Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation review

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (12A/PG-13, 131 mins)
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

It’s a sad state of affairs that Tom Cruise is the biggest star on the planet in every measure other than box office returns. For charisma, charm and sheer star wattage, on and off the camera, he’s still at the top of a tree he’s occupied for over 30 years now.

And yet for some reason cinemagoers, or perhaps more correctly, American cinemagoers, don’t want to look at his films anymore outside the Mission: Impossible franchise. In the face of this apathy he seems to have made it his mission to astonish audiences into submission by attempting things on screen that no human, never mind a pampered A-lister, should be doing.

That included dangling from the world’s tallest building in Ghost Protocol, the previous M:I movie, and now this fifth entry in the series showcases Cruise as superspy Ethan Hunt hanging on seemingly unharnessed from the side of a plane in take-off.

It’s pretty much what the entire film is being sold on, and looks like part of an elaborate climactic sequence, but in actual fact it happens in the first two minutes as Hunt and his team target a group of terrorists. He’s trying to get on the plane to rescue its dangerous cargo and, as prologues go, it’s magnificent stuff, brief but jaw-dropping and clearly completely real. See it in IMAX with the sound making the floor beneath you shake and you’ll feel like you’re taking off with him.

Such heights are hard to sustain, and for some of the next hour or so as plot elements are clicked into position, it can sometimes feel like you’re back down to earth and sitting in a traffic jam instead of flying high.

First off there’s the emergence of a shadowy organisation known as the Syndicate, rogue operatives responsible for worldwide atrocities. Then the Impossible Mission Force gets dissolved at the behest of Alec Baldwin’s CIA boss who doesn’t believe the Syndicate exists and thinks Hunt is himself rogue, leaving him on the CIA’s wanted list and on the run with only Simon Pegg’s analyst Benji to help him.

Ethan has already encountered Ilsa Faust (the excellent Rebecca Ferguson), a potential double agent who looks to be working for the Syndicate, led by a chilling bad guy in Solomon Lane (Sean Harris, who seems as though his many years of playing quietly dangerous nutters have been leading to this).

None of this is dull, but there’s a lot of it, interspersed with a bunch of fights and some country hopping. A polished sequence at the Vienna opera sets the film back on track while also setting up the mystery of just what exactly Ilsa is up to. And central to the Mission movies is having to steal a bit of tech from an impregnable stronghold, leading to a top notch underwater escapade that owes a lot to Gravity.

There’s a high-speed motorbike pursuit in Morocco that will leave you breathless, assuming you’ve got it back after the underwater stuff, but not all of these action moments feel like they're advancing the story, the bike chase in particular. So for all that these sequences look cool and offer fleeting excitement, there’s a bit of padding here, and a few too many computer generated cars despite protestations that it’s all for reals.

Critically though, as much of what makes these movies good is built on tension as it is on action. But even more importantly than that, it’s built on characters, and makes a virtue of Hunt’s doggedness and willingness to do what it takes for the mission. The result is a delicately balanced and extremely suspenseful chess game (not literally!) between Ethan and Lane that ratchets up as we head towards one of the best finales of the series.

Cruise is reliably excellent throughout and Jeremy Renner gets some funny lines but absolutely nothing to do in the action stakes (for some reason Benji has been promoted to second fiddle), which seems like a shame considering how able he was in Ghost Protocol. Overshadowing all of them is Ferguson, with the little-known Swede demonstrating serious combat chops as well as convincing us as an agent with a lot of secrets.

With 15 minutes shaved off and a little more clarity of focus, Rogue Nation might have claimed Best Mission: Impossible Movie. We’ll just have to settle for it being a first rate action movie and a terrific spy movie.

Edge of Tomorrow review

Edge of Tomorrow (12A/PG-13, 113 mins)
Director: Doug Liman
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

An early summer movie season that’s been fairly strong so far continues to tick along nicely with Edge of Tomorrow, a smart and fun sci-fi thriller which demonstrates that Tom Cruise is still one of the best in the business.

Even though this is a summer blockbuster that may have a premise like an episode of Star Trek, and even though it nods to most of the sci-fi action of the last 30 years, it still comes across as fairly original. It’s based on a novel called All You Need Is Kill and for all that it seems to be in the vein of Starship Troopers, the clear and unexpected touchstone is Groundhog Day.

News footage opens the film to fill us in on the backstory, which at first comes across as the kind of thing we’ve seen umpteen times before: an alien invasion has left earth on the brink of destruction and our forces are gearing up for one last make or break battle.

During this prologue we’ve been quietly introduced to Major William Cage (Cruise). In a nice twist, he’s not a hero but a media relations guy, prized more for his recruitment skills than his soldiering. But his superior (Brendan Gleeson) has plans to send him into the fray anyway during a low key start where he has to come to terms with being sent to the front line with no training and no clue.

The real hero is Rita (Emily Blunt), known as the Angel of Verdun since a successful mission against the aliens. Most of Europe has been destroyed and taken over, so the plan is for a Normandy landings-style incursion into France to take the fight to the enemy. These so-called Mimics are brilliantly designed many-tentacled beasties that recall the sentinels in The Matrix, scary, fast-moving and very hard to kill.

Saving Private Ryan is evoked as they drop onto the beaches of France to take on the aliens, only for everyone, including Cage and Rita, to be very quickly slaughtered. But here’s where the unique selling point of Edge of Tomorrow comes into play, as Cage wakes up to find himself at the start of the previous day. That day then plays out exactly as it did before, only he knows everything that’s going to happen because he’s already lived through it even if no one else has.

Day after day he sets out on the mission and day after he dies, unable to make much progress or save Rita. But finally something clicks on one of the days, and Rita tells Cage to come and find her when he, as it were, gets back to yesterday. She trains him how to better fight the Mimics, while he tells her what will happen tomorrow so they can survive for as long as possible.

That may sound like a complicated bit of shenanigans, but one of the key strengths here is that it’s all very clear to follow. Like a video game, Cage gets a bit further each time, learning from his mistakes and dying and restarting dozens, possibly hundreds of times until he gets it right.

It’s the very definition of repetitive action, with the beach landing and fight playing out over and over, but it’s far from a problem because we always get something a bit different. And it changes up as it progresses, taking us beyond the beach to the places their mission needs to go if it’s ever to succeed. There’s also room for some cheeky laughs in amongst all the dying, born out of Cage knowing the future and often at the expense of Bill Paxton’s hardnosed sergeant.

Blunt is convincing as a badass but no one sells this sort of thing like Cruise, who combines undimmed star power with the utmost sincerity so that we’re with him all the way no matter how preposterous the setup may be. His transformation into an action star may have come at the expense of more interesting dramatic roles but, even at the age of 51, all you need is Cruise.

Oblivion review

Oblivion (12A/PG-13, 125 mins)
Director: Joseph Kosinski
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

In 2077, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) has memories of earth before the alien war that wiped out most of humanity, the remnants of which now live in a space station in orbit. Along with Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), Jack remains on the surface as maintenance crew, cleaning up Wall-E style, in preparation for a move to Saturn’s moon. The arrival of a crashed spaceship containing a survivor Jack recognises from his dreams (Olga Kurylenko) coincides with the entry of Morgan Freeman’s possible baddie, and it’s clear from the start that there’s a deeper mystery at play in this derivative but well put together sci-fi adventure. How this develops is generally watchable enough, even if at first it seems to lack a clear objective and narrative drive, though familiarity and predictability are its main problems. Inspiration is evident from The Matrix to Moon via Total Recall and many more, and you can see the finale coming from outer space. It also lacks the ideas that inform the best sci-fi, driven more by plot machinations than having anything particularly groundbreaking to say. But visually it’s breathtaking, the crisp and clear CGI making it otherworldly without ever seeming cartoonish, and the infrequent bursts of action are solid, if hardly revolutionary.

Jack Reacher review

Jack Reacher (12A, 130 mins)
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Fans of the Lee Child novels which brought us the character of Jack Reacher are apparently up in arms because he’s supposed to be a massive, hulking former soldier turned drifter. Reacher here is played by the distinctly non-massive Tom Cruise, but that really isn’t a problem unless you’re totally hung up on the height thing, because Cruise is a movie star of the highest order.

In a coldly terrifying opening, a gunman takes out random passers-by from a distance with a high powered rifle. An arrest is made, with Richard Jenkins as the DA looking to put the guy away and Rosamund Pike as his daughter, a defence lawyer who hires Reacher as an investigator to find out the truth.

This first adaptation of Child’s books is being sold as some sort of revenge thriller in the style of Taken, when in fact it’s much more of a traditional police procedural, albeit a highly compelling one. Reacher is a man of action though, and capable of beating up anyone who crosses his path, which he does frequently.

Everything about it screams ridiculousness, and luckily it knows it, otherwise the would-be slick banter and clunky exposition would be too hard to swallow with a straight face. Reacher’s past gets explained to us in a way that would be moronic if it weren’t so tongue in cheek, but it could sometimes do with an injection of pace or a complete commitment to luridness to match its silliness.

Werner Herzog of all people turns up as the bad guy heading the conspiracy, and he adds ripeness, Cruise is magnetic, and Pike is terrible, all making for a hugely enjoyable slice of pulp.

Rock of Ages review

Rock of Ages (12A/PG-13, 123 mins)
Director: Adam Shankman
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The director of Hairspray returns with this peppy rock musical adapted from the successful stage show. It’s a proper musical too, wherein the characters are constantly bursting into song, the selling point being that all the numbers are covers of rock classics from the likes of Foreigner and REO Speedwagon. It’s kinda like Mamma Mia except, you know, good.

The most threadbare of plots is set in 1987, as small-town girl Sherrie (Julianne Hough) arrives in Los Angeles from Oklahoma with dreams of stardom. She gets a job in a club and meets Drew (Diego Boneta), another aspiring singer, and soon they're in love.

And to be honest, that pretty much it. But it’s everything that’s happening around them that drives the movie forward. Get a pair of bland leads and surround them with a larger than life support, like Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand as the guys who run the club, with the unlikely pair generating great warmth as they share one of the film’s more surprising numbers. Then there’s Catherine Zeta Jones who gets involved in a largely redundant subplot, as the mayor’s wife campaigning to save the city from the evils of rock and roll.

But there’s a secret weapon still waiting to be unleashed, and that weapon is Tom Cruise. As debauched rock star Stacee Jaxx, who is due to play his final gig at Baldwin’s club, he makes his entrance emerging from underneath a pile of women like a cross between his Frank Mackey in Magnolia and Gary Oldman’s Dracula.

Tattooed, spaced out, swaggering, and seemingly allergic to shirts, it’s an inspired piece of casting, since it would have been very easy to go the obvious route and give the role to Brand. He can sing too, and as he sweats and gyrates while belting out Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive and Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar On Me, Cruise makes for a thoroughly convincing rock god.

What perhaps lets the film down is the sometimes uninspired staging of some of the numbers, with the visuals not always able to keep pace with the songs. And the plot does kind of run into a cul-de-sac three quarters of the way in, as everyone goes off with their own problems.

But it scores big on the songs and those singing them, and as a celebration of classic rock and a lament for its passing, and the rise of the horrible anodyne pop we’ve been stuck with for the last quarter century.

And of course you better believe Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ will get wheeled out at some stage. It all adds up to a proper crowd-pleaser, a delicious slab of cheese that, as long as you know what to expect from it, delivers in spades.

Knight and Day review

Knight and Day (12A, 109 mins)
Director: James Mangold
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Tom Cruise’s critical and commercial reputation has taken a battering in recent weeks, ever since the thoroughly underwhelming performance at the US box office of Knight and Day, his new action romp.

The question of whether the star wattage of the one-time top dog in Hollywood is still at full power has come up repeatedly, even more so when you consider that the project he left to do this instead, Salt, has turned out to be quite the hit for Angelina Jolie.

But it’s possible that too much shouldn’t be read into it because Cruise and his co-star here, Cameron Diaz, are actually on fairly decent form, and Knight and Day would probably be just as lacklustre and uninspired whomever its stars were.

Cruise plays Roy Miller, who meets Diaz’s June when they get on the same strangely quiet flight. As they chat it looks like we’re heading for standard rom-com territory, but suddenly Roy has killed everyone on the plane and they’re on the run.

He’s being tracked by the FBI, who would have June believe that he’s a rogue agent, while Roy claims they’ve set him up, and amid all the chases and shoot outs, June has to decide whether he’s a psycho or the good guy. The answer to that question is never in much doubt, although we have to plod though an awful lot of plot developments that don’t make much sense to get to that point.

It’s that clumsy plotting that holds back this spy caper of would-be frothiness. With its Hitchcock style setup, Bond trappings and 21st century pyrotechnics, everything is in place to make it work, from its exotic locales (Austria, Spain) to a MacGuffin that’s being sought by bad guys pretending to be good guys, as well as actual bad guys.

And yet it never takes off, though it continually threatens to before stalling again. A deliberately slow start looks like it’s going to ease us gently into the mayhem to follow, but in fact it could be accused of lethargy. It’s frustrating that it just never zips as much as it ought to and flashes of entertainment fail to compensate for the overall sluggishness.

The action beats do crop up at regular intervals and they’re distracting enough, mostly consisting of car chases enhanced by buckets of special effects. But the problem with such carefree use of CGI is that, although it allows filmmakers to do things that otherwise wouldn’t be possible, it’s immediately obvious that what you’re watching isn’t actually real.

At best it takes the weight and momentum out of a scene and any sense of danger, at worst it looks like a cartoon. It’s no coincidence that the very best movie chases (The French Connection, Mad Max and the rest) were done with no trickery whatsoever.

The stars do their best to keep it on the rails and it’s they alone that stop Knight and Day from being a total snooze. Cruise does nutty quite well and Diaz is feisty and perky, apart from when June consistently and irritatingly does very stupid things just to further the plot.

But while they're an agreeable pairing, it doesn’t really generate the expected, or necessary, laughs. Sad to say, their appearance on Top Gear the other week was a good deal more fun than this.