Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Tom Cruise has been star and producer of the “Mission: Impossible” movie series since its 1996 inception, but the first few films were driven as much by the visual and narrative style of a rotating cast of directors. That changed when Christopher McQuarrie took in 2015 and then subsequently stayed on for three more movies, elevating the franchise to new heights by stepping back, so to speak, and centering Cruise and his relentless commitment to stunts. McQuarrie’s “Rogue Nation” (2015) and “Fallout” (2018) were the twin peaks of twenty-tens pop moviemaking and though “Dead Reckoning Part One” (2023) couldn’t live up to those two, graded on a curve, it was still exceptional. Whether “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” is, as the title implies, really the end of the series, we will see. I have my doubts. But the finished product suggests it’s probably time to call it quits. If in the wash, it’s good, it’s also overlong, overstuffed, occasionally plunders its own past, and turns Cruise’s devotion to big screen entertainment into messianism. 

When “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” concluded, a villainous Artificial Intelligence program called the Entity was threatening global destruction, but super-duper Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his motley crew had acquired a key that could unlock the AI’s source code to stop it. It’s just, that source code was aboard a Russian submarine sunk deep in the Bering Sea. A scintillating and simple set-up, and yet, “The Final Reckoning” takes too long to engage thrusters, laboring under the weight of addressing the Entity’s human emissary Gabriel (Esai Morales) also having gone rogue, an American government that wants Ethan to bring them the key, and myriad callbacks to characters and moments from previous movies as a kind of feting of the entire franchise. Maybe this would have worked had it been rendered with the joie de vivre that defined McQuarrie’s other entries, but the overall mood in “Final Reckoning” is oddly funereal, not festive, underlined in both an early twist and exposition scenes without the wit of those in “Dead Reckoning Part One.” None of this is helped by the absence of Vanessa Kirby, something like the co-villain of the previous two movies; Morales’s lack of verve is all the more conspicuous without Kirby’s delightfully bemused evil around to counteract it. Paying so much tribute to past characters that left no impression and they can’t even pour one out for The White Widow. 

Despite this protracted wind-up, however, the sequence in which Ethan does finally break into that submerged sub is sensational, taking the titular notion of an impossible mission and even by the standards of these movies stretching it with exuberant abandon. It is not merely the escalating complications that he encounters underwater but everything that gets him to the submarine in the first place; from the intervention of the President (Angela Bassett) to an aircraft carrier where Hannah Waddingham as its commander lays down the law (her line reading of “mister” is to die for) to a surprisingly sexy American submarine with a pair of powerful bit players in Tramell Tillman and Katy O’Brian and finally to the sunken Russian sub. And just when you think McQuarrie doesn’t have one more damn thing to heap on top of everything else, he pulls an ace with a reference not to May 22, 1996, a date that keeps echoing through “Final Reckoning,” but to August 5, 1983. I’ll let you figure it out for yourself. Suffice to say it’s the sort of moment that hits the action movie sweet spot, so ludicrously thrilling (thrillingly ludicrous), it makes you laugh out loud.

The DIY nature of Ethan’s mission, however, is also telling. “Rogue Nation” had fun with Ethan’s absurd invulnerability by having Alec Baldwin’s CIA director deem his IMF nemesis “the living manifestation of destiny.” “The Final Reckoning,” however, douses the knowing twinkle of that assessment by taking this living manifestation into some other sort of megalomaniacal dimension. Ethan, after all, proves the only one able to hold the Entity in the palm of his hand without fear of being tempted for ultimate power. And for as often as other characters insist that Ethan has always operated primarily from deep loyalty to his IMF cohorts, it’s noticeable how little impact those cohorts make. Paris (Pom Klementieff), Gabriel’s henchwoman from “Dead Reckoning Part One,” has switched sides to Ethan’s team, though despite Klementieff’s indelible presence, she is given virtually nothing to do. Hayley Atwell’s Grace has gone from an argumentative love interest to a cult member. Even the unexpected face from a previous impossible mission, not to be revealed, makes sure to thank Ethan for saving his life. 

The conclusion in which Ethan battles Gabriel aboard a biplane while his team attends to bomb-diffusing business on the ground comes out of nowhere and is essentially a loose remake of the climactic parallel by air and by land storylines of “Fallout,” as sure a sign as any that McQuarrie’s creative tank is approaching empty. Even so, it’s hard to deny that in and of itself this sequence doesn’t deliver by taking us back a hundred years to the barnstorming tours of the 1920s, as if this really all is just about the stunts, and wowing us in transforming wing walking into wing hanging. It’s a virtual Looney Tune, as Cruise’s face and hair stretched and squished with what might be amusing exaggeration if we didn’t know all this was real. No other actor, I thought, would be so willing to let himself look so ridiculous onscreen, the ultimate renunciation of vanity even if at the same time, that he was up there and performing this stunt at all was the ultimate vain exercise. Both are true, and it’s the moment where once and for all, whatever divide was left between character and actor falls away, the two physically and spiritually merging in service of blockbuster entertainment, a fitting coda to what came to be a phenomenal franchise, so long as Cruise has the paradoxical temerity to finally say, “Enough.”

Top 5 Tom Cruise *** Scenes

There are several reasons why Tom Cruise is the perfect movie star for our moment, not least of which is how the frequently lamented sexlessness of the modern movie scene perfectly dovetails with the innate sexlessness of Cruise’s persona. The pointed lack of sizzle in his scenes with Jennifer Connelly in “Top Gun: Maverick” was that otherwise superb blockbuster’s millstone as was his inability to truly meet that Vanessa Kirby kiss in “Mission: Impossible – Fallout.” It’s why Cameron Crowe’s smartest screenplay move in “Jerry Maguire” was to make it so that Cruise’s eponymous sports agent and his love interest Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger) weren’t in love, not really, not until the end, while part of what made “Eyes Wide Shut” work was the tension between the sexless Cruise and all the sex around him. This problem, as we noted in our “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” review, has not so much been corrected as circumvented by writer/director Christopher McQuarrie in their troika of M:I movies in a variety of clever ways, though, to be fair, he is not the first one to skillfully work around this recurring issue. Here, then, is a definitive list from off the top of my head comprising the Top 5 Tom Cruise sex, in a manner of speaking, scenes. Sorry if this makes you uncomfortable.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout. The subtext of the bathroom brawl between Cruise, Henry Cavill, and Liang Yang is virtually text, a dance scene given the pulse-pounding club music just outside as much as a fight, as close as Tom will ever get to Studio 54.

Born on the Fourth of July. The prom dance with Kyra Sedgwick after his run through the rain is the rare Chaste Tom Cruise romantic moment that works because the chasteness is inextricably part of the point, the culmination of All-American innocence before he it is shattered.

Knight and Day. Not one of the Cruise joints people to tend talk about, which I have always found unfortunate, not because it is one of his best movies, per se, but because it does a fun job harnessing the wackadoodle public-facing Cruise persona of the new millennium. This is especially true of the moment when his character Roy leaps off a motorcycle from above and lands on the hood of the car of Cameron Diaz’s June. It’s not a Meet Cute, because they have already met, but has the feel of one, nonetheless, and the certifiable smile on Cruise’s face and in his air suggests sexual yearning in, well, a “There’s Something About Mary” sorta way.

Top Gun. It’s a weird quirk of our present world that the homoerotic undertones of the original “Top Gun” are acknowledged, if not generally accepted and embraced, and yet “Top Gun: Maverick” eschewed having any of its own, as if it were running for President against Ron DeSantis and had to tone it down or else. And that’s unfortunate because a whole new generation of moviegoers (movie streamers) deserved their version of the volleyball scene, and one that was less virtuous team-building exercise, though the volleyball scene was not even the height of the original’s most pertinent romance. 

Look, I don’t mean this as disrespect to Jennifer Connelly, nor to Kelly McGillis, because romantic scenes with Cruise are like advanced calculus for cinema, just as a testament to the man, the myth Val Kilmer, who grasped that the negative charge of Cruise required a positive charge. That’s why in the bar scene, Kilmer palpably invades Cruise’s space, going so hard that he instinctively connects with his co-star’s cocky indifference. And when it does...to quote Bruce Springsteen, “Sparks fly on E Street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot.”

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. Granted, “Mission: Impossible 2” tried this, too, with a car chase between Cruise and Thandiwe Newton’s character as roadway flirtation, though “Rogue Nation’s” motorcycle chase between Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson did it better. It did it better because it was less overt in its connotations if more electrifying in its action, and because Cruise wore that shirt, that shirt up there, getting dressed in his action/adventure best for his rip-roaring spur of the moment social engagement, and because Ferguson pulled the same trick as Kilmer, if in a different way, like a tractor beam, in her cool air just sort of ineffably pulling this unwittingly smitten dude toward her.

Tom Cruise Takes the Dare

“A guy lays down a dare,” Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise) opined in the quasi-immortal “Cocktail,” “you gotta take it.” Cruise took his own character’s advice to heart, it would appear, by taking this blog up on its dare. After all, loyal frustrated followers will recall that two years ago in May 2021 when we first saw images of Tom Cruise hanging from a train in the then-upcoming, since-released “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” the blog had no choice but to wonder what Tom Cruise could hang from in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two.” We offered several recommendations but concluded by proposing he hang from a submerged submarine while carrying out an underwater break-in, an implausible scenario we had once imagined for an Angelina Jolie vehicle but decided to pass off to Cruise given his determination to push the action movie limit to the extreme. Well.

We don’t want to spoil anything, exactly, when it comes to “Dead Reckoning Part One” for those yet to see it, but suffice to say that its ending seems to suggest events in “Dead Reckoning Part Two” will necessitate…Tom Cruise breaking into a submerged submarine?

Cinema Romantico is just happy to know that Hollywood is finally taking our most incredibly absurd action movie ideas to heart, even if it means our blog might be bugged, and look forward to “M:I 9 – Honorable Vengeance” in which Tom Cruise rides a barrel over Niagara Falls.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

“Mission: Impossible” movies typically begin with preeminent Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) receiving a self-destructing recorded mission briefing explaining the preposterous assignment he will inevitably accept. Though “M:I – Dead Reckoning Part One,” movie seven in the venerable franchise, includes that scene, it begins with another recorded message, one intended for us, the audience, of Cruise himself and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie thanking for us coming out to see the movie in a theater, where it was designed to be shown, on the big screen. Technically, this might be considered separate from what follows, yet comes across spiritually part and parcel to it, nonetheless. Because if merely as a movie, “Dead Reckoning Part One” is sheer blinding sensation worthy of its two predecessors, it assumes an unexpected gravity, brought home in how McQuarrie has rendered the villain as something less personal than existential.

That existential villain is an Artificial Intelligence program called The Entity, suggesting Skynet of “The Terminator” movies as a global terrorist, threatening, as one character puts it, the very nature of truth itself. All this is outlined in a sequence of major U.S. Intelligence players, from CIA Director Kittridge (Henry Czerny) to National Intelligence Director Denlinger (Cary Elwes). Like many subsequent scenes, this one is pure exposition, but evocative of how McQuarrie deliciously conveys such informational drops in big, juicy lines of dialogue cut in big, juicy close-ups and with bit performers like Indira Varma and Charles Parnell having such a palpable blast that they become rejoinders to the very notion of AI. And this scene becomes demonstrative of how “Dead Reckoning Part One” brilliantly sculpts its rising and falling action so the ominous-sounding 163 minutes feels laser-focused rather than long or ungainly and helps set up Part Two without ever feeling incomplete.

This two-part nature extends to the two-part key that unlocks the AI’s source code and which Ethan seeks to destroy even as the American government and everyone else naturally wants it for their own devious purposes. That includes Grace (Haley Atwell), a pickpocket who mucks up Ethan and his old IMF cohorts Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) attempting nab one half of the key from its holder at the Dubai Airport, a sequence in which McQuarrie demonstrates, as he did with “Rogue Nation’s” motorcycle chase, a penchant for deftly working around Cruise’s sexlessness. Here, as Ethan and Grace maneuver around the expansive airport, in her frisky facial expressions and in his brief bout of magic, like the Pickup Artist in Ray-Bans, the scene in essence becomes a blind date, suggesting how the subtext of their flirtation keeps coming to the fore despite the text of her innate recruitment in the IMF.

These little bursts of joyful amusement are what keep the movie grounded, if not also light on its feet, like a quick image of Ethan, Luther, Benji, and the series’ recurring nebulous operative Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) entering Venice Harbor pairing nicely with a later image of just Ethan and Ilsa in the same place, painting them in the glorious Venetian light as something akin to tourists between derring-do. Almost by design, given that he’s an emissary for the AI, chief bad guy Gabriel (Esai Morales) kind of fades away despite being in full view, though his unlikely muscle, Paris (Pom Klementieff), picks up the slack, costumed at one point to look like a great sad tragic clown even if at other points she comes across like the most gleefully devil-may-care of the lot. Indeed, her thirsty expression when she guns the engine of her armored vehicle during a car chase through the compact streets of Rome feels like nothing less than McQuarrie bringing the Run Me Over meme to glorious, giggly life.

Zipping though the narrow streets and clattering down the steps of Rome, this vehicular pursuit becomes the rare screwball car chase, handcuffing Ethan and Grace together for a higher degree of difficulty while underlining their attraction, emitting veracity by forgoing a music score even while maintaining a distinct mischievousness, a reminder that action scenes can work as well being fun and funny as fierce. It also illustrates how the action set pieces of “Dead Reckoning Part One” don’t just duplicate certain forebears but expand, a la the concluding sequence aboard a train that reimagines the trailer going over the cliff in Steven Spielberg’s “The Lost World” as lumberjacks rolling logs.

If there is a fly in the ointment, it is “Dead Reckoning Part One’s” dependence on the Entity to advance the narrative, meaning the deliberately predictable nature of the movie’s biggest twist feels less wrenchingly fatalistic than weirdly rote, inadvertently putting the soullessness of storytelling algorithms into harsh perspective. Despite these occasional algorithm-generated hiccups, however, the relentless analogue bravado prevails, like Ethan riding a motorcycle right off a cliff, leaping into the abyss. If it comes across as a riveting referendum on a teetering theatrical model and an industry labor strike demanding protection from AI, a stunt as a call to action, it’s also a reminder of cinema as electrifying ephemera. For those few seconds when Cruise flies through the air, you don’t have to live anywhere but the spectacular now.

What Else Could Tom Cruise Hang From?

A couple weeks back the Interwebs were sent into a tizzy by the image of Tom Cruise hanging from the side of a speeding train in next year’s “Mission: Impossible” movie. This, of course, has become the “M:I” calling card of Cruise – actor, producer, stuntman. In “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” he hung from the side of the world’s tallest building; in “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” he hung from the side of an airplane as it literally took off; in “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” he hung from a payload hanging from a helicopter. And though you might suggest that Cruise hanging from a train in “Mission: Impossible 7” brings it all full circle since he hung from train in the first “Mission: Impossible” lo so many years ago in the summer I graduated from high school (therefore not to be named), this is Tom Cruise we’re talking about. You think he’s just going to call it a hanging-off-stuff day after hanging off a train once more for old time’s sake? Please. If I know anything about Tom Cruise, besides being the recipient of a Freedom Medal of Valor, it’s that he is always – always – just getting started. So. What could he hang from in “Mission: Impossible 8”? Thanks for asking! 

A few possibilities:

Hubble Space Telescope

This goes without saying.

Space Shuttle

Too difficult to film on the Hubble Space Telescope? Just film Cruise clinging to a shuttle as it lifts off from Cape Canaveral. Can’t imagine NASA doesn’t want to be in the Tom Cruise business.

Artificial Cloud

The 2022 World Cup humanitarian disaster is being held in Qatar where, as everyone knows, it can reach upwards of 250 degrees. That’s why artificial clouds are being constructed to help cool the fields. So what if Ethan Hunt’s mission, should he choose to accept it, has something to do with an artificial cloud heist during the World Cup Final in which the artificial cloud becomes an artificial thunderhead, leaving Ethan Hunt dangling from the artificial cloud amid artificial lightning strikes?

Petronas Towers

Cruise could hang from Tower 2 after performing a standing broad jump from Tower 1.

Kingda Ka

What if Cruise hung from the tallest rollercoaster in the world...for the entirety of its 28-second ride?

Submarine

I have long dreamed of an Angelina Jolie movie where she breaks into a submarine while it’s submerged. But maybe like Angie took the baton from Tom for “Salt”, Tom could take the theoretical baton from Angie, hang onto the submarine as it dives and then perform an impossible underwater break-in. Who says no?

Which Tom Cruise Would You Call Upon to Save the World?

The other day, amid America’s burgeoning banana republic, my friend Rory texted me a news story that a mummy coffin sealed 2,500 years ago in Egypt had just been opened. As Rory noted, given how humanity is already hanging on by a thread, this decision seemed rather unwise. On the other hand, given the state of 2020, it seemed wholly appropriate, a reawakened mummy perhaps heralding the end of the world. Unless someone could stop the mummy. But who would stop him, Rory wondered? Tom Cruise of “The Mummy” (2017) or Brendan Fraser of “The Mummy” (1999)? My answer: I would trust Brendan Fraser of “The Mummy” more than Tom Cruise of “The Mummy” to ward off 2020’s Mummy, but I would trust Tom Cruise of “Mission: Impossible” to ward off 2020’s Mummy more than Brendan Fraser of “The Mummy.” “Feels like a blog post, Nick,” Rory texted back. “Which Tom Cruise do you trust to save the world?” That was all I needed to go off. After all, we might well be staring down The End of the World right now. It’s best to be prepared.

Which Tom Cruise Would You Call Upon to Save the World?

My love for “Top Gun” is true, deep, absurd, abiding. You might think, then, that the obvious answer here is Tom Cruise in “Maverick.” However, can we be sure that Maverick won’t take a look at the mummy, freeze up, declare “it doesn’t look good”, and opt out? I know, I know, he overcame that as “Top Gun” ended, you’re saying, but until we can screen “Top Gun 2”, can we be sure that personal triumph truly took?

Jerry Maguire demonstrated impressive perseverance, granted, but the end of the world is nigh and we don’t have time for him to bottom out first, okay.

Same goes for The Last Samurai. We need your head in the game now, tough guy. 

Frank T.J. Mackey might claim he’s the savior but he definitely could not save the world. He would, however, thrive as the leader of a doomsday cult.

Look, John Anderton is only as good as the precogs. Pfffffft. 

Who ya got? Not him.

Ditto Major William Cage. The Angel of Verdun was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Tasking Roy Miller of “Knight and Day” to save the world is like when the Nebraska Athletic Department settled on Bill Callahan as new head coach after the first 57 options rejected them.

Ray Ferrier would get his kids to safety but what about the rest of us?

We all know how it turned out for Claus von Stauffenberg.

Bill Harford of “Eyes Wide Shut” would probably be willing to take on the task but he’d be in over his head right quick. 

Jasper Irving? Senator Jasper Irving? Republican Senator Jasper Irving? [Falls on the floor laughing.]

I know Jack Reacher might be an intriguing choice for some but Cruise as grim mercenary is far less credible than Cruise as crazy-eyed and ultra committed. And that brings me to...

Mid-Post Mission: Impossible Tom Cruise Saving the World Power Rankings

6. Mission: Impossible 2. You think The End of the World is falling for the old Kick the Gun Up in the Air and Grab It and Shoot You trick? SMH

5. Mission: Impossible III. I don’t want to have to start with The End of the World and then flash back to How We Got Here. I really don’t.

4. Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol. At least we know if The End of the World scrambles Ethan’s gadgetry, he’ll be able to adjust.

3. Mission: Impossible. A controversial choice, perhaps, but I’m inclined to believe this dogged, nigh obsessed version of Ethan could get the job done.

2. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. If not quite as well as this version of Ethan. I’m imagining Ilsa and Benji literally reading the Book of Revelation aloud to Ethan and then Benji saying “Well, that doesn’t sound impossible.”

1. Mission: Impossible - Fallout. Ethan Hunt Climbing Into A Helicopter Mid-Air, Throwing The Pilot Out and Figuring Out How To Fly It In The Middle Of Literally Flying It is the kind of energy I want from my Saving the World “Mission: Impossible” Tom Cruise.

But wait. What if “Mission: Impossible - Fallout” Ethan Hunt decides to save his IMF besties instead of preventing the apocalypse? 

If The End of the World challenges us, Earth, to a bar flair competition, like the Devil challenging people to a fiddle contests for their souls, then we’ll definitely give Brian Flanagan a call. Otherwise, nuh uh.

The mononymous Vincent of “Collateral” is an intriguing choice but how do you know Vincent wouldn’t just take some cold hard cash from The Beast rising up out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads and then shoot all the rest of humanity in the back?

If Lt. Daniel Kaffee could get The End of the World under oath, he might, just might be able to call its bluff. But The End of the World has quality defense attorneys. Too big of a risk.

It might be easy to assume that Stef Djordjevic not up to the challenge. But if you’ve ever been a kid and stayed home alone, made a complete mess of things and put yourself on the clock to clean it up before your parents get home, you know it feels a lot like the End of the World is looming. 

Given that the Tom Cruise of “Legend” is specifically trying to vanquish the darkness, he seems like an ideal choice, Rotten Tomatoes score or not. But.

I don’t like it any more than you do. And normally a guy like foul-mouthed Hollywood producer Les Grossman is gonna squash you, me and all us regular folks to get what he wants because what he wants supersedes all else. But The End of the World is the rare situation when the goal of Les Grossman and all us peons dovetails. The End of everything is what a raging narcissist like Les Grossman fears most. He’d do anything not to have to face The End and, my God, would he do it. And if he staves off The End of the World for himself, he staves it off for the rest of us. He’s the only choice. 

Some Drivel On...The Firm

Released in June 1993, six months ahead of “The Pelican Brief”, “The Firm” was the first of the not-called Grisham Wave, movies culled from adaptations of John Grisham print legal thrillers. As someone who has grown weary of a Hollywood only interested in big, bigger or biggest, I yearn for middlebrow trash in the vein of Grisham and finally, for the first time since I rented it from the small video store in my hometown so many moons ago, I returned to the semi-big bang of the Grisham-verse. But if I went in hoping to uncover something new about what makes courtroom cinema click, I unexpectedly came away with a deeper understanding of Cruise – that is, Tom.

“The Firm” begins with Cruise in full “Cocktail” mold, playing Mitch McDeere, a striving eager beaver who has just graduated from law school. It makes sense, then, given that Cruise go-getter grin, that when some unknown law firm in Memphis make Mitch and his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn) an offer too good to be true, he would seize on it. It turns out, of course, after they settle in and Mitch signs on The Firm’s dotted line that not everything is copacetic. No, The Firm is a front for the Mafia and the Mafia’s money laundering. It’s obvious, maybe, but the way it ends, with a punchline more than a punch, turning on the Firm’s propensity for overbilling, almost makes one think the movie might be on its own joke, seeking to portray corporate America and the mob as one and the same. But Grisham, as he did in “The Rainmaker”, cannot help but make googly eyes at the Law and all that the capital letter entails. By following it, Mitch is able to thread the needle.

In doing a little post-movie reading, I discovered “The Firm” had a little pre-release squabbling. It seems that upon entering the production late, Gene Hackman, playing Mitch’s Firm mentor Avery Tolar, asked for his name to be placed above the title on the poster. Cruise’s contract, however, stipulated that only his name appear above the title. Hackman then requested his name appear nowhere on the poster. In some ways, this saddened me, a noted iconoclast like Hackman caring in the first place about such minor marketing rubbish, though he was a temperamental iconoclast so perhaps it rang true. Whatever, this dispute did not affect his performance. I struggle to describe what he is doing except to say you do not really notice what he’s doing; he just does it. He innately inhabits his character, a little slimy, a little unscrupulous but quietly sympathetic in the way he seems to acknowledge without really acknowledging at all how this life in the Firm has spiritually undone him. Cruise, on the other hand, lets you see what he’s doing every step of the way.

One of the emergent plot narratives is that when Mitch and Abby learn The Firm’s dark secret and cooperate with the FBI, sort of, they are required to act like nothing is amiss. Cruise, though, approaches myriad moments as if EVERYTHING is amiss. The most unbelievable element of “The Firm”, in fact, is that Avery never deduces Mitch’s real motives considering Cruise allows the whole truth and nothing but the truth to be written across Mitch’s face. But at the same time, whenever “The Firm” indulges its inner-thriller and really requires Cruise to get physical, his ultra-commitment works. There is a moment near the start when, upon seeing a kid performing gymnastics on the street, Mitch just erupts into a series of back flips. It’s set up for later when, pursued by The Firm’s assassin, Mitch hides by hanging from the ceiling. But simply to see Cruise in this moment, hanging from the ceiling, sweat accumulating on his face, is to believe his character could do this regardless of whether or not we see him back flipping. Watch how he runs, either after his wife or away from the bad guys, still carrying a briefcase and improbably you see a logical line from “The Firm” to the recent scene in “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” when he runs for, like, five minutes through the streets of London. To see Tom Cruise run is to see Tom Cruise in his natural acting habitat, not having to convince us of anything but his own unrelenting sense of physical purpose.

We all remember when Tom jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch; it made him the butt of all the jokes. But Cruise was telling us something about himself, something that you see just as clearly in “The Firm” as in these recent “M:I” pop masterpieces. In that moment, on Oprah’s couch, he stripped away everything else, leaving only the zany-eyed commitment. 

American Made

In “American Made”, as Barry Seal, the real-life TWA pilot who struck it rich by smuggling drugs for the infamous Medellin Cartel before turning DEA informant, Tom Cruise is getting his brand of high. The movie, in fact, is jump-started by the actor’s cackle. If Seal is initially presented as so bored by the passenger flight routine that he slyly finagles his jetliner off auto pilot to fly it manually, we also quickly learn that he is smuggling Cuban cigars into the U.S., communicating his willingness to even flout the law to have fun. The latter is what prompts the CIA’s Monty Schaefer (Domhnall Gleeson) to seek out Seal in a sequence where the pilot’s bright white uniform pops against the icy blue of the club where he’s hanging, painting him as some sinister white knight. Even as Seal denies smuggling, he can’t stop smiling, like he wants to get a caught because maybe that will lead to some action. It does, in the form of a little reconnaissance flying over various central American countries to snap intelligence photos. Why he’s doing this, Seal addresses in voiceover, though Cruises’s aw-shucks speaking voice debunks any sense of intellectual analysis. That sensation is futhered when Seal first sees his spy plane and, smiling, cackling, caresses it. He gets a scene of zero gravity sex a little later, yes, but this is his real love scene.

In the context of “American Made”, Seal becomes something like a Reagan era Zelig, as he graduates to courier for Manuel Noriega and both running guns to the Nicaraguan contras and providing space on a lavish Arkansas estate gifted to him, with strings attached, by the CIA to help train the Contras, never mind that he smuggles drugs for Pablo Escobar too. Director Doug Liman’s film plays loose and easy with the facts, some real, some exaggerated, some fabricated, not that any of this really matters, particularly given the film’s pace, which is ferocious, utilizing pop-song accentuated montages several times, approximating its leading man’s air and his character’s golly-gee willikers, damn the torpedoes mindset. “What’d you think, son?” Gene Hackman asked Denzel Washington in “Crimson Tide.” “I was just some crazy old coot putting everyone in harm’s way as I yell ‘yee-haw?’” “That was not my first thought, sir,” Washington replies. But that’s basically what this Barry Seal is – a crazy old(ish) coot putting everyone, including his wife and kids, whose attitudes toward their husband and father’s intensely illegal activities are hardly lingered over, in harm’s way as he yells yee-haw.

The frenetic speed of the narrative is properly recounted in an equally frenetic handheld camera and wild photography, virtue of César Charlone, that, in tandem with Cruise’s nigh omnipresent grin, is the most rememberable element of the film. The colors in this movie are unyieldingly oversaturated, almost to the point of absurdity, where everything, not just sequences of Barry living the high life, from muddy rivers in South American jungles to the otherwise mundane home of the local sheriff of the small Arkansas town where Barry re-locates his family, are rendered in gaudy hues. This is not the late Tony Scott's preferred method, mind you, where his super saturation sought to convey a granular vérité. No, if Barry's recurring voiceover stokes the notion of a tall tale being told then these colors elicit the notion of an accompanying photobook being flipped through, each picture snapped in Kodachrome.

That also leaves one wondering what to make of the character’s very grave and real misdeeds, and unfortunately, “American Made” is conspicuously un-enlightening, just another in a long line of “Goodfellas” wannabes. “Goodfellas” glamorized, absolutely, and it glorified, assuredly, but it also let its principal character suffer the worst fate possible in accordance with his own established rules and let most of the rest of its characters get kicked in the teeth. Barry gets kicked in the teeth too, literally, but swiftly recovers, hardly worse for wear, and keeps right on going. It’s why this movie has no choice but to end as abruptly as it does – otherwise, Cruise never would’ve stopped cackling.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout

In the movie’s biggest twist, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” forgoes opening with a slam bang. I would not dream of giving it away but suffice to say the lengthy prologue is revealed as something akin to a shaggy dog story, brought home in a delicious celebrity cameo where somber topicality is just a ruse. It’s not that writer/director Christopher McQuarrie is utilizing reality in the name of a joke, but that he’s reminding us – or presuming to – that what’s at stake is sheer entertainment. What’s weird, then, is that McQuarrie not only proceeds to resurrect a particular ghost of Missions Impossible past, but that he employs this ghost to try and inject a little levity amidst so much mind-blowing mindlessness. The pivotal speech in “Fallout’s” glorious antecedent, “Rogue Nation”, comically equated Tom Cruise’s IMF agent Ethan with the living manifestation of destiny; the pivotal speech in “Fallout” stops the movie dead in its track to explain that Ethan is, like, a really good guy. It doesn’t ruin the movie, because too much of it is too good, some of it great, but it mellows the buzz.

“Fallout’s” plot boils down to plutonium, a word repeated throughout the traditional self-destructing message Ethan receives, that repetition being all we need to understand the global stakes. Three plutonium cores must be prevented from winding up in the wrong hands, and though Ethan’s team is tasked to retrieve them, his choice early on to save fellow IMF agent Luther (Ving Rhames) when the cores are within reach arouses questions of loyalty from the CIA. As such, they assign August Walker (Henry Cavill), he of the flowing 1940s movie star mustache, as an accompanying observer, and who comes to suspect Ethan has gone rogue, such an obvious faint you wish it would have been written out. The actual villain, meanwhile, fronting a terrorist group billed as The Apostles, is ultimately disappointing not because his identity might be obvious but because absolutely none of his ostensible anarchist streak comes across in the buttoned-up performance. Lame.

The real villain is, or should be, the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), a black market arms dealer working as the go-between for an undercover Ethan and The Apostles. In a scene where Ethan coolly maintains his covert persona by casually dismissing the sanctity of life, Kirby has the White Widow respond with an indelible turned-on trembly twinkle, the sort of theatrical relish the real villain decidedly lacks. Indeed, bowing to time-honored Hollywood tradition, Kirby’s character is moved aside much too soon, dousing the tantalizing possibility of a love triangle between she, Ethan, and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), back from “Rogue Nation” and still skirting about the story’s periphery, intervening to aid or thwart Ethan, with her own conflicting, unknowable motives.

Kirby is moved aside to pave the way for Michelle Monaghan, returning as Ethan’s fiancé, Julia, from J.J. Abrams’s third “Mission: Impossible.” Why she is here, I don’t know, unless there was an edict from on high, because she never appeared in “Rogue Nation”, a smart move given that McQuarrie’s universe is wholly different from the one created by Abrams. Then again, the character is much gentler than the White Widow, and that gentility connects back to not only Ethan needing to presented as all-around valorous but, worse, to Cruise’s eternal leading man flaw – that is, sexlessness. Seriously, you see it when the White Widow suddenly grabs Ethan and plants one right on his lips, which Cruise has his character receive like he’s out of practice. C’mon, Tom! Go for the gusto! No, a Cruise a love scene has always been better filtered through a stunt, like his martial arts meet cute with Ilsa in “Rogue Nation”, or, in a sly bit of Maverick/Iceman-ish, uh, camaraderie in a Grand Palais lavatory in “Fallout.”

That last one kicks off with the HALO jump, subject of so much breathless pre-release discourse, which Cruise performed himself, jumping from a plane at 25,000 feet, though his stunt work is ultimately less the point than the scene’s overall conception and execution, beginning with the way Lorne Balfe’s score connotes the paradoxical dread and exhilaration that must come moments before a breakneck freefall through storm clouds to earth. The mid-air rescue, meanwhile, in which Ethan must aid an unconscious August, while inherently dramatic, foreshadows in its movements the gala at the Grand Palais down below which the two IMF agents are infiltrating where they move about so many partygoers busting a swank move.

In other words, Ethan and August are – and I simply must take this moment to stress how wonderful what I am about to say is – HALO jumping into the club. One minute they are wearing pressure suits in the sky, the next they are sporting suits and ties. For a second, you yearn for Agent 007 who would have paused for a martini post-HALO. Still, what follows, Ethan and August’s confrontation with John Lark (Liang Yang), supposed Apostles mastermind, in a stark white bathroom with thumping bass deliberately left present on the soundtrack gloriously, improbably merges Studio 54 with the Octagon in a sequence so brutal the characters have to pause to huff and puff yet with choreography so precise that they seem to be floating on air.

If their rollicking showdown is the movie’s high point, the ensuing action scenes are nevertheless lit, like a Paris motorcycle chase where every time Ethan makes a move to put down his foot for balance I felt myself clutching my seat or the concluding spectacle of a roaring chopper chase through Kashmir. There Ethan figures how to pilot a chopper on the fly, which is absurd but also right on brand. And yet, even as he threads the needle of majestic valleys and snowy mountaintops, so too does “Fallout” itself try to thread the needle of absurdity and gravity. McQuarrie can’t pull it off, which is not a fatal flaw, just an “eh, whatever”, but still. It’s not critical overthinking; if anything, it’s gut-level acceptance. I enjoyed “Fallout” even if I wish the whole movie could have been made in the image of that bathroom melee, three dancing queens shutting out the noise of the world, having the time of their lives.

How Will Tom Cruise Push the Envelope Next?

In the run-up to the 67th “Mission: Impossible” film, to be released July 27th, nearly every incisive article cobbled together from press junket quotes makes sure to cite Tom Cruise’s affinity for, shall we say, death-defying stunts. In “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol”, he literally scaled the world’s tallest building. In “Mission: Impossible – Rouge Nation” (maybe the best pure action movie of the decade), he literally hung from the side of a plane as it took off and leapt from a 120 foot ledge. Now, in “Mission: Impossible – Fallout”, he performs a so-called HALO (High Altitude-Low Opening) jump, “usually done,” Reuters reports, “only by highly-trained military professionals.” (To be fair, Cruise is a former Naval Fighter Pilot.) Reuters explains that Cruise “leaps from the cargo door of a plane at 25,000 feet – almost five miles – opening the parachute less than 2,000 feet from the ground.” Yikes. He took a year to prepare for the stunt, he explained to Entertainment Tonight, practicing in a tunnel. Cruise summarized: “We were pushing the envelope, I know it.”

And if there is one thing I know about Tom Cruise, other than his steadfast commitment to The Eight Dynamics, it’s that he will push the envelope again. As such, our question here at Cinema Romantico is obvious: how will Tom Cruise push the envelope in the next “Mission: Impossible” movie? Aren’t you glad we asked?

How Will Tom Cruise Push the Envelope Next?

Canyon Jump Across Snake River Canyon in a Skycycle X-2. Prospective director Christopher McQuarrie explains: “Evel Knievel couldn’t do it, Tom.” And as Tom Cruise himself once opined in the quasi-immortal “Cocktail”, when a guy lays down a dare, you gotta take it.

BASE jumping from the Burj Khalifa. Cruise climbed it, so why not one-up himself and jump off of it? Granted, this would be illegal, but he could film it on the sly and then dare the United Arab Emirates to do something about it. Tom Cruise vs. the UAE Government will be his greatest feat of strength yet!

Dance Marathon. Ethan Hunt and cronies are always going undercover at lavish affairs for intelligence purposes, so why not make the lavish affair in “Mission: Impossible – Overton Window” one in which Ethan Hunt and cronies must infiltrate a dance marathon? Naturally Tom Cruise demands that they film this infiltration during an actual dance marathon in which they actually compete. Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames bow out. Tilda Swinton, John Turturro and Joaquin Phoenix step in. Tom Cruise wins the Dance Marathon. At the press junket, he keeps declaring between energy drink-ed cackles “I haven’t slept since we filmed it, jack!”

Climbing Everest Without Oxygen. Midway through “Mission: Impossible – Breakout Capability”, Ethan Hunt is tasked with acquiring the McGuffin which he must do, through a series of exorbitant calamities and coincidences, by summiting Mount Everest solo and without oxygen. Though the sequence only accounts for seven minutes of screen time, Cruise still trains himself into shape to film the sequence by literally summiting Everest solo and without oxygen.

Mission: Impossible – Mars. M:I7 will be set on Mars, meaning Tom Cruise will GoPro his own literal voyage to Mars, the first ever 5,112 hour one man action-adventure movie!

The Mummy

In his tentpole movie roles Tom Cruise often has a supernatural quality resistant to vulnerability. In the exquisite  “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” his otherworldliness is played for a joke. When a certain bit of potential derring-do requires his character to hold his breath underwater for over three minutes, Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn comically, incredulously remarks “You can do that.” Of course he can! And he does! Tom Cruise is invincible! So it only makes sense, I suppose, that Tom Cruise would need, in this era of cinematic superheroes, his own superhero movie. But what if Marvel or D.C. Comics or whoever else has no need for your services? You find another way in obviously, and so here is Cruise in the re-boot of the Universal Monsters film franchise “The Mummy”, transforming it something less than a project based on a version of the 1932 Boris Karloff character and more the superhero origin story of Cruise’s Nick Morton. I might even be tempted to call Cruise’s move a little brilliant if not for the fact that “The Mummy” is so rarely enjoyable.

Its unenjoyability stems directly from a kind of inadvertent More Becomes Less philosophy, where the myriad writing credits suggest a focused original concept that erupted into an out-of-control cinematic bloomin’ onion. For if its official basis is the Karloff black & white original, its real basis is the Stephen Sommers 1999 “Mummy” reboot, less horror and more action/adventure, even though its conspicuous lack of breezy execution is more in line with Sommers’ atrocious 2004 “Van Helsing.” The latter suffered from monster overload and so does this version of “The Mummy”, stretching to even make room for Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe), who occasionally goes Hyde, a non-Universal property that, seeing as how little we get to know him, seems to suggest a move for the next movie in line. Director Alex Kurtzman has made his bones in the business as a producer, a role given to Ideas rather than artistic follow-through, and it shows as he struggles to coalesce this preponderance of material, resulting in a lurching cinematic behemoth which is why more times than I could count he fell back on explanatory voiceovers laid over montages, emitting strong whiffs of editing cover-ups.

The unwieldy story opens with a monologue and montage, in fact, recounting the ancient tale of Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), set to become Pharaoh until her father has a son, stealing her birthright, the impetus for her giving her soul to the Egyptian God Set for a special dagger with an extra-special gem to kill her father and his son and then sacrifice her lover as a means to give Set bodily form. Alas, she is stopped pre-sacrifice, arrested, mummified, and entombed alive, while the dagger’s gem finds itself re-located to England. It is the tomb that Nick Morton (Cruise) and his sidekick Chris Vail (Jake Johnson), military contractors cum grave robbers, discover in present-day Iraq and remove from its resting place which, as it must, arouses Ahmanet to mummified life to unleash unholy terror trying to finish the job at which she failed so many centuries ago.

This is not an uninteresting opening. That Nick and Chris find the tomb at all is owed to an airstrike on an insurgent stronghold, just as the all-important gem to Ahmanet’s dagger is discovered in London on account tunnel construction, little seemingly throwaway plot details that actually underline the intrusion of man into an ancient world where they do not belong. To that point, the shots of Nick and company descending into The Mummy’s prison, where mercury floats in the air, evokes modern men out of time, and vice-versa. The film’s most comical line, in fact, for good and bad, is Ahmanet in the present day explaining her age-old evil: “It was a different time.”

That sentiment might be challenged by Jenny Halsey (Anabelle Wallis), archaeologist, obligatory love interest for Nick and member of Dr. Jekyll’s Justice League-ish anti-evil contingent, who enters the picture by literally punching Nick in the face for his roguish behavior, though that is pretty much the high point of her fieriness, as she gradually morphs from Marion Ravenwood into Willie Scott. In the second half of the film Jenny is reduced to doing nothing much more than following Nick into cavernous, ominous rooms and saying his name over and over and over. “Nick?” she’ll say, as if she’s afraid of the dark.

Though Ahmanet is not afraid of the dark, her character is essentially shunted there anyway, taking a backseat to Nick, who takes the form of her lover in the present day so that she can slay him to unleash Set on the here and now. That it does not go quite as planned goes without saying, though, of course, it is part of “The Mummy’s” broader plan all along, wherein Ahmanet, for all the power she possesses, is nothing more than a conduit to conferring supernatural status on Nick to make him, for all intents and purposes, a superhero in order to no doubt propagate so many superhero sequels. Alas, Tom Cruise’s greatest supernatural feat would be getting a sequel to this stinkbomb greenlit.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

The hellacious curtain raiser for “Rogue Nation”, the fifth installment of the “Mission: Impossible” film franchise, finds the series’ recurring protagonist Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) clinging to a cargo plane as it lifts off. Ostensibly Hunt wants to board this plane mid-flight because it is piloted by Chechen rebels who possess nuclear arms. Yet the plane just as easily could have been piloted by treasonous Canadian Mounties who illegally possess Vermont Maple Syrup. Hunt, comically bickering with fellow agent Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and his ace technician Benji (Simon Pegg) by headset while dangling, seems less interested in what’s on the airbus than whether or not he can actually pull off this mid-flight stunt. It’s a sequence played more for amusement than dramatic effect, a sensation analogous of the whole film, where even its most tense moments are infused with action movie joie de vivre. It isn’t about self-serious heroism; it’s about wanton brinksmanship.

Wanton brinkmanship, in fact, is the phrase employed by CIA Director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) as he convinces a Senate committee to shut down the Impossible Mission Force. “They’re a throwback,” he dismissively declares in the midst of his plea. So is the film. While so many summer tentpole movies have acquired emotional baggage as a means to ground their stories in realism, “Rogue Nation” jettisons any pretense of reality the instant Ethan gets himself into that airliner pickle, no baggage to check, thanks.

Cruise’s characters so often have someone to avenge, scars of the past to heal, but for “Rogue Nation’s” Ethan everything is refreshingly present tense. He’s only got what’s he going after and that is Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), chief of the vile Syndicate, a kind of “anti-IMF” used for evil rather than good, whose requisite diabolical scheme seems to exist of nothing more than daring Ethan to come and get him. That’s all “Rogue Nation” is really – one big dare and as Cruise’s Brian Flanagan once opined, When a guy lays down a dare, you gotta take it. So Ethan does, over and over.

Lane is admittedly a bland baddie, essentially faceless, seen as a sketch on a drawing pad just as often as in person. And that’s okay because the real villain here isn’t even Lane (he’s just the piece of cheese at the end of the maze); it’s Hunley, played with patented droll pomposity by Baldwin. His character’s shuttering the IMF has caused Ethan to become a fugitive, and so as Ethan chases Lane, Hunley chases Ethan. Hunley, though, is no match for our on-the-lam hero, and nor should he be.

Now you could read Hunley’s disdain for the IMF as commentary on governmental candidness mucking up the unmitigated secrecy necessary to keep us safe or you could see Hunley as something more akin to Margaret Dumont in old Marx Brothers movies, continually disgusted by the hero’s actions and eternally foiled by them nonetheless. (Psssssst...it’s the latter.) Steam practically billows from Baldwin’s ears every time Ethan gets the best of him, never more so than a rip-roaring, repartee-driven late film sequence where he goes from being one step ahead to thirty-nine steps behind in the blink of an eye. His reaction is worthy of a silent film. Curses!

In addition to Benji and Brandt, Ethan’s longtime cohort, dating all the way back to the first “M:I” movie, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) turns up, yet they all take a backseat to the suspiciously named Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), the fetching Swede who just like “Casablanca’s” immortal Ilsa Lund finds her allegiance pulled every which way. (Ferguson looks so much like the late great Ingrid Bergman that I kept waiting for her to pull off one of those famous “M:I” latex masks to reveal another face.) She matches right up to Ethan, eye-to-eye, though only after she kicks off her high heels, a little aside that feels humorously humongous, suggesting Cruise is on the whole joke. Though she transforms into his antagonistic love interest, this is PG-13 and they’re not allowed to have sex, which is okay because they just end up doing it, so to speak, in an intoxicating mountainside motorcycle chase anyway. That’s why Ethan acquires his most flamboyant article of clothing – an acid jungle print button-up – just prior to mounting his steed; it’s their first date and he wants to look his best. And even if she gets away, he catches back up, because that’s their push & pull, accomplices and enemies.

She’s also just as adept at ass-kicking as Ethan, saving his Yankee bacon not once but twice, most unforgettably in an underwater escape sequence where outfit with an armband that counts down his oxygen supply (movie prop of the year!), he has three minutes to hold his breath or else. The lead-up to this unforgettable bit of aqua derring-do comes to encapsulate “Rogue Nation” as a whole, a verbally dexterous sequence in which Ethan, Ilsa and Benji luxuriate in an opulent room, talking through strategic options of how to achieve their aim, dismissing plausible plans until they hit an idea that’s truly impossible. You can imagine writer/director Christopher McQuarrie doing the same with his think tank.

Ethan’s quest to find Lane is nothing more than a globe-trotting parlor game of action set pieces, each one effectively reaching its own level of OMG grandeur without piggybacking on the last, live action Loony Tunes that know the real stakes in these sorts of full-throttle epics are merely whether or not something is so electrically rendered it makes you laugh out loud. “Rogue Nation” made me laugh out loud more than most so-called comedies. Almost everything is electrically rendered. If the climactic sequence leaks just a little it’s only because the preceding two hours were walking on air, and upon re-entry I was more than willing to look the other way. As good as Hollywood gets, “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” is mindless escapism as art.

Final Scene of Mission: Impossible Space Vertigo

In all the hullabaloo regarding the 117,000 superhero movies greenlit over the course of the next 75 years what got lost was the announcement that Tom Cruise would be starring in another 5 “Mission: Impossible” movies over the next 20 years. The final film, slated to be titled “Mission: Impossible Space Vertigo” will be helmed by a Finnish director you haven't heard of because he hasn't made a movie yet.

One of Cinema Romantico's most trusted sources was able to get his hands on a copy of the “Space Vertigo” screenplay, and the last scene's twist is so delicious I was left with no choice but to share it. And while I hesitate to divulge this information for fear of reprisals from both the studio and the Cruise Camp, well, I think when you see the “twist” I’m talking about you will agree it was worth the risk. The final scene has been re-printed below with no embellishments…

EXT. SPACE ELEVATOR - 96,000 KM ABOVE EARTH

Ethan Hunt dangles from the tippy-top of the elevator, wearing a space helmet that, somehow, still allows his flowing locks to dangle to just below his neck, as Aarne Klaus, in a jet-black spacesuit, floating weightlessly, taunts him from just above.

Ethan looks down, Earth spinning just below him, its atmosphere ready and willing to incinerate him should be fall.

Klaus rears back with his pugilistic space gloves and slams into both of Ethan’s desperate hands. 

With a defiant yell, Ethan lets go and falls, falling and falling toward Earth. Nothing can stop his ultimate demise now.

INT. FLANAGAN'S COCKTAILS & DREAMS - MANHATTAN - PRESENT DAY

BRIAN FLANAGAN, leaning against the back counter of illuminated liquor with a mop in hand, is dozing while standing up. Seeing this, his wife, JORDAN MOONEY, smacks him with a wet dish towel.

JORDAN: Hey. Dufus. You were sleeping on the job again.

BRIAN: I just had the strangest dream. I dreamt that I was a special agent in the IMF.

JORDAN: IMF? You mean, like “Mission: Impossible”? The old TV show?

BRIAN: Yeah, exactly.

JORDAN: Was Peter Graves there?

BRIAN: I think so. But he looked more like Jon Voight.

JORDAN: Jon Voight?

BRIAN: And I was married to that girl we saw in “True Detective.”

JORDAN: Maggie Hart? You were married to Maggie Hart?

BRIAN: It was really weird. My personality kept changing. And the tone of the whole dream was just like......all over the place. Like, I was slipping in and out of different dreamscapes created by different people. They were so uneven in quality. It felt like I was at this dock in Sydney for, like, 127 hours. 

JORDAN: No more daiquiris for you before bed. By the way, one of the regulars threw up in the bathroom again. Too many whiskey sours.

BRIAN: (sighs) I’ll get to it.

JORDAN: Cocktails and dreams, eh, Bri’?

Brian shuffles off. In the distance, from the jukebox, or perhaps an old transistor radio, we hear “Aruba, Jamaica ooo I wanna take you / Bermuda, Bahama come on pretty mama”…

FADE OUT

Edge of Tomorrow

Sarah Vowell once posited that America likes watching Tom Cruise be put through the wringer - and she wrote this in January 2000, long before he infamously besmirched Oprah's fine upholstery. This hypothesis irrefutably holds up when considering "Edge of Tomorrow", Doug Liman's re-imagining of Harold Ramis's elegant time loop comic masterwork "Groundhog Day" as a futuristic "D-Day" where the human race is made to confront to an alien army of tentacled Mimics. They are called this, I reckon, because they are in the process of mimicking the Nazis' European aggressions. Who says you can't repeat the past?

The Cruise version of vain weatherman Phil Connors is Major William Cage, an unctous public relations man whose interest is maintaining and propagating the military brand in the midst of all-out war rather than getting involved in anything literally militaristic. Which is why when his superior officer (Brendan Gleeson, dryly hysterical) assigns him to the front lines of Normandy 2.0, he grins and tries to bribe his way out. Instead, he's arrested, re-cast as a deserter in an officer's uniform and thrown in with a pack of grunts. One minute he's trading exposition with Erin Burnett on CNN, the next he's in handcuffs on an army base tarmac getting kicked in the guts. He's Tom Cruise reduced to our level. Sure, he'll wind up the hero, he has to, after all, but he'll crawl through the mud to get there.

Truly there is something satirically subversive in seeing Tom Cruise, hero, strapped into a Mini Me version of a Jaeger and not know how to turn off the "safety". Even better is seeing Bill Paxton as a mustachoied Kentuckian barking orders and insults at our leading man, as if we are momentarily allowed to imagine an alternate reality where Paxton, not Cruise, is the box office luminary. And "Edge of Tomorrow" is all about indulging in alternate reality.

At the onset of the invasion, one in which the commanding officers in all their hubris have miscalculated and left themselves woefully vulnerable, Cage is killed. But not quite. Rather than saying 'sup to St. Peter, he wakes up back on the army tarmac, being kicked in the guts, his own personal "I Got You, Babe". He's destined, it seems, to re-live the invasion and his own death over and over and over, etc., for the rest of eternity. Until, that is, he meets Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) on the battlefield, a soldiering celebrity, which no doubt would have caused the notable feminist John Wayne to throw a monotone hissy hit. She is nicknamed The Angel Of Verdun, another military history nod and an embodiment of her role as Cage's guiding spirit. She also lived through this endless invasion loop, and has deciphered the secret - by killing an Alpha Mimic, a person gains the power to re-set time. And if they can re-set the time, they can get a leg up on the enemy.

The film is based on a book which itself was based on a video game, and this is extremely evident in the evolution of Cage's journey. He garners strength, physically and mentally, builds his combat skills, and incessantly re-strategizes with Rita. Each time he dies, he begins a "level" anew, until he conquers that level and moves to the next one. It cleverly allows the film to refresh in the moment, even as its overarching narrative is fairly boilerplate. But where "Edge of Tomorrow" significantly diverges from its Bill Murray forefather is in its protagonist's trajectory. If Phil Connors' arc was one of personal redemption then William Cage's is the more commonplace Cruise-esque Becoming The World's Savior. Which is why even in this wearying loop, even with the obligatory second act comedown in advance of the climax, there's a bit too much Spunky Explorer to the performance.

Blunt is the true counterpart to Murray, the film's secret weapon, giving it gravity, suggesting something more Shakespearean than Hollywood. Cruise may be bordering on the Edge of Tomrrow, but Blunt is mired in, to quote the prospective novel of "Sideways'" Miles Raymond, The Day After Yesterday. Yes, she's an action heroine, and yes, Liman's camera repeatedly ogles her in the midst of musclebound yoga as her respective Sonny & Cher trigger, and yes, the script grafts on some blah attempt at romance. But her performance is intense, meditative, emitting a soulfulness I wish more turns in would-be blockbusters would have the guts to try. The character's exhaustion is palpable and suggestive of a different movie lurking just underneath this very good one.

Every attempt made by Cage to "get to know" Rita, she rebuffs, a subtle reminder amidst all the effects and bouts of heroism that no matter how much time we spend in the company of another person, we never really get to know them at all.

Happy 4th of July!

It's America's birthday, and nothing says "AMERICA!!!!!" quite like Tom Cruise in Ray Bans in front of an American flag.