Movie Review: Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Genre: Action Thriller  

Director: J.J. Abrams  
Starring: Tom Cruise, Michelle Monaghan, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Laurence Fishburne, Billy Crudup, Maggie Q, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Keri Russell  
Running Time: 126 minutes  

Synopsis: Impossible Missions Force Agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is engaged to Julia (Michelle Monaghan), having retired from field duty and settled into the role of a trainer. But when his former trainee Lindsey (Keri Russell) is captured by elusive international weapons dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Ethan returns to duty with his team to mount a rescue in Berlin. He next attempts to kidnap Davian from a Vatican gala to prevent him from peddling the dangerous "Rabbit's Foot" device, but Ethan's exploits have far-reaching consequences involving IMF Directors Musgrave (Billy Crudup) and Brassel (Laurence Fishburne), with a showdown in Shanghai.

What Works Well: The third installment in the franchise achieves superb polish, director J.J. Abrams finally unlocking the potential of the series. Tight editing, a controlled running time, and a steady stream of highlights deliver perfect measures of suspense (the abduction of Davian from the Vatican), stunts (plentiful, but the high-rise jumps in Shanghai are spectacular), and plain high-intensity action (the bridge ambush). Grit (Lindsey's rescue and aftermath) mixes with romance (Cruise and Monaghan sharing good chemistry). The globe-trotting plot is easy to follow, helped by a cast stacked with quality. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a terrific cold-blooded villain and worthy adversary to Cruise's combination of athleticism and intensity.

What Does Not Work As Well: The "Rabbit's Foot" deserved a better explanation, and the political machinations within the IMF Director ranks are half-baked.

Key Quote:

Lindsey (under fire with Ethan in the middle of a firefight): I'm out. How many rounds you got?

Ethan (checks weapon): Enough.

[rises, fires one shot, and takes out the opponent]

Ethan: Now I'm out.

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Movie Review: Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)

Genre: Action Thriller  

Director: John Woo  

Starring: Tom Cruise, Thandie Newton, Ving Rhames, Brendan Gleeson, Anthony Hopkins  

Running Time: 124 minutes  

Synopsis: Impossible Missions Force Agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is tasked with locating rogue ex-agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), who has stolen a priceless pharmaceutical product. Ethan teams up with professional thief and Sean's ex-girlfriend Nyah (Thandie Newton). They fall in love before locating Sean in Sydney, where he is arranging to profit from villainy.

What Works Well: A series of set-pieces in search of a purpose, the first sequel is an intentional exercise in excessive style subjugating any attempts at substance. Director John Woo prolongs every action scene towards inflated operatic grandeur, with dramatic slow-motion and hair-in-the-wind close-ups used as punctuation marks to add more for the sake of more. Car chases, motorcycle duels, hand-to-hand combat, and fierce firefights are all elevated to feats of death-defying mythology. 

What Does Not Work As Well: When it's not convoluted, the plot is inane. Both the antagonists and the love interest are of the instantly forgettable plastic variety, not helped by an underpowered supporting cast. The self-deprecating wit and careful but faulty planning hallmarks of the series are notably absent in favour of unnecessarily serious James Bond derivations, and the face mask trick achieves tiresome irrelevance through overuse. 

Key Quote:

Ethan Hunt: We just rolled up a snowball and tossed it into hell. Now lets see what chance it has.

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Movie Review: Cocktail (1988)

Genre: Buddy Drama 

Director: Roger Donaldson  

Starring: Tom Cruise, Elisabeth Shue, Bryan Brown  
Running Time: 103 minutes  

Synopsis: Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise) leaves the Army and heads to New York City with dreams of making big money. But lacking any college education, he fails to land a corporate job. Veteran bartender Doug Coughlin (Bryan Brown) gives Brian an opportunity as a bartender, and the two men become friends, developing an energetic rapport behind the bar. Brian pursues college business courses, but after a falling out with Doug, he relocates to Jamaica where romance blossoms with the wholesome Jordan (Elisabeth Shue).

What Works Well: Director Roger Donaldson injects energy into the ultimately absurd spectacle of bartender showmanship. Aside from the juggling bottles act, the Doug Coughlin character is an intriguing study in complexity, manipulation, and false wisdom, while the thorny friendship between Doug and Brian exposes the pitfalls of male camaraderie when fueled by the warped metrics of greed and lust. 

What Does Not Work As Well: Seemingly packaged for the primary purpose of promoting soundtrack and poster sales, this is a superficial drama built upon unlikeable characters consumed by narcissism and meanness. Instead of exploring the dangers of the darkness within, Brian is presented as a celebration-worthy central character, despite never maturing beyond a toxic mix of selfishness and juvenile aggression. In a milieu rich with equal opportunity self-absorption, the women who enter the lives of Doug and Brian are either vapid, conniving, or possessing spectacularly poor judgment.

Key Quote:

Doug: The luck is gone / the brain is shot / but the liquor we still got.



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Movie Review: Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)

Genre: Action Thriller  

Director: Edward Zwick  

Starring: Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, Danika Yarosh, Patrick Heusinger  

Running Time: 118 minutes  

Synopsis: Nomadic retired Military Police Major Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) busts a human trafficking ring, then establishes a telephone relationship with his successor Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), who is then suddenly arrested. Reacher suspects she is being silenced for uncovering a weapons smuggling conspiracy in Afghanistan, and helps her escape. They are pursued by a contracted assassin (Patrick Heusinger), and Reacher's efforts to prove Susan's innocence are complicated by teenager Samantha (Danika Yarosh), who may be his daughter.

What Works Well: The quieter and better moments feature Reacher reflecting on whether Samantha could possibly be his daughter, her quick thinking and resourcefulness fueling his suspicions. Reacher also finds a good sparring partner in Susan, who combines professionalism with a refusal to bow to misplaced notions of male superiority.

What Does Not Work As Well: This checklist-driven sequel fails to find a spark. Lacking wit and originality, the action scenes are inserted at numbingly predictable intervals, and executed with mechanical familiarity. The plot is listless, with Reacher and Turner always successfully leaping to the next correct conclusion and destination dispute a scarcity of facts and resources. The enemy-from-within is supposed to be a large and dangerous corporation, but Reacher's only notable on-the-ground rival is a stock hissing villain with no name, supported by an endless army of interchangeable goons.

Key Quote:

Turner: Some folks still wonder why you left.

Reacher: Let's just say I woke up one morning and the uniform didn't fit.

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Movie Review: Valkyrie (2008)

Genre: World War Two Drama Thriller  

Director: Bryan Singer  

Starring: Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Kenneth Branagh, Terence Stamp  

Running Time: 121 minutes  

Synopsis: Already disgruntled with the Nazi regime, the German army's Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) loses an arm and an eye in a North Africa battle. He is subsequently recruited into a group of officers conspiring to overthrow Hitler, including General Olbricht (Bill Nighy), General Beck (Terence Stamp), and General von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh). However, the crafty General Fromm (Tom Wilkinson) remains staunchly non-committal. Stauffenberg conceives a plan to assassinate the Führer, blame the SS for an attempted coup, and activate Operation Valkyrie, a contingency protocol to deploy the reserve army.

What Works Well: Based on actual events, this brisk historical thriller enjoys good pacing and ever increasing tension fueled by risk, courage, and a sense of duty. Director Bryan Singer stages the action within quality sets and hustles tactical details along with admirable efficiency, only pausing to enjoy a couple of preceding assassination attempts. The third act is dedicated to the centrepiece July 20, 1944 bombing-plus-coup, Tom Cruise's confident charisma enhancing a faithful recreation of a chaotically tumultuous day.

What Does Not Work As Well: Despite the efforts of a stellar supporting cast, too many men-in-uniforms jostle for limited screen time, devoid of any depth outside their peripheral plot involvement. Consequently, their vision for a new Germany is opaque.

Conclusion: A worthy tribute to the cause of thwarting evil.

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Movie Review: Lions For Lambs (2007)

Genre: Drama  

Director: Robert Redford  

Starring: Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise, Michael Pena, Andrew Garfield  

Running Time: 92 minutes  

Synopsis: Three separate events take place concurrently. In Washington DC, veteran reporter Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) is granted an interview with up-and-coming Senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise), who outlines a new military strategy for US troops in Afghanistan. In that country, soldiers Arian (Derek Luke) and Ernest (Michael Pena) are caught on a snowy ridge and have to defend themselves against enemy forces. At a California college, political science Professor Malley (Robert Redford) discusses the responsibility of citizen involvement in politics with his student Todd (Andrew Garfield).

What Works Well: Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, this is an honest and balanced debate about the United States simultaneously waging two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Lions For Lambs (the reference is to brave soldiers serving the whims of incompetent leaders) covers the political and intellectual angles on either side of troops dealing with on-the-ground reality. Potent themes include the media's role in a corporate world, failing to learn the Vietnam War lessons, and the rapid erosion of trust in government among young people. The stellar cast ensures engagement throughout the dialogue-heavy scenes, Tom Cruise particularly effective as the charmingly brash Senator not yet scarred by failure. 

What Does Not Work As Well: Although various viewpoints from across the political and generational spectrums are presented, the glare of the obvious regularly defeats subtle messaging.

Conclusion: While soldiers do the actual fighting, the influence battle is waged through verbal sparring.



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Movie Review: Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Genre: Action Drama

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Starring: Tom Cruise, Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller, Val Kilmer, Jon Hamm, Ed Harris

Running Time: 130 minutes

Synopsis: More than 30 years after graduating, Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) returns to the Navy's Top Gun academy. He is tasked with preparing a group of ace pilots for a dangerous mission to destroy an enemy facility in mountainous terrain. The trainees include "Rooster" (Miles Teller), who is the son of Maverick's old buddy Goose, as well as "Hangman" (Glen Powell) and "Phoenix" (Monica Barbaro). Maverick reunites with his old rival "Iceman" (Val Kilmer), now an Admiral, reignites a romance with Penny (Jennifer Connelly), and clashes with Vice Admiral "Cyclone" (Jon Hamm). 

What Works Well: After a 36 year wait, the mix of nostalgia and action is potent. The Ray-Bans, the motorcycle, the irresistible boyish grin, some of the music, and all of the non-conformist attitude return with vigor, this time with an added dash of self-deprecating humour. The echoes of Maverick's past carry strong resonance, while the flight sequences, starring F/A-18 Super Hornets, feature real hardware and minimal CGI. Director John Kosinski pays homage to Tony Scott's legendary aerial aesthetics for a mission:impossible requiring canyon flying, gravity-defying climbs and dives, and precision targeting. The final 40 minutes are a non-stop old-fashioned action thrill ride.

What Does Not Work As Well: The inter-character dynamics, rivalries, and dialogue are from the 1980s school of elemental emotions.

Conclusion: The second trip to the danger zone is just as good.



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Movie Review: Knight And Day (2010)

A humorous spy action thriller, Knight And Day demands brain dis-engagement then provides a fun dose of non-stop adventure.

June Havens (Cameron Diaz) restores classic cars for a living. While catching a flight to attend her sister's wedding, she bumps into Roy Miller (Tom Cruise). On the plane he subdues a team of assassins and crash lands into a cornfield. June realizes Roy is a CIA agent and she is now mixed-up in his wild world.

Roy has seized a small perpetual energy battery developed by genius scientist Simon Feck (Paul Dano), to prevent his evil ex-partner agent John Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard) from selling it to an international arms dealer. But Fitzgerald has convinced his boss CIA Director Isabel George (Viola Davis) that Roy has gone rogue. In the globe-trotting adventure that ensues, Roy has to keep June and Simon safe while revealing Fitzgerald's motives and ensuring the battery does not fall into the wrong hands.

Directed by James Mangold and written by Patrick O'Neill, Knight And Day is a glitzy frolic. While undoubtedly entertaining as an almost old-fashioned star vehicle for Cruise and Diaz, this is also an artificial and relatively soulless exercise, often overpowered by special effects and lacking in anything resembling character depth.

The plot is a classic and most basic MacGuffin escapade, a new and barely explained perpetual energy battery enough of a device to instigate numerous chases around the globe. The logic holes are glaring, but the set-piece highlights are plentiful and spiked with humour, including the fight on the plane followed by a raucous crash landing, a stunt-filled freeway chase and shootout, and a re-invention of the running with the bulls. All are well executed despite erring on the side of bloat, Mangold using a running joke about Roy drugging June to get her out of jams as a shortcut to not even bother with some of the narrow escapes. Cruise again throws himself into the stunt work to enhance the awe factor.

In terms of performances, Cruise and Diaz are celebrities enjoying themselves while trading on their pre-established personas and unburdened by the need to act. So little is revealed about Roy and June they may as well be glossy magazine cut-outs thrown onto the same page. Paul Dano, Peter Sarsgaard, and Viola Davis are wasted with even broader sketch strokes.

Knight And Day has all the planes, trains, automobiles, and motorcycles to create a festival of flashy kinetics, the toys plentiful even if the heart is missing.



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Movie Review: Oblivion (2013)

A post-apocalyptic science fiction drama, Oblivion is visually gorgeous but compromised by substantive logic gaps.

In 2077, the moon has been destroyed and Earth is uninhabitable after a war with invading alien scavengers ("scavs"). The humans won the war but relocated to Saturn's Titan moon, leaving the gigantic Tet spaceship to orbit Earth. 

Maintenance technician Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his communications partner Vika (Andrea Riseborough) are among the few humans on Earth. Taking instructions from their commander Sally (Melissa Leo) on Tet, they are completing a five year stint maintaining military drones that hunt remaining scavs and protect massive generators converting the ocean's waters to energy.

Jack and Vika are supposed to have had their memories wiped before their maintenance mission, but Jack suffers from persistent flashbacks featuring a mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko). He has also discovered a pasture where nature is recovering, and he yearns to stay on Earth. After he locates a signal broadcasting into space, a human spaceship crash lands. The behaviour of the drones at the crash site and the story of the sole survivor force Jack to question everything he knows.

A combination of dystopian nightmare and hopeful resiliency-of-humanity epic, Oblivion offers plenty to admire. Written and directed by Joseph Kosinski, the cinematography is a feast for the eyes. With seamless CGI effects, the destroyed and abandoned Earth is a desolate, engrossing place, haunted by the remnants of an exploded moon. The command centre in the sky is sleek, and the spacecrafts and drones are clever, agile machines. 

Starting with a well-constructed premise but always hinting at the potential for curves, the plot basics are intriguing. Kosinski reveals the hidden layers of his story in increments, maintaining a good level of curiosity with a succession of twists. Unfortunately, many of the highlights are also familiar from other movies, and under any cursory level of examination the plot details disintegrate.

Also less successful are a couple of unnecessary action scenes thrown in as a check-box exercise. These are notably out of place and poorly executed. The drones invade a hideout, and then pursue a craft in canyon-like terrain, and both sequences are derivative, choppy, and edited with a hatchet.

The cast is small and led by a typically magnetic Tom Cruise performance. Jack Harper benefits from a complex backstory, and Cruise savours it with inquisitive conviction. Andrea Riseborough teases out the tension within a conflicted character, but Melissa Leo has less to. Morgan Freeman and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau enter the narrative about halfway through in smallish but pivotal roles.

Oblivion works best as a tableau of artistry, a vision to be admired from a distance, the details best left unexamined.



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Movie Review: Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

A thrill-a-minute action movie, Mission: Impossible - Fallout delivers expertly constructed and exhilitaring set-pieces with astounding stunt work, but tilts towards over-the-top extremes.

Agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) accepts an assignment to retrieve missing plutonium before it falls into the hands of an anarchist terrorist group led by the mysterious John Lark, who filled the void created when Ethan apprehended mastermind Solomon Lane (Sean Harris).

Working with his support members Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), Ethan finds but loses the plutonium in a botched transaction in Berlin. This failure prompts the CIA's Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) to insist her agent Walker (Henry Cavill) accompany Ethan, over the objections of IMF's Secretary Hunley (Alec Baldwin). 

Using information extracted from a rogue Norwegian nuclear scientist, Ethan's team heads to Paris to disrupt a meeting between Lark and black market dealer White Widow (Vanessa Kirby). After reuniting with MI6's agent Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), Ethan is forced to improvise by adopting a terrorist persona, and learns that Lane's release is part of a maniacal revenge and mass murder plot, with Ethan's ex-wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) in imminent danger.

The sixth installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Fallout is stacked with exactly what the series promises: a succession of hair-raising chases, impossible yet possible stunts, and dazzling oh no! moments. Every plan is well thought-out but nothing ever goes according to plan, on-the-fly innovation is a core ingredient, and every twist is followed by a turn to throw doubt on everything and everyone. And in the hands of star/co-producer Tom Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, quality and confidence ooze from every scene.

But yet signs of flab creep in. At 147 minutes this is a really long haul. Many of the chases should have been more sharply edited, and one or two of the pursuits could have been dispensed with altogether. In a subversion of real-time tension, the final 15 minutes (featuring the de rigeur countdown to the small matter of multiple nuclear bomb explosions) seem to take twice as long to tick by. And the humour starts to creep towards Roger Moore-era Bond shenanigans, sharp wit replaced by eye-rolls.

As for the plot, this is classic MacGuffin territory. The plutonium balls are an excuse for agile hops to snazzy locations in Berlin, Paris and London, ending with a trip to a rustic medical camp in Kashmir. The neck-snapping double and triple-crosses between all the assembled agents border on incomprehensible, but McQuarrie takes care to always explain what is going on and why (whether it makes sense or not), and particularly excels in rational, non-nausea-inducing editing of the chase and hand-to-hand combat scenes.

And Cruise continues to astound by performing all his own stunts, and some are truly jaw-dropping. The breathless motorcycle, car, and foot chases are here augmented by extraordinary fun with helicopters (inside and out), and Cruise earns enormous respect by placing his body on the line for some of the most impressive stunts captured on film.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout succumbs to some excess, but still delivers a blast.



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Movie Review: Jack Reacher (2012)

A clever action thriller, Jack Reacher unleashes an irresistible crime investigator onto a convoluted conspiracy.

In Pittsburgh, five innocent civilians are killed in a seemingly random sniper attack. Physical evidence leads Detective Emerson (David Oyelowo) to ex-army sniper and Iraq war veteran Barr (Joseph Sikora), who is summarily arrested. A stunned Barr requests help from Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise), a crime investigator who served with him in the army and now lives a nomadic off-the-grid existence.

Jack teams up with Barr's lawyer Helen (Rosamund Pike), who is also the daughter of District Attorney Rodin (Richard Jenkins). Jack is aware of Barr's unhinged behaviour in the army, but his investigation into the Pittsburgh killings suggests Barr was the fall guy for a larger conspiracy. Both Jack and Helen are soon targets of the ruthless criminal enterprise behind a sinister plot.

An adaptation of the book One Shot by Lee Child, Jack Reacher is a slick and relatively grounded crime thriller. Director Christopher McQuarrie and star Tom Cruise combine to deliver quick paced and special effects-free action with a dash of biting humour. Rational editing, glistening night-time cinematography, an involving plot, and a cheeky attitude elevate the entertainment value.

Of course with Reacher quickly established as the epitome of cool heroism, some suspension of disbelief is required to ride out his antics. Reacher can outfight any number of goons, even when he literally finds himself with only a knife in the middle of a gunfight. He out-thinks friends and enemies alike, connecting barely visible conspiracy dots with remarkable prescience. And on close inspection, the central evil plot carries the whiff of bad guys choosing the most complicated route towards achieving their objective.

But the highlights are plenty. McQuarrie stages a one-against-many street fight with panache, and follows it up with a hilarious confined quarters brawl. The car chase scene is an epic two-chases-in-one combo delivered with exceptional control. And the final showdown is suitably orchestrated at an isolated quarry, with caustic humour sustained to the bitter end.

In addition to his radiant charisma, Cruise adds to the sense of realism by performing all his own stunts, and struts through the film with brilliant arrogance. Pike struggles to match him in a marginally frantic performance. Robert Duvall rolls back the years in a crusty role as the operator of a shooting range reluctantly drawn into the mayhem, while Jenkins and Oyelowo contribute robust support. Celebrated director Werner Herzog adds cold menace in a small acting role.

Discarding gadgets and over-the-top imagery in favour of polished grit, Jack Reacher is a welcome embrace of brainy basics.



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Movie Review: Tropic Thunder (2008)

A satire about actors and their rampant self-admiration, Tropic Thunder is vulgar, bloody and hilarious.

Five actors are part of an expensive crew on location to shoot Tropic Thunder, a Vietnam war epic based on the memoirs of veteran Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte).

• Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) is a fading action movie star with one last chance to salvage a career. 
• Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) is a low-brow comedian and heroin addict looking for respect. 
• Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) is an award-winning method actor who has undergone revolutionary skin darkening surgery to play a black soldier. 
• Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) is a rapper and energy drink promoter attempting to launch an acting career.  
• Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel) is a relatively new actor, and the only one who has bothered to read the book or the script.

The director is Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan), and he has trouble keeping all the egos in check. Cody (Danny McBride) is the explosives expert, and thanks to Cockburn incompetence detonates a massive explosion when the cameras are not rolling. Back in Hollywood, Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey) is Tugg's agent, keen to ensure his star has what he needs to survive the jungle ordeal, while studio boss Les Grossman (Tom Cruise) is worried about his investment.

To toughen up the actors Cockburn agrees with Tayback's suggestion to drop them deep in the jungle with no support and film with hidden cameras. But the chosen location is in the Golden Triangle, where the vicious Flaming Gang runs a heroine operation. As the actors wander into the danger zone, Tugg still believes they are filming a movie, but Kirk starts to suspect something is very wrong.

An almost miraculous combination of action, comedy, gore and satire, Tropic Thunder grabs a movie-within-a-movie premise and squeezes hard. Director Ben Stiller wrote the screenplay with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, and they take direct aim at directors, producers and agents within their own industry, but skewer actors with particular venom.

And the film is a spectacular spoof made successful thanks to relatively sharp writing and a terrific cast in top form. Robert Downey Jr. stands out and deserves credit for taking a potentially disastrous blackface construct and selling it as the epitome of method acting. His Kirk Lazarus stays in characters no matter what is happening in the jungle, spouting inane lines about performance art and scoring the film's biggest laughs.

The other unforgettable role is Tom Cruise as producer Les Grossman, screaming scatalogical threats down phone lines and then pulling off legendary dance movies while concocting an evil plan to turn a turkey into a monetary windfall.

Tropic Thunder also features surprisingly effective action scenes, and in classic war movie fashion these are interspersed with character interactions to build up depth. The conversations are often debates as to whether the stranded actors are in a real or make-believe conflict zone, and the surreal topic provides a suitably ridiculous basis to tease out the various personalities, often wracked with deep-seated insecurities or on the verge of full-out panic.

The humour is a combination of lewd, cringy and disgusting with a large dollop of severed body parts, and remarkably, most of it works.

Equal parts obnoxious and fearless, Tropic Thunder is a preposterous explosion.

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Movie Review: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

A spy thriller, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation packs in impressive amounts of glossy action but almost overloads its own plot.

After intercepting a shipment of chemical weapons in Minsk, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) of the Impossible Mission Force travels to London and comes face to face with his nemesis Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), the leader of The Syndicate, an evil global terrorist group. With the unexpected help of undercover British operative Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), Hunt escapes Lane's clutches.  Meanwhile CIA Director Hunley (Alec Baldwin) shuts down IMF, much to the disappointment of Hunt's boss Brandt (Jeremy Renner).

Ethan reemerges six months later, calling on his IMF colleague Benji (Simon Pegg) to join him in Vienna where they attempt to prevent an assassination at the Opera House, which leads to a reteaming with Ilsa in Casablanca. The hobbled IMF has to disrupt Lane's nefarious plans to secure access to billions in illicit funds, but Lane always seems to be several steps ahead of his pursuers.

After the spectacular success of 2011's Ghost Protocol, the Mission: Impossible series returns with the still slick but slightly bloated Rogue Nation. Frequent Tom Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie writes and directs this fifth chapter, and delivers the expected non-stop thrills, humour, country-hopping and wild stunt scenes expected of the series. More than ever a James Bond influence creeps in, certainly jazzed up but evident in a rather harried plot and underlined by a knowing emerge-from-the-water-in-a-bikini moment.

At 131 minutes, Rogue Nation does go on. The mandatory MacGuffin in this case has something to do with a triple encrypted digital file stored in a fortified bunker, but overall the story gets more convoluted, less interesting and increasingly blurry by the minute. Better to acknowledge the plot as the flimsiest of excuses to justify the set-pieces, and when it matters McQuarrie and Cruise deliver with eye-popping expertise.

A stand out sequence involve a quadrangular wild motorcycle and car chase, the Mission: Impossible series yet again proving new life can be found in one of the oldest action movie cliches, the rational editing adding immensely to the enjoyment level. Even better is an underwater infiltration to swap a computer card involving exceptional physical exertion laced with humour and late heroics.

The character of Ilsa Faust injects the series with feminine clout and provides Ethan Hunt with a worthwhile counterpart, ally and rival. With Rebecca Ferguson providing plenty of resolute oomph, Ilsa plays a more prominent role than most of the IMF members, with Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell suffering the most notable relegation to the background.

Never pretending to be weighty, Rogue Nation is a fast paced and agile romp through the world of high octane thrills.

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Movie Review: War Of The Worlds (2005)

A science fiction thriller, War Of The World boasts slick special effects, a character-centred story and a sturdy Tom Cruise performance.

In New Jersey, port crane operator Ray (Cruise) has custody of his kids, moody teenager Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and the younger Rachel (Dakota Fanning), for a few days as their mom Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) visits her family in Boston. After a strange-looking storm causes multiple lightning strikes, massive advanced technology tripod war machines burst from below the ground, piloted by evil aliens intent on annihilating humanity and occupying Earth.

Mass casualties ensue, and Ray goes on the run with Robbie and Rachel, generally heading towards Boston. Along the way they encounter other survivors, and have to survive multiple attacks by the rampaging tripods. An attempted ferry river crossing causes a riot and exposes the worst of humanity. Robbie very much wants to join the outgunned army to try and fight back against the aliens, while Ray and Rachel take refuge in the basement of rough survivalist Harlan (Tim Robbins), who causes his own set of problems.

An adaptation of the classic H.G. wells story directed by Steven Spielberg, War Of The Worlds is a consistently exiting and tense science fiction thriller, with a tight focus on a reluctant father suddenly faced with a large dose of responsibility. The CGI is mostly convincing, and the visual scope and ambition are never less than impressive.

Comprehensively breaking away from his previous aliens-are-friendly ethos demonstrated in Close Encounters of The Third Kind and E.T. The Extraterrestrial, here Spielberg has no qualms defining the invaders as pure evil beings intent on literally sucking humanity dry. And the film quickly gets to the point, the invaders emerging from the sky, activating their long-hidden death machines from subterranean hideouts, and carrying out the business of killing with ruthless efficiency.

To maintain a reasonable level of bloodless and gore-free family friendliness (at least for families with older kids), the aliens initially kill by vaporizing the squishy humans. But Spielberg does emphasize the horror in a chilling riverfront scene exposing the extent of the genocide, and later the landscape is colored a sinewy red as the grotesque details of the invasion are revealed.

War Of The Worlds does not get everything quite right. The interlude in Harlan's basement does serve to slow down the mayhem and introduce tension instead of mass and breathless destruction, but it goes on for too long and eventually threatens to spiral into a whole different movie. And the ending is first too rushed and then too Spielbergian, a bittersweet opportunity squandered.

Tom Cruise radiates star presence at the heart of the film. With Ray not asked to accomplish anything other than save his kids, Cruise demonstrates the true meaning of heroism. Dakota Fanning, all of 11 years old, is affecting as the terrified kid forced to grow up in an awful hurry.

War Of The Worlds ponders the potential inconsequentiality of the human species, a vision both nightmarish and undeniably entertaining to imagine.

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Movie Review: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

A spectacular spy action film, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is an expertly crafted thriller with terrific set-pieces and breathless yet controlled pacing.

Agent Hanaway of the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) is killed by assassin Sabine Moreau (Léa Seydoux) in Budapest while on a mission to retrieve Russian nuclear missile launch codes. Agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is rescued from a Russian prison by agents Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Jane Carter (Paula Patton), and immediately sent on a mission to infiltrate the Kremlin in search of records belonging to a man known as Cobalt, intent on initiating a global nuclear war.

The mission goes wrong, the Kremlin is destroyed and Hunt's team is blamed. The IMF is shut down but the Secretary (Tom Wilkinson, uncredited) surreptitiously gives Hunt instructions to stop Cobalt, but with no back-up resources. Cobalt is revealed to be Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), a mad scientist who believes world peace can be achieved after a nuclear holocaust. Hunt, Dunn, and Carter are joined by analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and head out to Dubai, where Moreau is planning a meeting to sell the nuclear launch codes to Hendricks.

Directed by Brad Bird, Ghost Protocol is the fourth installment in the Mission:Impossible franchise. The film gets everything right: a good and always coherent story drives the action, the main characters are well-defined and each gets an opportunity to shine, and the right doses of sly humour pepper the proceedings. The action scenes are exquisitely crafted, the stunts are innovative and genuinely thrilling, and finally, the editing is sublime. Editor Paul Hirsch finds the sweet spot where the scene composition conveys risk and excitement without resorting to jerkiness, micro-edits or losing the stunt context.

A large part of the Ghost Protocol charm resides in Hunt's team often screwing up. Many of the ruses that they try do not quite work, forcing the team to innovate to Plan B, and sometimes Plan C, on the fly. These are protagonists prone to failures, sometimes overestimating their own trickery, and having to rely on quick thinking to rescue each subsequent situation.

Many of the set-pieces are nothing short of magnificent. Hunt and Dunn infiltrate the Kremlin with the help of an unwieldy on-the-fly virtual reality screen to simulate an empty hallway. Hunt (with Cruise doing his own stunt work) has to climb on the outside of Burj Khalifa in Dubai, using unreliable sticky gloves. And as if the climb up was not challenging enough, the return down is even trickier, this time without the gloves.

The deception in the Dubai hotel rooms, where Hunt's team attempts to smoothly disrupt the transaction between Moreau and Hendricks, contains wonderfully staged suspense. The venerable car chase finds new life within a raging sandstorm. And the climax occurs at an automated multi-level parkade in Mumbai, a vertical and uncooperative jigsaw puzzle.

The film is elegantly paced. Quiet scenes intermingle with frantic chases, and room is created for the team to regroup at regular intervals. Special effects are used strategically, and most of the film offers a grounded, realistic aesthetic. The slower-paced but still tension-filled interludes include an elegant cocktail party in Mumbai and a couple of heist-style break-ins.

Amidst all the action, the script (by Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec) finds time to add to the backstories of the main characters. Carter has her personal reasons for going after Moreau; Brandt has a painful history with IMF which will take time to emerge, and Hunt himself has an elaborate background plan churning away, barely perceptible underneath the main plot.

Fun, gripping and wildly entertaining, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol strides to the pinnacle of the action spy movie genre.

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Movie Review: Days Of Thunder (1990)

A sports drama and romance, Days Of Thunder is a sophomoric redux of Top Gun with fast cars replacing fast fighter jets.

Car dealership owner Tim Daland (Randy Quaid) convinces semi-retired engine builder Harry Hogge (Robert Duvall) to get back into NASCAR racing and mentor hot new driver Cole Trickle (Tom Cruise). Harry reluctantly agrees, as Cole proves to be naturally talented but clueless about car mechanics and race craft.

On-track Cole tangles frequently with aggressive driver Rowdy Burns (Michael Rooker), until he finally starts to listen to Harry and learns how to win. But a big crash sends both Cole and Rowdy into hospital, where Cole meets and starts a relationship with neurosurgeon Dr. Claire Lewicki (Nicole Kidman). With Cole temporarily out of commission, hot new rookie Russ Wheeler (Cary Elwes) gets a chance to prove himself, and soon he is challenging Cole for on-track supremacy.

Producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, director Tony Scott and star Tom Cruise get back together to retell an overly-family story: the naturally talented but raw and troubled young man with all the determination in the world who just needs a mentor to guide him to his true potential. Days Of Thunder of course also throws in the cheesy romance with the beautiful woman in a position of authority, this time Nicole Kidman convincing no one as a neurosurgeon.

Deprived of the opportunity to film elegant fighter jets against orange skies, Tony Scott is confined to the grittiness of the race track, and he makes all the wrong choices. NASCAR is reduced to a ridiculous jousting contest, drivers using their cars as weapons at every opportunity, dangerous manoeuvres the order of the day as the competitors routinely look to crash each other and "put him in the wall".

The characters are shallow, the emotions derived from the self-help pop-psychology bargain bin, and the final triumph as obvious as it is hollow. None other than Robert Towne wrote the banal script, which mostly consists of cliched lines.

Duvall does his best to inject undeserved gravitas, and despite the familiarity of the material Cruise exudes his special brand of star power, although here it veers towards self-parody.

Days Of Thunder is a race of blunders, going around in predictable circles.

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Movie Review: American Made (2017)

A ridiculously fun yet incredible biographical adventure inspired by real events, American Made is a mad dash across a warped corner of the Cold War.

It's the late 1970s, and Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) is a restless TWA pilot based in Baton Rouge and married to Lucy (Sarah Wright Olsen). Always on the lookout for adventure, Barry is recruited by the CIA's Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson) and agrees to start flying covert missions over Central America to photograph communist rebel bases. He establishes a daredevil reputation, connects with a Colombian drug gang (including the soon-to-be notorious Pablo Escobar) and starts to smuggle cocaine onboard the CIA plane, with stopovers in Panama where a young Manuel Noriega gets a cut.

When Barry gets into trouble with the Colombian authorities, Schafer intervenes and offers a new mission: flying guns to the Nicaraguan Contras, a ragtag militia supposedly waging a counterrevolution against the Sandinista government. The CIA relocates Barry and his family to the tiny community of Mena, Arkansas, where he is soon running his own airline, fulfilling the CIA's wacky anti-communist missions but getting insanely wealthy with his expanding drug smuggling enterprise.

Inspired by real people and events, American Made is an it-should-be-too-wild-to-be-true romp through the world of covert CIA missions as the Cold War disintegrated into batty dirty wars. The film is also a fictionalized profile of the actual Barry Seal, a thrill-seeking pilot who found a home in the CIA's anything-goes approach to espionage, and could never resist a little something extra on the side for personal gain.

Director Doug Liman has a personal interest in this slice of history. He is the son of lawyer Arthur Liman, chief counsel for the Senate Iran-Contra hearings. As a result American Made is more patient with historical facts than is typical for Hollywood; the film pauses at the right times and for the right durations for Seal to explain the raging geopolitics and mission logistics, and it's all done in a humorous yet effective tone.

The pace is furious and rich with content. While painting a vivid contextual picture of the times through real footage of Presidents Carter and (especially) Reagan on television selling a sterilized version of the real story, the film gallops from one incident to the next with confidence. Seal hops furiously between hidden Colombian airstrips in the jungle, airdrops over the Louisiana swamps, stopovers in Panama, ramshackle rebel bases in Nicaragua, his rapidly unraveling home life with a wife, kids and troublesome brother-in-law JB (Caleb Landry Jones), and still finds time to build a multi-plane contraband business while evading a host of law enforcement departments.

Tom Cruise is at his charismatic best, the role of Barry Seal fitting his screen persona like a glove: fearless, mischievous and able to talk his way out of most hellholes. Domhnall Gleeson ghosts in and out of the film as only a spy can, while Sarah Wright Olsen gives the long suffering Lucy just a bit of a memorable edge.

American Made features plenty of harrowing flights, but the film is an exquisitely smooth trips.

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Movie Review: Edge Of Tomorrow (2014)

A science fiction military action film, Edge Of Tomorrow (also marketed as Live. Die. Repeat.) makes the most out of a gritty time loop battlefield premise.

In the near future, Earth has been invaded by a destructive and seemingly unstoppable alien species known as the Mimics. With Europe largely occupied, a human army is assembled in England to prepare a massive counterattack, emboldened by a new exoskeleton weapons system. General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) presses Public Affairs Officer Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) into covering the front line, despite Cage's lack of combat training. Very much against his will, Cage joins J Squad under the command of Master Sergeant Farell (Bill Paxton) as they prepare for the invasion on the next day.

The human army is ambushed on the beaches by massive Mimic forces, and Cage duly dies, but not before spotting the famous Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) in the midst of combat. During the battle Cage is splattered by the blood of a rare alien command species, giving him special powers to loop back in time, and he awakes on the previous day back in the clutches of Farell and J Squad. He repeatedly relives the massacre on the beach, trying to learn from each day's experience to influence the outcome of battle. He finally connects with Vrataski on the day before the invasion, and together they have to figure out a way to destroy the main brain behind the Mimics before Earth is annihilated.

A fusion of Groundhog Day and wicked Aliens-on-Earth engaged in an existential Saving Private Ryan scale battle, Edge Of Tomorrow is an adaptation of the Hiroshi Sakurazaka book All You Need Is Kill. Directed by Doug Liman, the film contains enough human interaction between the charismatic Cage and the jaded Vrataski to infuse the action scenes with meaningful emotion. The combat setting, on the beaches of France and then pushing into the continent, is intended to bring echoes of World War Two to life, the fight against evil this time not so much about ideology but rather human survival.

Edge Of Tomorrow recreates the video game experience of frequent dying, re-spawning and trying again, every attempt intended to improve forward progress by small margins. Death is no longer final, just a momentary frustration that comes with the aggravation of having to replay the familiar in order to venture a few more steps into the new. Ironically, this is the feature stripped out of game-to-movie adaptations, here embraced in a non-adaptation that capitalizes on the value of learning what does not work in order to find what does.

For Vrataski, every day is new. For Cage, it will take a multitude of attempts to save Earth. He cannot succeed without failing, and his frustration and evolution into an efficient killing machine go hand in hand. In depicting this procress, Liman cleverly holds his cards close to his chest: once the premise is set, the film is often intentionally unclear until late in a scene whether events are depicting Cage's first attempt at navigating new terrain, or the umpteenth time.

Less successful are the CGI-dominated action scenes. Most of the Mimics are a swirl of tentacles, and the combat scenes are frantic and fuzzy rather than fearsome.

Tom Cruise is in his element as the roguish public affairs officer dealing with a new and unwelcome reality, Cruise's comfort with the more cerebral elements of action serving the film well. Emily Blunt is intense and bordering on dour, but carries the flag for feminine fighters acquiescing to no one.

Edge Of Tomorrow is a breath of original air, and a breathless exercise in racing against time -- repeatedly.

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Movie Review: All The Right Moves (1983)

A coming of age sports drama, All The Right Moves benefits from a gritty small-town setting, excellent cinematography and a raw, unfiltered attitude towards themes of desperation and ambition. A dedicated Tom Cruise performance is an added bonus.

In tough economic times, the small steel town of Ampipe, Pennsylvania is slowly dying, with The American Pipe and Steel factory the only major employer. The high school students are mostly descendants of Eastern European immigrants, and the brighter students are anxious to secure college scholarships or face a dour future in a dwindling industry. The high school's football team is one avenue for a sports scholarship, and defensive back Stef Djordjevic (Cruise), entering his graduation year, dreams of doing enough on the football field to win the attention of a good college where his dream is to study engineering.

Others have similar ambitions, including teammate and best friend Brian (Chris Penn), while Stef's girlfriend Lisa (Lea Thompson) also wants to leave Ampipe to pursue studies in music. Even the school's football coach Nickerson (Craig T. Nelson) is angling for a better job as a college team defensive coordinator. With the football season drawing to a close and a big game against an undefeated rival coming up, Nickerson pushes his players to their limit, leading to an epic on-field performance but plenty of unintended consequences.

Directed by Michael Chapman with cinematography by Jan de Bont, All The Right Moves is an unblinking view of personal agendas in a forlorn town facing austere economic times. Beautifully filmed to capture the grit, grime bleakness and perpetual dampness of a steel town where the only certainty is a dead-end job, the film is all about individuals thinking of their own futures and plotting a lonely, anywhere-but-here course.

The Michael Kane script refuses all the easy short cuts, and indeed allows Stef to discover the many ways that he can sabotage his own prospects. The film is really about all the wrong moves, and for long stretches Stef, Brian and many of their teammates face the unappetizing prospect of staying in Ampipe for all the wrong reasons. There are unwanted surprises with girlfriends, blow-ups with the coach, relationship breakdowns, mistakes on the field, and acts of mischief and petty crime that derail the already tenuous plans to escape life in the steel factory.

The tension between Nickerson and his players is at the heart of the film, and Craig T. Nelson deserves a lot of credit for creating an unsympathetic, hard-nosed high school football coach just as desperate as his students to find something better. Nickerson pushes his players to perform and think as a team, but whether he actually cares or is using them to better his own prospects is open to interpretation. The film creates a premise where both the coach and the players are scheming beyond the collective, and yet everyone needs the team to be successful for personal reasons.

For a film set in a football milieu, there is just the one football game, and de Bont captures the action in coherent and exciting takes. Plenty of time is spent at the training field, a deglamourized place overtaken by mud where the coach cuts his players to size while injecting just enough encouragement to make his abuse barely palatable.

Released two months after Risky Business, All The Right Moves confirmed Cruise's stature as the hottest emerging star in Hollywood. As Stef Djordjevic Cruise builds on his persona as a young man more than capable of getting himself into a lot of trouble, and then having to methodically work his back into his starting position. Lea Thompson gives the girlfriend role a sharper edge than usual as she stands up for herself and avoids cliches and daydreams about happily ever after.

All The Right Moves suffers from a really dreadful 1980s music soundtrack, but otherwise makes a sharp turn towards a fulfilling story of concentrated struggles on and off the field.

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