Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

Tom Cruise is within earshot of Rebecca Ferguson.

(2015) Action (Paramount) Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, Ving Rhames, Sean Harris, Simon McBurney, Jingchu Zhang, Tom Hollander, Jens Hulten, Alec Baldwin, Mateo Rufino, Fernando Abadie, Alec Utgoff, Hermione Corfield, Nigel Barber, James Weber Brown, America Olivo, Adam Ganne, Eva-Marie Becker. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

When we go to the movies in the summer, it is with a different expectation than when we go in the fall. In the autumn and winter months, we expect something more thoughtful, something challenging. In the summer, we want spectacle. We want things blowing up and car chases and bullets flying but never ever hitting the hero, who is usually a big Hollywood star. We wanted to be wowed.

Well, nobody ever accused the Mission: Impossible franchise of failing to give the people what they want. The IMF finds itself in hot water, but not from some baddie with an axe to grind who wants to take over the world; no, not unless you count the CIA and Congress among that demographic. You see, the head of the CIA (Baldwin) wants to break up the band – shut down the IMF. He feels that they have no oversight, they do essentially what they want, have a ginormous budget and the return on that budget is shall we say chancy. Being that there’s no Secretary to speak up for the IMF, it is up to agent William Brandt (Renner) to carry the torch and he basically has his hands tied. End result: the IMF is history.

It’s a bad time for the IMF to take a header. The Syndicate, an evil organization that is out to sow the seeds of chaos and war around the world (and fans of the original series will remember was often the antagonist to the IMF back in the day), is ready to rear its ugly head and agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has made contact with them – at least, he knows what some of their agents look like. Aided by a British agent named Ilsa Faust (Ferguson) who has a name that would have sounded better on a sexy SS agent, he escapes their clutches and sets out to foil their plans and bring the anti-IMF – which is what the Syndicate is – to its knees, if not on its back in the morgue.

To do so Hunt is going to need old friends Brandt, Benji Dunn (Pegg), an expert on computers and gadgets and Luther Stickell (Rhames), maybe the world’s best hacker. They’ll be going up against Solomon Lane (Harris), the head of the Syndicate and a soft-spoken but wholly deranged former British agent, and his top dawg Janik “The Bone Doctor” Vinter (Hulten) who should sue for a better nickname. They also can’t be sure about Ilsa, who may be a double agent but has some pretty messed up stuff in her past, nor about Atlee (McBurney), the weasel-like head of the British Secret Service who is either a ruthless spy out to protect his country at all counts, or just plain ruthless.

The film begins with a sequence that includes Hunt holding on for dear life to the outside of a cargo plane – which is an actual stunt actually done by Cruise which I’m sure led to some cardiac arrest in the halls of insurance companies worldwide. He also is really driving the car going down the steps and flipping over like something out of NASCAR, and that really is his knee almost touching the asphalt as he drives his high speed motorcycle around a hairpin curve on a mountain road outside of Casablanca.

The action sequences are big and bold and exciting. The sets range from gleaming high tech to dusty ancient cities to the gilded grandeur of the Vienna Opera House. Each location is proclaimed in big graphic letters so we always know where in the world Carmen Sandiego, or at least the IMF team, is. Like the Bond movies which set the formula, we get the team in exotic (and not-so-exotic) locations, we get nifty gadgets and we get amazing stunts and action. We even get beautiful women, although in this case it’s just one woman, but when she emerges from a swimming pool in a bikini, don’t tell me that you more veteran moviegoers weren’t thinking about Ursula Andress.

McQuarrie started out as a writer, penning the excellent script for The Usual Suspects among others, and has lately graduated to directing with solid results (Jack Reacher, Edge of Tomorrow) has graduated to better than that. This has all the ingredients for solid summer entertainment; and likely will dominate the box office (given the anemic early results of Fantastic Four) throughout August.

Like a lot of the M;I films, there are some twists and turns to the plot, most of them involved with Ilsa’s true allegiance, but for the most part they don’t fool anyone and in all honesty, I think the movie could have used a little more vagueness when it came to her true intentions. Well before the final denouement we all knew which side she was buttering her bread as it were.

The main fulcrum that the movie revolves around however is Cruise, and at 53 years old which in action star terms is a bit long in the tooth he still has the boyish good looks that have always been his stock in trade (although he is starting to show his age just a tiny bit). Then again, both Schwarzenegger and Stallone have been doing action films with effectiveness in their 60s. Cruise is still in fine shape and looks like he could do another  three or four of these movies without breaking a sweat and given the satisfying box office numbers here at least one more is almost certain. Cruise is a star through and through and he continues to have maybe the best fundamental understanding of how to remain a star as any in Hollywood.

This is definitely a “grab the popcorn and an ice cold soda” kind of movie, the kind that you can drag the whole family out to, or your entire circle of friends. It doesn’t matter if you’re young, old or in between – this is entertainment for nearly everybody. Just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.

REASONS TO GO: Top notch action sequences. Cruise still has it.
REASONS TO STAY: The twists are a little on the lame side.
FAMILY VALUES: Violence and intense action sequences with a scene of brief partial nudity.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Each Mission: Impossible film has had a different director: Brian De Palma, John Woo, JJ Abrams, Brad Bird and now McQuarrie.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 8/8/15: Rotten Tomatoes: 93% positive reviews. Metacritic: 75/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Casino Royale (2006)
FINAL RATING: 7/10
NEXT: Nightingale

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Locke

Tom Hardy discovers that he can’t go home again.

(2013) Drama (A24) Tom Hardy. Starring the voices of Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, Ben Daniels, Tom Holland, Bill Milner, Danny Webb, Alice Lowe, Silas Carson, Lee Ross, Kristy Dillon. Directed by Steven Knight

As we drive from point A to point B, we are in our own insulated little world in our cars, surrounded by other people in their own little worlds. Do you ever wonder what dramas are taking place in those other vehicles, what life and death struggles are happening as our tiny little environments of steel and glass hurtle down the concrete ribbons in the night, each bound for its own private destination.

Ivan Locke (Hardy) is in one such car. He has knocked off of work at a construction site in Birmingham, England where he is the manager of a major project. The next morning is a big day on his job – the pouring of concrete to lay the foundation for the tower he is building. It is going to be one of the largest concrete pours in European history and things have to go just right.

Except Locke won’t be there. He has an errand of his own, a personal one. He is driving from Birmingham to London where a woman is waiting for him in a hospital bed. The woman is not his wife. Rather, his wife and two sons are preparing to watch the local football  team in a crucial match. That’s football as in soccer, by the way. In any case, the boys are excited, mom has bought some sausages to grill up and has even finally consented to wear the team jersey that Ivan bought for her and has been nagging her to wear on game days. But Locke won’t be there either.

During the course of the night he will drive down British highways through varying degrees of rush hour traffic while talking on a hands free mobile phone built into the dashboard of his SUV. He will nursemaid his second in command through the necessary steps of preparing the construction site for the big pour. He will try to explain to his boss why he is acting the way he is, and the same to his wife while trying to at least maintain a veneer of normalcy for his sons. The longer the drive continues, the more that veneer cracks and threatens to fall apart.

This is not your usual sort of drama. Other than the opening scene in which we see other anonymous faceless construction workers leaving the job site, Hardy is the only person we ever see onscreen. He interacts with other actors on the phone, wispy spectral voices that question Ivan’s judgment and even his sanity.

Ivan Locke is a fastidious sort. Respected in his profession, a solid family man, he nevertheless has made a crucial error in his personal life and is now trying to make it right. In his mind at least he’s doing the right thing – viewers may disagree, but Ivan Locke, once his mind is made up, never wavers in his course. It separates him from his father, whom Ivan addresses in the car from time to time even though dear old dad, an alcoholic who abandoned his family, has been dead for some time. Ivan has never forgiven him however; he would love to dig up dear old dad just to desecrate his bones.

Hardy is best known for playing the masked terrorist Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. There he is behind a mask with his voice electronically modulated but still Bane is perhaps the best thing about the movie. Here, Hardy shows just how good an actor he is, something that those who saw Bronson already knew. While his ascendance to Hollywood stardom has left him with some fluffy roles as of late, he certainly has plenty of chops to carry this through.

And he does. We see Ivan’s facade slowly crumble. While his voice is even and calm with a Welsh accent adding color to the part, we see in Hardy’s eyes the depth of frustration and doubt that assaults him. Ivan Locke knows what he is doing will have consequences that will be bitter, but even so he insists on trying to apply logic and practicality to a situation that he is painfully unequipped to handle because one thing Ivan Locke doesn’t understand is human emotion. So he drives through the night, downing cold medicine and blowing his nose. This isn’t just business for its own sake as other critics have intimated; Hardy actually had a cold during filming so his illness was written into the script.

When his wife wails “You love your buildings more than me,” she isn’t far from the truth. Ivan waxes rhapsodic about concrete, of stealing a part of the sky for this new tower. When asked why he is doing it, he says “I’m doing it for my building. I’m doing it for the concrete.” Locke, whose childhood was apparently full of instability, relishes the permanence of a well-laid foundation.

This might sound like a boring picture but thanks to some clever cinematography and on the basis of Hardy’s searing performance it is anything but. My wife and I were immersed in the film from beginning to end. Some may look at the manner of storytelling as a gimmick and I have to admit that in most hands it certainly would have turned out that way. Here however thanks to the elements I mentioned the gimmick works and how often can you say that truly?

REASONS TO GO: Mesmerizing performance by Hardy. Compelling story and clever concept.

REASONS TO STAY: Some might find it gimmicky.

FAMILY VALUES:  The language can get pretty raw. The themes are a little bit on the adult side.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Tom Hardy filmed his role in six days. The other actors were all in a hotel room and read their lines over the phone to Hardy.

CRITICAL MASS: As of 5/23/14: Rotten Tomatoes: 88% positive reviews. Metacritic: 82/100.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: Margin Call

FINAL RATING: 7.5/10

NEXT: Godzilla