Bullock, Blanchett, Anne Hathaway are presumably only allowed out for serious stuff. They are evidently condemned to a career full of Lysistrata and assorted anguished maternal roles.

Like I said, click bait and I’ve spent more time on it than it deserves.

Moving on. Ocean’s 8 is far from perfect but it is good fun and, to its credit, not once does it make a big deal out of its largely female cast. There are no nods or winks and, to a certain extent, the plot unwinds on a gender neutral basis.

Where Danny Ocean wanted to rob casinos, sister Debbie (Bullock) has her eye on robbing the annual Met Gala, specifically a rare necklace worth $150 million which will be on show there. She has been planning the robbery while she was in prison and now she is out she is ready to execute.

The film follows the standard tropes of a classic heist movie; first you put the gang together, then you outline the inevitably fiendishly complicated plot, then you carry out the robbery and, finally, you reveal what they were really up to.

It’s tried and tested and in the best of the genre – The Thomas Crown Affair (1968 or 1999), The Anderson Tapes (1971), or The Hot Rock (1972) – it works to create a soufflé-light confection.  Ocean’s 8 is no soufflé, it’s more of a fondant - mostly light but with a gooey bit in the middle – but it’s still satisfying.

That seems to be the fault of the director Gary Ross and the editor Juliette Welfling. The pacing of the film is fine for the first act but goes seriously awry during the heist itself and there are parts which should be crisp but turn out quite leaden. The gang’s big moment of triumph – to the tune of These Boots Are Made for Walking – should be the money shot. Instead it’s thrown away and a talented cast are sold short.

As is often the case in ensembles the balance of performance is uneven.  Sarah Paulson and Mindy Kaling, for example, don’t get enough to do and Awkwafina is pretty much just a plot point. However Sandra Bullock, for my money the most underrated female lead in the business, is marvellous and there is a nice chemistry between her and Cate Blanchett. Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham-Carter, and Rihanna, also get their chance to shine.

At the end of the day the star power, the sheer scale of the crime and the brio and invention with which it is carried out should be enough to keep the audience happy. Inevitably I suspect a sequel may be in the works and that’s fine by me, I mean it can’t be worse than Ocean’s Thirteen.

Fallen Kingdom puts the Jurassic franchise back on track

Although it was a game-changer in film making terms the Jurassic Park franchise has been a victim of its own success. The first three films – and it’s hard to believe that Jurassic Park is 25 years old – were a throwback to the Cinema of Attractions: we went simply to see the dinosaurs. The human cast were just so much window dressing.

Any time the real world tried to intrude in the subsequent sequels, the results were disappointing. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) features some of the poorest work Steven Spielberg has done as a director when he brought a T. Rex to San Diego. The least said about Jurassic Park III (2001) and its whistling dinosaur skulls the better.

The new trilogy, which began with Jurassic World (2015), is a clever and so far successful attempt to address the issues of the first trilogy, apparently using a template established by the new Planet of the Apes franchise.

Jurassic World was essentially a soft remake of Jurassic Park, this time with giant dinosaurs and a new species of super-predator. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom takes us beyond that in showing us a world where dinosaurs are now a commonplace. Indeed so established have they become that when a volcanic eruption threatens their home on Isla Nublar it is perceived as a potential ecological disaster. There are protests and demands that something must be done.

When these pleas fall on deaf ears it is up to our returning heroes Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard to save the day with a rescue scheme funded by a billionaire recluse who was the former partner of Jurassic Park founder John Hammond. They are however being duped and this is all part of a bigger evil scheme to sell off the dinosaurs to the highest bidder for various nefarious schemes.

None of this information spoils the film; it’s all in the trailer. Although my doubts from the trailer about why you would want to pay millions for a dinosaur are not allayed by the film. What would you do with it? There are vague notions of super dinosaur armies but this whole section is best left unexamined.

Once again the film turns on getting the dinosaurs off the island and the successful difference here is in the choice of director. J.A. Bayona is ideal for this film. He’s done the spectacular stuff with his tsunami movie The Impossible (2012) and the spooky horror stuff with The Orphanage (2007). He is in his element.

The first third of this film zips along at a ferocious clip since Bayona plainly can’t wait to get them off the island, although he does allow us a moment of pathos for the end of Isla Nublar. Then we are into what is essentially an ‘old dark house’ suspense thriller but with added dinosaurs which works very well. The decision to use physical dinosaurs in many of the scenes gives the film added threat and makes the creatures more menacing.

This is probably the first plot-driven Jurassic movie in that the dinosaurs are not treated as spectacle. Bayona has a lot to cram in and there are times when it feels a little over-stuffed even though some of the ideas are interesting and worthy of further exploration. Consequently Pratt and Howard don’t have a lot to do except run hither and yon but there is some nice villainy from Toby Jones and Ted Levine and it’s always nice to see Geraldine Chaplin. She is something of a lucky charm for Bayona having been in all of his features.

By the end of the film good has triumphed, evil has been vanquished and the bad guys have all met satisfyingly horrible ends.

But we are now left with a world much changed and consequences will have to be dealt with – not least in that bit from the trailer you had forgotten about. The implication is that we will be back in Planet of the Apes territory for the third one and, to be honest, I’m intrigued so see how this turns out.

Daedpool 2 rinses and repeats to no great effect

The success of Deadpool (2016) was largely based on the fact that it was a comic book movie that wasn’t really for kids, which is fair enough because comics are no longer aimed at kids. The ultra-violence, the profanity, the sex gags, and all the rest ushered in the age of the adult super hero movie.

It was a huge and deserved hit but it does leave us with a problem. Having broken all the rules first time round, what do you do for an encore? If you’ve changed the game then where do you go from here?

Deadpool 2 hedges its bets. There’s more of the same from the first one but there is also an uncomfortable reliance on conventional superhero tropes; getting the group together, saving the vulnerable, the importance of family, and love conquering all. The problem is that this isn’t really what Deadpool is about.

The film tries hard but the effort seems misplaced. There’s lots of irreverence – a couple of ‘C’ bombs raise the adult language stakes – but it essentially feels repetitive. The first two acts are just spinning their wheels with lots of action but it seems to be more in service of Deadpool the brand rather than the story.

It’s rude, it’s occasionally inventive, and much is made of our hero’s cartoonish invulnerability. It’s well done but pointless. There is a lot of witty voice over but this is lazy writing and a couple of meta gags about lazy writing don’t excuse that. Speaking of meta gags there are plenty of jokes but you need to work for them; this is a movie which allows hard core comic geeks to feel superior. It’s the sort of film that’s accompanied by small pockets of people laughing too hard to demonstrate they’re smarter than you.

The story such as it is concerns Deadpool trying to redeem himself by saving a young mutant (Julian Dennison). In the background is the unkillable Cable, part man, part machine, and wholly indestructible.

Who is Cable and why is he here? Who knows, other than those people laughing too hard of course? The film busies itself with setting up a new super team, X-Force, but this is essentially an elaborate prank. It’s only when Cable explains himself and the third act kicks off that this finally feels like a movie.

From here on in it’s pretty good, even if there is more of that lazy writing in an ending that telegraphs itself a long way out, and in the final analysis the movie will not disappoint.  It is fun but it lacks the brio and wit of the first one.

Ryan Reynolds is fine as Deadpool though I suspect this may end up being a career limiting role and Josh Brolin manages to bring something to Cable which isn’t in the script. Action specialist David Leitch directs crisply and efficiently and the one thing that has to be said is that it doesn’t drag.

On top of that there is a post-credits scene in two parts that may be the best that Marvel have ever done. This, like much of the rest of the movie, will have the hard core fans in ecstasy but they need to be thinking about building their brand and reaching out to a few more agnostics.

Avengers:Infinity War is simply a marvel

It doesn’t seem like ten years since Marvel took a gamble on Iron Man (2008) and launched what became the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And let’s not forget that it was a gamble; Iron Man was not a big-selling character with little in the way of an external profile, and its star was a man with a history of substance abuse, imprisonment, and other issues that had made him almost unemployable.

It was a big win for all concerned. Marvel emerged as a major studio while Robert Downey Jr. became the highest paid star in Hollywood and the linchpin of what became known as the MCU. Simply put Iron Man was a game changer and now ten years and 19 films later Avengers: Infinity War changes the game again.

I had always felt that the audience would grow tired of superhero movies for their own sake. The tagline for Superman (1978) was ‘You’ll believe a man can fly’ and we did, and that was the appeal. The superb performance by Christopher Reeve was a bonus.

Now we believe not only that a man can fly but also that he can shoot webs, burst into flames, emit power beams from his eyes, and do all manner of things. And what’s more we are pretty well inured to the magic of CGI now too. However, this film does manage to test the bounds of credulity with one scene in which a train is seen running through Waverley Station late at night; I know this is fantasy but, come on.

Anyway, in some respects there are parallels here with early cinema. The first ten years of moving pictures is characterised by the film historian Tom Gunning as ‘The Cinema of Attractions’. Simply, audiences were fascinated merely by the fact that they could see things move. Very quickly the attraction paled and they wanted more; in this case narrative. So the story film was born and cinema as we know it developed from there.

That, to me, is pretty much where we are now with the MCU, the DCU and even the Star Wars Universe. We are all spectacled out, we have become bored with sensation and we want a bit of substance. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) was probably peak superhero for its own sake. I remember one scene in that film in which a whole country was being levitated and I neither knew why nor cared.

Now we want more; the super heroics are just another plot strand. Hence Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) becomes a high school movie, Thor: Ragnarok (2017) is a satirical comedy, and Black Panther (2018) is about racial empowerment.

In those terms Infinity War is the most ambitious and sophisticated film that Marvel has attempted. It is, for the most part, a triumph and the perfect way to mark the tenth anniversary of the MCU. It is a film about sacrifice and the nature of heroism; how much of what you love are you prepared to give up in achieving it?

What strikes you most is the scope and ambition of the piece. It is epic in almost every sense. Every significant MCU character is here – with two notable exceptions – and it’s a story that spans time and space. My fear for the film was that it would be over-stuffed but even with, by my count, 27 principal characters there’s little sense of people vying for screen time.

Credit must be given to screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley for the way they have handled the plot. The structure is an old-fashioned comic book trope in that the heroes are split into teams, sent across the universe on a quest, and then brought back for the big finale – Gardner Fox pioneered this in the Justice Society of America comics in the 40s and revived it with the Justice League in the Sixties. This makes the transitions between the scenes easier since the episodic nature and the fades to black mean you don’t have to worry too much about continuity editing; it’s like each quest is a mini movie.

The plot is essentially a treasure hunt. Thanos, the all-powerful ruler of Titan, wants control of the six Infinity Stones scattered across the galaxies – including parts of Edinburgh – so he can enact his plan to save the universe. Kudos to the production designers who have done a superb job in differentiating the locations, so you have no problem in orienting yourself; a major concern in a story this big.

The MCU has had a bit of an issue with satisfactory villains but Thanos delivers the goods. He’s a Nero-like figure; a tyrant who believes he is an artist and actually doing good. His lunatic plan has an underpinning of logic, albeit a twisted logic, and this allows Josh Brolin (above) to bring some nuance to the character. His Thanos operates with a great deal of forbearance; the Marvel heroes don’t really know what they’re doing in his eyes so they’re not wrong, just misguided.

The breadth and depth of the conflict throws up some surprises. Dr Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) turns out to be a lot more pivotal than perhaps you might have thought, and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who has veered between a drunk and a blowhard in previous movies, is finally treated here with the power and majesty he deserves. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man also does well, and Mark Ruffalo brings an interesting dimension to his Hulk.

The pace of the film is impeccably managed. The rhythm of Markus and McFeeley’s script allows moments of humour and pathos between the action scenes. The battle sequences themselves are directed with deceptive ease by the Russo brothers in a manner that looks exactly like the best of Marvel’s comics output.

The two and a half hour running time flies in and even though this is only the first half of a longer story, there is a sense of completeness about it. There is the cliff-hanger to end all cliff-hangers but there is also hope which comes in a post-credits sequence which absolutely should not be missed.