Category: Esai Morales

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE THE FINAL RECKONING

By Marc S. Sanders

The blessing behind Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning is that it opts not to follow the uninspired routine that was settled for with the previous entry, Dead Reckoning Part I.  With myself included, that film was poorly received overall (look for my review on this page). It performed way below box office expectations as well.  After its release, writer/director Chrisopher McQuarrie and producer/star Tom Cruise were in a quandary.  The hanging thread of a magical key/MacGuffin and the answer to destroying the omnipotent Entity were left unresolved.  A new film had to be made, despite an empty storyline.  Money had to be spent.  So, the guys needed to invest it wisely.  For the most part, the finances were used quite well as the pair learned what worked. More importantly they steered away from what didn’t.

What this movie improves upon is a hearkening back to some of the favorite elements of almost all of the prior films in the series, now on its eighth chapter.  Naturally, some citations cover what occurred in the last film to drive the continuous thin story of Final Reckoning. There are references made to the mysterious Rabbit’s Foot from the third picture, a favorite of mine.  Most notably, is the return of a long-lost character that no one would ever expect to turn up again. The best thing is that he truly serves the mission.  He’s not just a cameo blink and miss it.  Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire repeated that terrible grievance over and over.  The return of this particular guy actually makes you smile, laugh and cheer.  Yes, believe me when I tell you that marketing for Final Reckoning thankfully do not share every detail.  There’s more here than Tom Cruise running and running some more. 

Miguel and I took advantage of an IMAX presentation, and for two guys who normally favor Dolby, this action/adventure should only be seen on IMAX.  Probably the best film I’ve ever seen in this medium and I saw Dead Reckoning Part I this way, but that did not measure up to what’s offered this time.

Tom Cruise is absolutely nuts.  He’s over sixty and he’s doing some of the most daring stunts he’s ever accomplished.  The insurance bill to cover his safety must be at least half the budget to make the movie.  The famed biplane scenes that you likely caught in trailers, even on the marquee poster, is so much more impressive on IMAX.  You are seeing every limb of the actor’s body stretch to their breaking points to hang on to first a red plane and later a yellow plane.  Cruise’s facial muscles stretch against the G-force that is giving him resistance at ten thousand feet in the air.  McQuarrie makes sure to cover every inch of these flying machines from the cockpit to the wings and the tail rutters and the landing wheels underneath.  Cruise’s superspy, Ethan Hunt, has to climb all over these things as they go up and down and upside down and right side up on top of bursting into flames.  This scene is not even over in ten minutes.  It feels like a good twenty-five minutes and it looks like it’s no easy feat for Mr. Hunt.

Midway through the film finds Ethan Hunt deep sea diving to a shipwrecked submarine.  This sequence might rely more on set design, but I was convinced the entire time that Cruise was actually that deep below the surface of the water.  Memories of James Cameron’s The Abyss come to mind, but McQuarrie’s craft of this middle sequence within his three-hour film is so well edited and designed.  On IMAX you feel yourself submerged with the weight of the ocean above you.  The film will cut to the outside of the sub to show it drifting as Ethan Hunt shifts from one side of the interior to the other.  Whatever action the guy takes, the sub works against him leaving you wondering if the vessel is going to topple over an ocean floor cliff to even greater and unescapable depths. 

I will never like this movie as much as when I saw it in the IMAX screening.  It’s impossible to feel the same way on a large in-home flat screen.  This is a giant movie.

Grand set pieces with the sub or the planes had me thinking that Christopher McQuarrie should get a Best Director nomination.  I know it won’t happen but not everyone can accomplish what’s offered in Final Reckoning.  Could Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola?  I question that, because this is an altogether different kind of beast.

McQuarrie must have done a polish on the violations he committed with the last film.  The story remains to be nothing but a chase with countdown digital clocks and the urgency for all of these tasks to be accomplished by Ethan and his team at the exact same second (a repeat M:I staple), but the dialogue does not drive in literal circles of similar vocabulary this time.  Terms like “the key” and “the entity” are not so exhaustingly uttered over and over in this film.  Esai Morales, as the conniving Gabriel, is much more interesting.  In the last movie he was terribly boring.  No charm.  No anger.  No brattiness.  Here, he at least gleefully laughs at Ethan’s demise.  He’s still far from a great villain and totally forgettable, but at least he’s given something more to do than just stand menacingly behind Tom Cruise. Morales is not just donning a dark tan and a salt and pepper goatee. 

Most of Ethan Hunt’s team is given something to do, particularly Ving Rhames as Luther and Simon Pegg as Benji, always reliable.  Hayley Atwell was the best feature of the last movie and she’s great here too as the pickpocket, and now supposedly a quick learning kick ass superspy.  Kind of—No-VERY ridiculous but I stopped asking questions.  Atwell deserves a franchise series of her own.  She’s charming and lights up the screen.  Great actor too.

Pom Klementieff as the dangerous assassin Paris is now a good guy and other than speaking eloquent French she’s regrettably become a ho hum element.  There are other unnecessary characters including Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and those two guys who were chasing Ethan in the last movie.  One carries a stupid secret that’s more like an unwelcome surprise.  The other joins Ethan’s team to shoot a gun and look panicked. 

It will only frustrate you to follow when Ethan or Gabriel has the upper hand.  Christopher McQuarrie fleshes out his overly long three-hour picture playing games like that, and I stopped trying to pass his impossible SAT exam.  The attractions are a few of the characters who work with Ethan and the great feats of strength that the hero attempts to overcome. 

It is not the best in the series.  It is a huge improvement over the last picture, though.  What’s most significant is that Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning is a gorgeous, mind blowing and breathless visual opus.

SEE IT ON THE IMAX before it self-destructs on your flat screen in five seconds.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE DEAD RECKONING PART 1

By Marc S. Sanders

The object of the Mission: Impossible films is not to wow its audience with thought provoking questions of politics or Cold War intrigue or even daring and uncompromisingly evil villains (apart from Phillip Seymour Hoffman).  The elements of espionage coursing through the TV series are non-existent in the film adaptations.  I’m not watching a film based on a John LeCarre spy novel.  By the time the seventh installment has arrived, titled Dead Reckoning Part 1, the goal of the film series is to sketch out the set ups for one action piece after another.  Only they must be bigger, bolder, and seemingly that much more impossible to overcome for their hero, Tom Cruise (playing a guy named Ethan Hunt).  The action is once again top notch.  The glues that bind these displays of bravado together, you know where the characters have to talk and give us a semblance of a plot, is as nil as the scotch tape that assembles a stretch of film reel into a running time length of nearly two hours and forty-five minutes.

The locales are as grand as any travel getaway. We go through a labyrinthine airport.  A techno night club works as a meeting place for a bunch of characters. There are journeys to the Arabian Desert, Rome, Venice, and a beautiful ride along the famed Orient Express.  Shot on digital, this movie is a gorgeous travelogue.

Let’s get the problems out of the way, though.  The MacGuffin that Ethan Hunt and his trusty pals Benjy and Luther (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames) have been assigned to recover is two parts of a specially designed key.  One part is supposedly with the disavowed MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson).  The other half is questionable as to who possesses it, but a thief known only as Grace (Hayley Atwell) may be significant in finding it.  Put the two halves of the key together and it will unlock something that no one seems to know of, or where it is located.  Here’s my first issue.  The audience does know what the key unlocks because it is shown in the first three minutes of the film.  So, while the cast of characters act dumbfounded, we know all along.  So, there goes any curious interest I may have for wanting to follow through with this. 

The other problem is that the same conversation happens over and over and over again.  Lines like (and I’m paraphrasing here, or maybe I’m not) “If this key gets into the wrong hands…” and “Whatever this does unlock, Ethan, could spell the end of the world…” or “It’s important that both halves of the key are not put together…”  or “Whatever this does unlock…”  (See?  Even I just repeated myself in this write up.) Except, we know what it unlocks!!!!!  The same exchange of dialogue occurs over and over.  The redundancy exhausts itself.  It occurs so much in fact that it’s writer/director, Christopher McQuarrie, relied upon the repetitive dialogue to stretch this next M:I chapter into two films instead of one (Part 2 is scheduled to be released in 2024).  I don’t recall the context of any of Ving Rhames’ lines going further than what I have presented here, for example.

The film is also a little too character heavy.  I never understood why two agents (Shea Wigham, Greg Tarzan Davis) are constantly pursuing Ethan.  Just was not clear for me. Heightened suspense?  That’s the best excuse I can think of.  The White Widow from the prior film (Vanessa Kirby) also appears.  Not much purpose to her.  Cary Elwes is the deputy director, there at the beginning and later towards the end, but again I was not entirely certain of his contribution to the story.  Even Ilsa Faust does not seem to have much value, except to work as a step in Ethan’s ongoing trajectory for the key.  I think Rebecca Ferguson had no more than five lines in the whole picture.

Finally, Ethan Hunt seems to be up against an omnipotent enemy, an AI program known as The Entity.  The humans doing the bidding of this phantom program consist of a goatee wearing Esai Morales and his henchwoman, played by Pom Klementieff.  She looks straight out of a James Bond picture and makes for a good car chase through the stone cobbled streets of Rome in a tank like Hummer.  Morales is as boring as most of the other the M:I villains.

What works for the film is what Tom Cruise really wants to impress you with though.  Riding a speeding motorcycle off a mountain and parachuting his way down.  That’s actually a near sixty-year-old Tom Cruise performing that feat.  Very impressive.  The car chase with a handcuffed Cruise and Atwell in a puny yellow Fiat versus an unbeatable Hummer and an army of Italian police vehicles is fun on the level of Roger Moore’s Bond films.  Most impressive for me is the final act where the famed Orient Express train tumbles off a bridge with a gap in the middle, car by car with all the furnishings, piano included, pouring out while Ethan and Grace hold on for dear life. 

It’s the high stakes stunts that work.  Whatever smidge of a story there is fails though.  The script by McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen lacks so much that the cliffhanger the film ends on doesn’t leave me yearning for more because it only hearkens back to the beginning.  The characters catch up to what the audience has known for the last three hours.  So, I’m not losing sleep wondering with what happens next.

Of course, I’ll go see the Part 2 installment.  Tom Cruise won’t let me down in whatever daredevil achievements he’s dreaming of doing next.  However, am I going to these movies to watch Mission: Impossible, or to watch an aggressively updated version of Circus Of The Stars?