I'm Sorry, I Reject "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1"
#233: "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1," "Joy Ride," "Magnolia," "Monos"
Edition 233:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read up on Tom Cruise’s latest death-defying installment in his signature action franchise. I also checked out the raunchy comedy Joy Ride, and found a small little foreign film that’s fantastic. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Ridley Scott gives us a lush vision of Napoleon starring Joaquin Phoenix.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1
There’s always some government agent pursuing Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible movies — you know the type: gruff, simplistic, always two steps behind — and this time the poor shmuck (played by Shea Wigham) briefs his goons in totally serious, sincere voice that the man they’re going after is a “mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos.”
My sold out theater started laughing. No human actually talks like that, obviously. But the laughs weren’t directed at the movie, necessarily, people were more just giddy over how perfectly ridiculous that line, and so many more in the movie, happen to be.
The most recent iterations of the franchise are all defined by this kind maximalism. Everything from the stunts to the melodrama to the dialogue is sure to be over the top, and this movie one-ups the last in every category, including what felt like 10 sequences of Tom Cruise sprinting and at one point hurling him from the top of a cliff (as you’ve probably seen or heard). Wigham’s quote makes a comparison to super hero movies almost too easy, but don’t get me wrong, making an action movie with something like 20% practical filmmaking to 80% CGI instead of the 100% CGI crapfests of most blockbusters does make a huge difference.
Director Christopher McQuarrie has said publicly that he and Cruise first come up with what stunts they want to do, and then build the movie around that. This time around, it’s clear that an absolute minimum amount of storytelling is being done to string together these sequences.
Now I realize not liking these movies is partially my personal preference, and I don’t want to be labeled “pretentious” by hating all big movies. People say oh relax, you can’t overthink or overanalyze these things! But if enjoying these movies is dependent on not taking seriously something that appears to be taking itself seriously…then what are we doing here?!
While I get that it’s a dumb popcorn entertainment, the movie isn’t a farce. It’s not trying to be funny. As with all these blockbusters, it’s buried under the weight of collective mythology and treats that backstory like it’s sacred text (ignoring the fact that the early M:I movies were especially trashy). It’s the same thing I’ve said about so many movies this year: Indiana Jones 5, Extraction 2, Guardians 3 and John Wick 4. It’s a copy of a copy of a copy, and this one may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. No matter how good it may or may not be, I reject it on principle.
To me this story, these characters, it’s like an episode of Scooby Doo — cartoonish in both form and function. There’s MacGuffins to retrieve and side quests to explore and globetrotting to be traversed, some convoluted something about saving the world, of course. A fun thought exercise is to imagine any of the scenes happening without the swelling score and vistas of Rome, Venice or some other European locale in the background. Then, the proverbial emperor has no clothes.
Movies of any scale don’t have to be this way. I mean, there’s a reason why a collection of stunts on their own wouldn’t be packaged and put into theaters. People wouldn’t come. At a base level, I truly believe people care about good stories, they’re just so rarely exposed to them anymore.
It’s not impossible (mission: impossible, one might say) to do both. Top Gun: Maverick for example, or either Spider-Verse flick. I KNOW we can do better. And I’m desperately hoping that’s what we’re going to see with Barbie and Oppenheimer in a few weeks. Check back in with you then.
Something New
Joy Ride (Theaters): To call this movie a new Girls Trip or The Hangover with an Asian female cast is unfair, except the movie’s own marketing steered into the comparison, bending over backwards to ensure every sentence mentioning the movie also includes the word “raunchy.” Yes, the movie has hard ‘R’ humor, but its heart is really more in the tender friendships between the leads — Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu.
The movie is emotional as much for represents as what it shows on screen, which is at many points comes across like loosely connected comedy sketches focused around the idea that Asian people have free rein to ridicule Asian stereotypes. Well, that and sex jokes. Lots of sex jokes.
If judged by any objective criteria, it’s not a very good movie. But then again, neither are most of those 2000s comedies about man child white guys. What matters is whether it makes you laugh. In that regard, it’s more a fun movie than an overly funny one, I think because it’s so good-natured that there’s nothing dangerous about the humor (even if its dirty, it’s nice), so there’s no edge that can take a comedy up to a 10.
Something Old
Magnolia (1999): In case you’re wondering, as I was after watching M:I 6, when was the last time Tom Cruise starred in a movie in which he didn’t kill someone…I think you have to go back to last century for this Paul Thomas Anderson epic (and even then I’m not sure he can be considered the Star). This movie is often called a “mosaic,” and at over three hours long is a true demarcation of PTA fandom. It’s excessive in pretty much every way, loose and inconsistent.
But this might be the very best Cruise performance in a role against type — he’s not the sprinting action hero in any way, but is nonetheless magnetic as a sleazy motivational speaker. It’s a reminder of a time when he used to place himself in the hands of great filmmakers — Kubrick, Spielberg, Scorcese, PTA, Mann — instead of only producing perfect star vehicles. If he wants to make one more run at an Oscar, I’d love to see him return to that well one more time.
Something to Stream
Monos (Max): I’ve got to give a shoutout to my friend Smith for recommending this 2019 Columbian movie, which I never would’ve found on my own. It’s one of my favorites I’ve seen this year, about a group of teenage commandos tasked with holding an American POW hostage during some unidentified conflict.
The geopolitics don’t really matter here, because the story focuses on the lives of the kids, who slowly lose their innocence as they’re forced into more and more savage circumstances. The acting and plotting is impressively naturalistic, resisting every urge to Hollywood-ize itself, which draws a viewer deeply into the incredibly tangible world. There’s an undeniable confidence to the blocking and framing of scenes, allowing visuals to unveil or add information as often as the intentionally sparse dialogue. It’s as strong in the small, human moments that investigate our characters as the bigger set pieces, set high in the mountains and then deep in the jungle, stunts and shots which I’m not even entirely sure how the crew pulled off. Overall a very impressive movie that I highly recommend.
Trailer Watch: Napoleon
I detest three-minute long trailers because more often than not they give away the whole movie. But in the case of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, at the end of the trailer I’m still left wondering what the arc of this Bonaparte biopic will be. That’s a good thing!
It seems like 85-year-old Ridley Scott — the man behind Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator all the way up to Black Hawk Down and The Martian — still has his fastball. The frames in this trailer are a visual feast, the quotes are memorable, and Joaquin Phoenix (not to mention Vanessa Kirby) feel perfectly suited to the role. A November release from Apple? That has Oscars written all over it.