Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation pits Tom Cruise and his pals against SPECTRE KAOS HYDRA SMERSH COBRA FOWL VILE SCORPIO – aw, jeez, guys.  “The Syndicate?”  You’re putting them up against “The Syndicate?”  I could come up with five better names for evil organizations right off the top of my head:  1. SPAWN (Special Project for Anarchy, War, and Nachos (seriously, those things are really bad for you)); 2. OUCH (Organization to Undermine Capitalist Hypocrisy); 4.  MTI (Moustache Twirlers International); 5. The Bay City Rollers.  Honestly, this stuff isn’t hard.

Fortunately, choosing a boring moniker for the villains appears to be the only serious shortcut taken by this latest entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise.  Here’s a spy fantasy with a cleverly written script, well-shot action set pieces, cool gadgets, a beautiful heroine, and movie star’s movie star Tom Cruise busting his tukkas in one incredible stunt sequence after another.  This movie has exotic locales,  gymkata, motorcycle chases, gunfights, even a hacker character pushing a big red button – I mean, it has it all.  Best of all, it has laugh-out loud humor, a wonderful sense of fun, and absolutely world-class production values.  

While it can’t boast a sequence that tops the amazing Burj Khalifa bit from Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol, this entry in the series delivers everything one could possibly hope for from this kind of film.  If you like this genre, I don’t see how you could possibly not enjoy Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.

Avengers: The Age of Ultron

It’s probably not a good sign when you’re sitting in Avengers: Age of Ultron and thinking, “Y’know what was a really good Marvel movie?  Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  Where’s Robert Redford when you need him?”

Some background: I took my two older boys, ages 15 & 8, to see this movie.  I really wanted to see Mad Max: Fury Road, but fatherhood isn’t about getting what you want.  So, there we sat, popcorn and soda in hand, ready for some Whedon-y goodness.

[On further reflection, it probably wasn’t a good idea to let my 8-yr-old get the medium root beer, which would be a large in any sane world and contained roughly a metric ton of corn syrup.  After about fifteen minutes, he started to squirm, after 30, he was all over the place.  In thirty minute intervals thereafter, he left the (mostly empty) theater to run to the bathroom – probably more for the running than the actual bathroom.]

In the story, Tony Stark is basically Victor Frankenstein and the android Ultron his mad creation.  Unlike Frankenstein, Ultron doesn’t start out innocent and misunderstood.  It starts out evil, a fanatic who sees mass murder as a perfectly acceptable expedient enroute to utopia.  
And then there’s a lot of punching, plus a guy with a bow and arrow saying, “What am I doing here?  I’m just a guy with a bow and arrow!”  And people get hurt, and innocents get killed, and there’s a lot of angst, and it’s all so miserable that I thought I was in a DC movie.  In fact, it’s so miserable that, at the end of the movie, several characters just quit the team.  

Don’t get me wrong: the effects are great, the leads are likeable, and Linda Cardellini and Paul Bettany both shine in supporting roles.  But after two and a half hours, I wanted a little less recycled Shelly and little more Spider-Man learning to swing, or Star Lord disco-ing through space-ruins, or Robert Redford opening his fridge to find a bottle of Newman’s Own salad dressing on the top shelf.  I wanted some fun.  I wanted some laughs.  I wanted some moustache-twirling.  All I got were meditations on mortality, morality, and the use of denouments as leveraging tools in contract negotiations.

But, hey, my boys liked it.  As for me, I am honestly beginning to suspect that I’m getting too old for this stuff.

The Avengers

I suspect that The Avengers is pretty much the best movie about The Avengers that it’s possible to make.  Consider this:

·      There are several Avengers, all of whom we should care about.

·      They need something to avenge, something that we in the audience feel needs avenging.  The audience needs to cry.  Then, it needs to get mad.

·      People liked Iron Man more than they liked The Hulk.  Message: make ‘em laugh; don’t make ‘em think.

·      Lots of stuff had better blow up real good.

Now, consider the following:

·      Joss Whedon is really, really good at screenwriting and directing.  His resume demonstrates an ablity to craft fully realized worlds, populate them with diverse and engaging characters, and give those characters interesting (and funny) things to say.

·      He’s not afraid to blow stuff up real good.

So, Item One: so many Avengers, so little time.  Whedon addresses this by taking characters who had been in bad movies (Captain America, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2) and cutting those film’s weaknesses.  Consequently, he capitalizes on their strengths.  Here’s a rundown:

Robert Downey, Jr.’s comic timing is Iron Man’s whole appeal.  Too much of it, however, and you want him to just shut up already.  The Avengers uses him enough to satisfy the audience’s thirst for its favorite player, but not so much that they hope for Sam Rockwell to show up and give ‘em a break.

Thor’s problem was that the whole movie was about two things: Thor’s magical transformation from dick to hero through the power of Natalie Portman’s smile, and Loki’s descent from someone who, reasonably enough, doesn’t like the dickish Thor to full-blown villain.  Here, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor begins the film understanding justice and humility while Tom Hiddleston’s Loki radiates gleeful malevolence.  Now, I’ve got a good guy I can root for and a bad guy I can boo. 

Edward Norton is a brilliant actor, no doubt about it.  But his Bruce Banner was just plain boring.  Eric Bana’s version, on the other hand, was masterful; but everybody (except for me) hated that movie.  Whedon’s solution?  Assume his audience already knows Banner’s back story and give us a whole new guy to play the character.  Mark Ruffalo plays Banner not as a rope about to snap, but as a decent guy with issues – a guy who can tell a joke.  We sympathized with Norton and Bana, but we like Ruffalo.

Captain America suffered from being just another origin story.  Its villains, extra-evil Nazis calling themselves Hydra, were an insult to every self-respecting actual evil Nazi still hiding out in Argentina.  I mean, c’mon!  How do you top real, historic Nazis for evil?  And Illinois Nazis don’t count.  Further, if you’re Captain America and you’ve already beaten the Nazis, where are you going to go next?  That’s why Loki’s the perfect foil: he’s the villain of Norse mythology, one of the touchstones of German National Socialism.  Further, Whedon leverages the fact that Chris Evans’s Captain America is an actual Army captain, schooled in small unit tactics and experienced in leading capable people under stressful conditions.  Throw in some fish-out-water material (he had to get the character to 2012 somehow), and you are maximizing the potential of this character.

There are other Avengers, like Scarlett Johansson, whom we like because she’s Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner, whom we like because we remember The Hurt Locker.  And you know what?  It all works.  Whedon takes the best, most entertaining aspects of his characters, cuts the fat, and gives us concurrent arcs in which we can believe.  Success!

Item Two:  Whedon does give them something to avenge, and it works on a personal level.  This isn’t, “Hey, you wiped out a Dunkin’ Donuts, and now we’re really mad.”  It’s, “You have gone too far, and this shall not stand.”  Going in to the details would spoil the film, I think.  But I’m comfortable telling you that Whedon surprised me, saddened me, angered me, and made me hungry for revenge.

Item Three:  The Avengers is funny.  I laughed out loud more often than I did at Bridesmaids.

Item Four:  Lots of stuff does, in fact, blow up real good.

So, there’s all that.  There’s plenty that didn’t work for me, as well.  The “Let’s fight before we team up” stage went on a little long.  I’m convinced that Tony Stark’s true nature is that of an amusingly selfish jerk, sentencing us to film after film in which he learns to not be such a jerk, only so that he can forget those lessons in time for the next outing.  I never have been able to get past the fact that a hovering aircraft carrier is a profoundly stupid idea.  But that’s ok.  By taking the best of the films that preceded it, The Avengers crafts an exciting, spectacular, fun time at the movies.

Movies like this are what popcorn is made for.  Or shawarma.  Whatever.

Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol had me at the opening credits.  I’d forgotten that Brad Bird directed this film, and seeing his name flash on the screen assured me that I was in for a good time.

You see, Brad Bird directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille.  The Incredibles is the greatest superhero movie ever made, and Ratatouille moved me to stand and applaud when its credits rolled, something I’ve done exactly once.  This guy knows what he’s doing and it shows in this, his first live-action feature.

The Mission: Impossible movies imagine what James Bond would be like if he weren’t a sociopath.  Tom Cruise, as secret agent Ethan Hunt, can actually make and sustain friendships, lead people, and present himself as more than a collection of top-shelf stuff he read about in men’s lifestyle magazines.  This gives us an “in” to his character that the 007 movies simply can’t deliver.  This matters, because it overcomes the fact that this spy thriller is just another entry in the “stop a madman out to destroy the world / corner the market on X / extort ONE MILLION DOLLARS from the UN” genre.  We like Ethan in a way that we simply can’t like Bond.  We like his team, which includes recently omnipresent Doctor Who alumnus Simon Pegg.  We like his boss.  By God, we like the Impossible Missions Force, whose self-destructing messaging systems sometimes need a little whack to, y’know, actually self-destruct.  So we’re on board when things get rough.

And rough they get, giving Bird a reason to deliver breathtaking action set-pieces.  I’ve flown over Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower a zillion times, but it took this film to bring home its awesome height.  I’ve been in sandstorms, but the sandstorm here felt more dangerous and more awesome than any I’ve actually experienced.  As a film buff, I’ve seen more stunt fights in industrial settings than I can remember; but I’ve never seen a stunt fight like the one this delivers in its climax.

A friend of mine recently said that Brad Bird should get a Bond film.  I say that Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol is as good as spy action-thrillers get, and better than any Bond film I can readily recall.  Brad Bird hasn’t just raised the bar.  He’s built a better bar, taller and stronger and cooler and just plain more fun than the bars that have gone before.

I can’t praise Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol enough.  Brad Bird knows what he’s doing.

PS  … except for that last scene, which looked like it was filmed on different stock and tied everything up far too neatly.  Hey, people who follow this kind of thing: was this a reshoot thing?  I just don’t understand how you do two hours of excellence, only to go mundane at the wrap.  Thoughts?

The Town

Brilliant writer and great guy Les Phillips has allowed me to run his review of The Town.  Enjoy.

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THE TOWN (2010, directed by Ben Affleck).  Ben Affleck has become a really excellent director of action.  I don't mean asteroids 'n' scary monsters; I mean his presentations of robberies, gunfights and car chases make them new, with special rhythms and angles.  They look and feel like nothing you've seen.  And Ben loves Boston (and Cambridge).  His footage of the city is special too; the camera lingers on the geometry of the downtown skyline, or it pauses for a second to revere the Bunker Hill Monument, or observe something as small and particular as the toll booth on the Tobin Bridge.  Affleck films a robbery and getaway in the North End, one of the oldest neighborhoods in America, and somehow he fits all the energy and violence into its tight old streets and alleys.  Those sequences are both engineering and filmmaking; it's impressive film art.  The director proved with his first film how well he understands poor white Boston; he "gets" the sociology of Charlestown perfectly.  And, of course, he's Ben Affleck, so they let him film at Fenway Park.

THE TOWN has some absolutely wonderful performances.  Rebecca Hall is superb.  She plays a bank manager, one of the random young professionals who've moved into Charlestown's gentrified sector, in the neighborhood but certainly not of it.  She falls in love with a bank robber -- that would be Doug MacRay, played by Ben Affleck. Why would she fall for a criminal from the 'hood?  Hall makes it more than plausible; we see a refined young woman who's also more than a bit lonely, carrying around some incompleteness that's waiting for somebody to come along.  Pete Postlewhaite is a florist who also happens to be the local crime lord, and he is the most menacing, purely evil florist in all of recorded history; he's a quiet, suggestive Irish serpent.  Jeremy Renner is an utterly convincing Boston boyo, vigorous and vulgar.  Blake Lively has the druggy-slutty girl role, and she makes the most out of her minutes on screen; she's brash, wounded and sorrowful.  I haven't even gotten around to Jon Hamm and Chris Cooper, who are just as fine.  This cast is a tremendous embarrassment of riches, and Affleck makes the most of them.

So there are great visual moments, many fine pieces of acting, many fine scenes.  What's missing from THE TOWN?  A screenplay good enough to weave all this humanity into a persuasive narrative, and deep enough to highlight the moral resonance that's only touched on.  There are several little speeches where characters tell their backstories -- how Doug MacRay lost his mother, how his sidekick has always searched for a family.  But all of these speeches are thin, cliche, sentimental.  THE TOWN announces itself as a story about a community where crime is the dominant art and craft, handed down through generations; about mere theft that escalates into a series of murderous rampages; but there's no moral urgency, no gravity.  When all is said and done, this is a story about some bank robbers.  Also missing:  the central performance that could anchor the film.  Doug McRay is Charlestown's representative man; he's got to embody all the pain and conflict of the cursed reluctant criminal, acting out his fate.  Affleck spends much of his screen time reacting, furrowing his brow, speaking the lines; he's not awful, but he never finds the character.  He's occupying space that needs a great performance.  Affleck can be a fine actor, but he doesn't deliver here.

Ah, but Affleck the director!  GONE, BABY, GONE was a pleasant surprise.  THE TOWN is much more than that; this is a director with real vision and imagination, first-rate talent with actors.  THE TOWN is not quite Affleck's breakthrough, but the next film might well be.