Tag: Simon Pegg

Every Mission: Impossible Movie Ranked, From Worst to Best

Where does Tom Cruise’s latest, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout,” rank among the six films?

Did anyone ever expect the “Mission: Impossible” franchise to have this much longevity? In every movie, Tom Cruise dons a ridiculous prosthetic mask, pulls off an impossible heist and even ends up forking over the thing he just stole to the very person he’s trying to keep it from in the first place. But across 22 years, six films and five directors, each “Mission: Impossible” movie has varied wildly in tone, style and cast while pushing the limits of wacky, action set pieces and preserving the tongue-in-cheek spirit of the original TV series. With “Mission: Impossible – Fallout,” the sixth film in Cruise and Paramount’s franchise hitting theaters Friday, we chose to accept this nearly impossible mission of trying to decide which ones we like best. This list will self destruct in five seconds. Continue reading “Every Mission: Impossible Movie Ranked, From Worst to Best”

Ready Player One

Ernest Cline’s book is the subject of much deserved backlash, but Steven Spielberg’s film might be interesting if it was even half as problematic

Ready Player One PosterI feel like one of those angry male fanboys complaining about “accuracy” and being “faithful” to source material. While Ready Player One maintains most of the plot points of Ernest Cline’s novel, it often feels like a completely different story. Masturbatory and overwritten though it may be, the book Ready Player One at least took its fandom seriously. Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation is a sugary pop culture smorgasboard. It’s empty, overstuffed and bland where it should be awe-inspiring. And instead of a virtual reality world filled with wonder, Spielberg’s latest vision of the future looks corny even for him.

Ready Player One has been the subject of a lot of backlash, much of it deserved. Cline’s adventurous sci-fi novel celebrates ‘80s pop culture but does so trivially. And in the process it overlooks art made by and for women and champions insular, nerdy dudes who view the whole world as a video game and have become the model for hateful trolls on the Internet.

If Spielberg’s movie were half as problematic it might be interesting. It cheapens the Willy Wonka sense of discovery you got from reading the book and simplifies the idea of the OASIS, an infinite, game-like universe to “a place where you can climb Mt. Everest…with Batman!” Cline’s book isn’t celebrated for his prose, but even he never wrote a line that bad (he’s a co-screenwriter on the film). And better luck next time to any tech guys who thought this movie might put VR headsets on the map. For every remarkable thing that happens in the OASIS, Spielberg can’t help but cut back to someone in the real world looking like a total dweeb. Continue reading “Ready Player One”

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

The fifth in the MI franchise, Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise have elevated the series to James Bond status

MI5PosterDaniel Craig and the new James Bond left a campy-sized hole in the hearts of many an action movie lover. The films became so polished, so good and even so plausible that while no one was clamoring for a throwback to Pierce Brosnan ice palaces and invisible cars, there’s a sense that spy stories could be a little less serious.

Enter “Mission: Impossible”, which five entries in has shed its TV adaptation roots and finally taken Bond’s place on the franchise throne. Previously the “MI” series has been a malleable Tom Cruise vehicle: a Hitchcockian thriller in the hands of genre stylist Brian De Palma, a visual showcase in the hands of John Woo or a dense conspiracy caper in the hands of J.J. Abrams. The fourth film, “Ghost Protocol”, was so delightfully cartoonish (in the hands of none other than Pixar’s Brad Bird making his live-action debut), that even dangling Tom Cruise off the tallest building in the world was not the most outrageous part.

So what is ironically fresh about the latest and fifth entry, “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation”, is that Director Christopher McQuarrie isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. The film has not taken on yet another new life in the hands of a new director but has found a comfortable groove that combines the best of all four previous films.

The most notable trait of course must be Tom Cruise, who continues to impress and prove why he’s a bankable star despite never once setting foot in superhero spandex or body armor. In purely Bond fashion, Cruise opens “Rogue Nation” with an incredible set piece detached from the plot of the main film. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt leaps aboard a taxiing plane and hangs on for dear life even after the plane takes off.

And that’s Cruise’s career in a nutshell: trying so hard and still able to hold tight against all odds even as every young teen star takes flight.

Here Cruise’s Ethan Hunt undergoes the Mel Gibson in “Lethal Weapon” treatment, being suspended from the ceiling and beaten and tortured, only to acrobatically crack some skulls and escape. He’s on the run after coming across an agent he believes to be the head of The Syndicate, Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). The Syndicate is a shadow organization made to destroy the IMF, and which Hunt believes was behind several global accidents he and the IMF were been unable to avert.

Lane’s frail, crippled tone behind glasses, a German accent and a short haircut make him sound like a man struck by lightning as a child. He’s a convincing ghost, and one of the franchise’s more memorable villains, if still behind Philip Seymour Hoffman from “MI:3”.

But the IMF is also facing a challenge from the CIA and their operation head, played by Alec Baldwin. The CIA is in denial that any Syndicate even exists, and the IMF’s biggest lead is a double agent named Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) who they first encounter attempting to murder a German chancellor.

It’s enough spy mumbo jumbo to keep the wheels moving and not too much to overwhelm the story in Macguffins and pseudo-science jargon. And the help of returning cast Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames continue to keep things light and tongue-in-cheek.

Because part of what makes “Rogue Nation” so refreshing, and for that matter all the “Mission: Impossible” movies, is how outlandish and oversized the film’s various set pieces can become, and yet are never once CGI maelstroms. One scene takes place in the backdrop of an opera in Vienna, and to say it’s magnificent, musically edited, and operatic is an understatement. Then there’s an underwater scene where Cruise has to hold his breath for three minutes while avoiding rotating gears and security blocks. It’s preposterous and near impossible to describe or rationalize, but in 2015 it’s more memorable than any horde of disposable robots.

These are traditional action movies after all, but when Bourne has gone gritty, the “Fast and Furious” movies have grown into their own superhero films, and John Wick has gone downright minimal, it’s nice to see that Ethan Hunt’s missions still look impossible.

3 ½ stars

The 3rd Annual Anti-Oscars

The movies and the performers that don’t stand a chance of getting nominated this year.

Each year there are movies and performers that don’t just fail to get nominated for the Academy Awards but aren’t even in the conversation. This is where the Anti-Oscars were born.

Blogs, critics and Oscar pundits spend a lot of time discussing what’s in and less discussing what’s out. So although I’ve taken the time to do actual Oscar predictions, hopefully this piece can shed some light on under the radar work while placing it in the context of this behemoth we call the Oscar race.

See last year’s Anti-Oscars

Best Picture

  • Prisoners
  • The Spectacular Now
  • Spring Breakers
  • The Place Beyond the Pines
  • Upstream Color
  • Frances Ha
  • This is the End
  • The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Some of this year’s actual Oscar nominees are as strong as they’ve ever been, and yet it still boggles the mind that the Academy considers there to be nine better movies than “Before Midnight”. That nominee, along with “Blue Jasmine,” “All is Lost” and “Fruitvale Station,” will likely miss the cut, but they were at least on someone’s radar.

Movies like “The Spectacular Now” and “Frances Ha” are those indie gems that never get noticed by the Academy, maybe an Original Screenplay nod if they’re lucky. They represent the modernity and the youth often missing in the Oscars. They’re actors’ films with minimal story but an exploration of a point in life, and they share the style that makes them distinctly cinema.

“Spring Breakers” and “Upstream Color” are on the other end of the spectrum, indies too weird and polarizing to even be considered by the old fashioned Academy, even if their membership is slanting younger. Both utilize excessive style and their directors’ daring vision to create jarring, innovative films, one about way too much and the other arguably about nothing at all. Both however are beguiling, hypnotic mysteries.

In the middle are “Prisoners” and “The Place Beyond the Pines,” both midsize thrillers that were labeled as either too ridiculous or too portentous. They stretch storytelling boundaries with their ambitious screenplays, and they earn major thrills that even some of the likely Best Picture contenders can’t muster.

And last are the two studio movies, “This is the End” and “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” one a bit more massive than the other. These movies are why most people go to the movies, and they’re the ones that almost never show up on Hollywood’s most important night. They combine massive movie star appeal with rambunctious and accessible storytelling. But most of all, they’re fun. If the Oscars can be  self-serious homework, these movies are a different sort of escapism. Continue reading “The 3rd Annual Anti-Oscars”

The World's End

“The World’s End” is a wacky fun throwback comedy with a real sense of nostalgia.

Earlier this year, “This is the End” served as something of a finale on the man-child comedies that have defined the last 10 years or so of Hollywood comedies. It did so in such spectacularly silly fashion that it seemed as though no movie again should try and top it.

“The World’s End” too marks a different conclusion. It’s the last in the Cornetto Trilogy, a series of Edgar Wright parody films that started with “Shaun of the Dead,” continued with “Hot Fuzz” and took a break during “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.” Writers and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost along with Wright branded a completely new approach to the parody film, one that was slick, stylish and action heavy.

But like “This is the End,” the juvenile fun and spastic, hyper kinetic style seems to be behind Wright, Pegg and Frost. The characters in “The World’s End” are more mature, the consequences and emotions are more genuine, and the film seems less like an homage to apocalyptic movies and more like a heartfelt throwback.

Pegg plays Gary King, a wonderfully soliloquizing pack leader trapped in his teenage glory days. In an AA meeting, he reflects upon an epic bar crawl from his last day of high school: 12 pubs, 12 pints, but one he never finished. He now seeks to return home and finish the quest with four of his old mates, all of whom have matured and settled into comfy jobs and families while he’s kept his old car, cassette player and selective memories.

He’s completely glossed over a harrowing accident that almost killed his best friend Andy (Frost), one that’s never shown but only hinted at as the group gets drunker and more candid. Continue reading “The World's End”

Star Trek Into Darkness

“Star Trek Into Darkness” isn’t overstuffed, but isn’t exactly balanced, and it begs for more innovation.

J.J. Abrams’s innovation on the “Star Trek” reboot was that he managed to take a long-standing institution, play with a very sacred universe’s timeline and still manage to canonize it. If he didn’t manage to impress me, and I was one of very few, it’s that doing so was his only innovation.

Set pieces existed for their own sake, as did stylistic camera twirls and lens flares. Dialogue teetered on being self-serious and self-referential without pausing for breath, and the plot that grew out of it didn’t make as much sense as it appeared. Even Roger Ebert pointed out that in this futuristic sci-fi epic, space battles were reduced to cataclysmic mayhem and sparring with fists and swords.

And although “Star Trek Into Darkness” improves upon that last aspect to the point that I enjoyed everything I saw, part of me wishes the Abrams from “Super 8” showed up, to dust off a cliché, and boldly go where none have gone before. Point being, if you’re looking for innovation here, you won’t find it. Continue reading “Star Trek Into Darkness”

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

The action set pieces in “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” are so cartoonish it’s no surprise Brad Bird of “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille” fame made it his live action debut.

It is the rare fourth movie capable of revitalizing a franchise by cutting down on the exposition, hyper stylization and melodrama of each installment and delivering wholesome action movie adrenaline. Continue reading “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol”