Review: Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

* * *
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Starring: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill

Mission: Impossible - Fallout is the most movie you'll see all summer. It has everything. Allies who turn out to be enemies, enemies who turn out to be allies, double crossing, globe hopping, love triangles (of a sort), car chases, helicopter chases, gun fights, room destroying fist fights, assassination attempts, nuclear bombs, and at least four occasions when it's entirely conceivable that Tom Cruise could have been killed during the filming of the scene. I can't wait to see what insane thing the next Mission: Impossible's director manages to talk him into doing. Maybe he'll go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Maybe he'll wrestle a tiger. Maybe he'll surf a wave of lava. Anything's possible!

Review: American Made (2017)

* * *
Director: Doug Liman
Starring: Tom Cruise

The story told by American Made is the type for which the phrase "only in America" was invented, a tale of daring and ambition and corruption fueled by the enterprising nature of the "American Dream," a story about flying too close to the sun and then bursting into flames. I don't know how much of it is actually true, but it certainly seems like the kind of story where the truth is even crazier than what ends up on screen because there are limits to how much you can expect the audience to believe. Directed by Doug Liman, American Made a greatly entertaining movie that makes the most of Tom Cruise's movie star charms as well as the audience's fondness for protagonists that do the wrong things while winking conspiratorially and making it look like a damn lot of fun - at least until a cartel gets pissed off, then the fun stops pretty quick.

Review: The Mummy (2017)

* *
Director: Alex Kurtzman
Starring: Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe

I'll give The Mummy this much: it takes stones to start your movie by announcing it as the inaugural entry in the "Dark Universe" when previous attempts to launch the series have already been released and failed (and then disavowed as if they were never meant to be anything of the kind in the first place). As for the rest? Meh. Marketed (in North America, at least) as a "darker" take on the Mummy story that would veer towards horror, it's actually aiming to be an Indiana Jones-style adventure yarn with frequent shots of humor, and if that's what you want to watch, well, you may as well just watch the Brendan Fraser version of The Mummy, which does everything that this one is trying to do (except kick off a shared universe) but much better.

Review: Oblivion (2013)

* *
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Starring: Tom Cruise

How can a movie cost so much to make and still seem so incredibly half-assed? Is it really so much to ask that, with $120 million dollars to play with, the result not be shoddily constructed from the spare parts of other science fiction, action, and post-apocalypse movies? That at least one of the two female characters not be wafer thin? That it at least have enough of a spark of originality to not name its hero "Jack," the go-to name (along with "John") for everyman heroes? Action movie screenwriters of the world: if you need your hero to have a down to earth, dude's dude name, can we maybe start branching out a bit? If you're going to surround your protagonist with every cliche and recycled plot point that comes to mind, can you at least make him a "Mike" or "Dave" or "Chris"? That alone wouldn't make the movie better, of course, but it might make it somewhat less annoyingly familiar.

Review: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

* * *
Director: Brad Bird
Starring: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton

In terms of malleability, the Mission: Impossible series may be second only to the Fast & Furious series (which has transitioned from being undercover cop movies, to heist movies, to movies about a bizarre, non-sanctioned special forces team, with what is essentially a stand alone movie about teenagers and street racing in the middle) in terms of its ability to hit the reset button with each new entry. Every film, none of which share a director or a writing team and where the only real constant is Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, strikes its own particular tone and presents its own particular take on the spy movie. It's the sort of series that you can watch entirely out of order without missing a step because there's not a lot of carryover from the previous films (in this respect, Ghost Protocol is an exception, albeit very, very slightly) and the series is defined by its action set pieces, rather than any overarching narrative. If you rank the films according to the skill and audacity of their set pieces, Ghost Protocol would arguably end up on top as, even though the dangling off a plane as it takes off sequence of Rogue Nation is nothing short of impressive, I'm not sure that anything will ever be more go for broke than the sequence where Cruise climbs up and then runs down the Burj Khalifa.

Review: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

* * *
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Starring: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is everything a summer movie ought to be. It's action packed, light on its feet (despite a somewhat convoluted plot), and has a sense of humor even as it takes itself, and its narrative stakes, seriously. It's a great entertainment and, even though it is the fifth entry in its series, it's easily accessible even if you haven't seen all (or any) of the previous entries. It's a film that does just about everything right, and does it in a way that's sleek and exciting and also has a classical kind of feel to it. While star Tom Cruise's career over the last ten years feels like it has seen more misses than hits, Rogue Nation is proof that you can never quite count him out as a movie star.

Review: Minority Report (2002)

* * * 1/2
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Cruise, Samantha Morton, Colin Farrell

People don't seem to talk about Minority Report that much these days (though that may change when the TV series premieres this fall), which is odd because, aside from being a really good science fiction/action film, it's also a high point in star Tom Cruise's career since the 20th century gave way to the 21st (I'd say it's a high point in director Steven Spielberg's 21st century career, too, except that Lincoln, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Catch Me If You Can and War Horse are among the 10 films he's directed since 2000, so Minority Report falls more in the middle of his output). I hadn't seen Minority Report in years before sitting down to watch it recently, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it has held up, the soft ending aside. It's a film very much worth revisiting.

Review: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: Doug Liman
Starring: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt

Like a lot of people (judging by the film's tepid box office) I didn't catch Edge of Tomorrow (or Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow as it has been rebranded) when it was in theaters. I missed out by not making time for it because the film - whatever you want to call it; a rose by any other name, and all that - is one of the year's best pure entertainments. A smart science fiction action movie which has confidence enough in the audience not to spoon feed the plot, and instead to trust that the audience will keep up and follow along, Edge of Tomorrow is the sort of popcorn movie that most of us always say we want - but, based on the fact that it grossed less than half of what the last Transformers movie made, it is perhaps not the popcorn movie we deserve. If you haven't caught up with it yet, I highly recommend it. It's a film that is entertaining and intelligent in equal measure.

Netflix Recommends... Jack Reacher (2012)

* * *
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Starring: Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike

I have a volatile relationship with Netflix's recommendations. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that Netflix seems to have no idea what the word "recommends" means, given that it sometimes recommends films to me that have no connection to anything that I've already watched and indicated liking, and/or films that it believes I would give a rating of 1 or 2 stars if I did watch it. For whatever reason, when it does this I usually can't resist watching whatever it comes up with; it's like a challenge that I can't bring myself to walk away from. So, when Netflix recommended Jack Reacher, a film which I recall reading scathing things about when it came out in theaters, I figured that it was, once again, screwing with me, though it did claim that the recommendation was based on my having liked Drive and Hanna. Those two films are vastly superior to this one in myriad ways, but I actually did not hate Jack Reacher. In fact, I kind of enjoyed it (though I am told that this is only possible because I never read the book). So congratulations Netflix, you've won this round in the game we're playing with rules I'll probably never quite understand.

Review: Valkyrie (2008)

* * *
Director: Bryan Singer
Starring: Tom Cruise

Valkyrie is one of those movies that seems to have had a pall pulled over it before it even got started. Instead of being buzzed about as "the serious movie about the 20 July plot" it was talked about as "the movie where Tom Cruise is an eye-patch wearing Nazi ("Ha" implied)." The very idea of it was met with hostility in Germany, where Scientology is looked upon less than kindly, and everywhere else it had to come up against the fact that over the course of the last decade, Tom Cruise' image has become almost unforgiveably ridiculous. I fully believe that if Valkyrie had come out in 1998 instead of 2008, it would have been a little more warmly received. 'Cause you know what? It's actually not a bad movie.