Napoleon: A Review - You Can't Always Get What You Want

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The film could have, and should have, been great, but it just never coalesces and much to my chagrin ends up being a rather dull, formulaic and flaccid affair.

Napoleon, the highly-anticipated bio-pic from iconic director Ridley Scott, stars Joaquin Phoenix and dramatizes the rise and fall of France’s famous Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

The film, which hit theatres back on November 22nd, is now available to stream on Apple TV+, and I finally got a chance to see it.

I admit I was very excited to see Napoleon when it first hit theatres as I’m a big fan of Ridley Scott and consider him one of the master filmmakers of his generation. I also think the film’s star Joaquin Phoenix is the best actor on the planet, and his co-star Vanessa Kirby, is no slouch either. But despite avoiding reading reviews it was readily apparent that the film had garnered no cultural traction upon initial release, so I never put in the effort to see it in the theatre.

Napoleon has long been a tantalizing subject for cinematic exploration. For instance, in the late 1960’s Stanley Kubrick set his sights on the diminutive tyrant and got far along in the pre-production process but due to the high cost of shooting on location the film got scrapped.

I saw a Kubrick exhibit a decade ago in Los Angeles at LACMA which had a plethora of artifacts from his various movie projects. There was a bevy of material from his un-made Napoleon project…and I found it mesmerizing.

Unfortunately for me…and you too, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is not a Kubrickian Napoleon. Truth be told it doesn’t really even feel like a Ridley Scott movie. There is no epic feel to the festivities nor is there an intimate one. Filmmaking 101 tells us that you can either be epic or intimate, and on rare occasions both…but you can never be neither.

Napoleon, which runs two hours and thirty-seven minutes, is a dramatically impotent, narratively inert exercise in expensive wheel-spinning.

The film follows a rather tedious and trite bio-pic formula of jumping from one notable event to another, but provides no dramatic or human insight into any of it.

Despite some stunningly gorgeous cinematography from Dariusz Wolski, most notably in the coronation scenes – which are breathtakingly beautiful, the film just never coalesces into anything more than bland background noise.

There is rumor of a four-hour director’s cut of Napoleon that will one-day be available to screen but isn’t yet. I hope that is true because that director’s cut might unlock the dramatic and narrative coherence the theatrical release lacks. This was true with Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), a film that failed as a theatrical release but shines in its lengthy director’s cut…one can only hope Napoleon follows the same course.

Joaquin Phoenix is, in my never humble opinion, the best actor in the world, and yet in Napoleon he fails to settle into the role and feels decidedly detached from the character. This just isn’t a solid performance, as it feels scattershot and dramatically random, which is a shocking thing to say about a performance from a titanic acting talent like Joaquin Phoenix.

Vanessa Kirby is, as always, a luminous screen presence but she too is out of rhythm and entirely forgettable as Josephine, Napoleon’s wife. Josephine is quite a character and yet we never see her as an actual human being, only as a sort of conniving figurine…lovely to look at but ultimately empty.

Worse still is that the infamously combustible relationship between Napoleon and Josephine is deprived of any and all life. There is no chemistry or electricity between Phoenix’s Napoleon and Kirby’s Josephine. It is a lifeless and meaningless affair, which renders the rest of the film equally lifeless and meaningless.

The script, written by David Scarpa, is rudimentary, as it avoids getting under the skin of its subjects, and thus removes their motivations and humanity.

Yes, we know that Napoleon was a small man looking for a balcony, but why was he like that? And how did his relationship with Josephine propel that tyrannical instinct? And who was Josephine and what drove her to make the choices she makes? These are important question and none of them are answered or even remotely pondered in Napoleon.

There can be little doubt that Scarpa’s limited script is a large contributor to the less than stellar performances from usually spectacular actors like Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby.

I really wanted to love Napoleon because I love the talent involved (Ridley Scott, Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby) and the topic explored, but ultimately the movie, at least in its two-hour and thirty-seven-minute form, is a strange one that seems to be devoid of not just artistic and entertainment value, but of purpose and meaning.

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon reminded me in some ways of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Both Scott and Scorsese are two of the most iconic filmmakers of their generation, and they both came out with sprawling, lengthy films this year that failed to live up to their prodigious talents and astonishing previous work. If I’m being brutally honest I would say that at least Napoleon looked better than Killers of the Flower Moon…but both fall decidedly flat.

At the previously mentioned Kubrick exhibit at LACMA, as I perused his notes, pre-production materials and photographs of his Napoleon that were on display, it pained me deeply upon seeing those treasures that Kubrick never made the film. I had the same feeling watching Ridley Scott’s version of Napoleon but for different reasons…as Scott’s failure on Napoleon simply taints what should have been a magnificent cinematic story, and leaves it terribly tarnished and unusable for at least another generation – not because its “so bad”, it isn’t, but because it’s just entirely uneventful and forgettable.

Back when Kurbick was contemplating his Napoleon movie, The Rolling Stones sang that “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you find, you get what you need”.

Well, the first part is right…but as Ridley Scott’s Napoleon proves, the second sure as shit isn’t as I definitely didn’t need this Napoleon.

Kubrick’s Napoleon is what I wanted…Ridley Scott’s muddled mess of Napoleon is what I got.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 104: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to listen to Barry and I as we jump off a cliff on a motorcycle while discussing all things M:I 7 - Dead Reckoning, the newest installment of Tom Cruise's long-running Mission: Impossible action franchise.  Topics discussed include the franchise's unique history, the odd stunt-obsessed turn in Cruise's later career, and Barry's attraction to various women like Rebecca Ferguson, Hayley Atwell and Vaness Kirby...as well as a special prediction segment where we guess the box office for Barbie and Oppenheimer's first weekend. This podcast will, like its hosts, self-destruct every five seconds or so.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 104: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One: A Review - Assume the Missionary Position

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. Compared to all the other vapid junk recently available at the cineplex, this is the best of the vapid junk. If you love Mission Impossible movies you will love this one. If you loathe those movies or Tom Cruise, you’ll definitely hate this one.

I can say without reservation that Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh film in the Tom Cruise starring Mission: Impossible franchise, is most definitely a movie…but whether it’s a good one or not is a much more complicated question.

Mission: Impossible is one of the more confounding film franchises in cinema history. Astoundingly, it has been around for nearly thirty years (Cruise was 33 on the first one and is 61 now!), and for the majority of those years it has been considered pretty forgettable, second tier entertainment at best.

Oddly, the films have become more popular as the series has gone along. The films always made money…but they never made that much money. The first three films generated a respectable but not earth-shattering $457M, $546M and $398M respectively at the box office…but with budgets of $80M, $125 and $150m.  Movies four, five and six made a much more impressive $694M, $682M and $791M respectively with budgets of $145M, $150m and $175m.

In addition, fans and critics were lukewarm at best on the first three films, with Rotten Tomato scores of 66 critical/71 audience, 56 critical/42 audience and 71 critical/69 audience respectively for films one, two and three. Interestingly enough, starting with the fourth film, both critics and audience’s love for the films has grown exponentially, with the RT scores being 93 critical/76 audience, 94 critical/87 audience and 97 critical/88 audience for films four, five and six respectively.

That Mission: Impossible survived its first three middling movies to become a respectable franchise is pretty astonishing. It would not have been surprising if, after any of the first three films, the studio (and Cruise) just decided to close up the Mission: Impossible shop.

But what happened instead is that the films stopped being films and transformed into the Tom Cruise Stunt Experience. Starting with the fourth movie, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the franchise’s focus became less about the stories it told and more about the insane stunts Tom Cruise performed in each movie. For example, in Ghost Protocol, Cruise climbed the tallest skyscraper in the world – the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The marketing around the film was all about Cruise’s insane stunt work, and not about the film itself.

That approach has only grown more vociferous since, with the focus of the Mission: Impossible films being Cruise’s increasingly daring stunt work as opposed to…I don’t know…his acting or the story. There was the famous scene in Rogue Nation (film #5) where Cruise hung off of an Airbus as it took off and flew, and then the HALO parachute jump into Paris in M:I 6.

The marketing approach of highlighting Cruise’s death-defying stunts has worked incredibly well, even when those stunts don’t look particularly good on-screen – like the HALO jump. But the point of the stunts isn’t for them to look good but to distract people from the actual movie by making them mutter in amazement, “wow, Tom Cruise just did that crazy thing!”

The newest film, Dead Reckoning Part One, written and directed by longtime Tom Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, is no exception. The marketing around the movie is all about Cruise’s motorcycle/parachute jump off a cliff. The stunt is no doubt impressive even if it doesn’t exactly visually translate very well once Cruise and his motorcycle leave terra firma.

The rest of the movie is…fine…I guess. I mean it’s good for a Mission: Impossible movie, considering the franchise that has always been a parody of itself. Yes, it’s utterly ridiculous and absolutely absurd, but I did find myself mostly engaged for the rather bloated two-hour and forty-five-minute runtime, but I also found myself pondering a more existential question in the wake of watching Dead Reckoning, namely is this movie now considered good because everything else is so bad?

In my case, the last two movies I saw before this were The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Those two movies were, like most of the movies I’ve seen over the last few years, dreadfully bad, and Dead Reckoning is much better than them, but that doesn’t necessarily make it good.

My theory is this…it seems to me that cinema in particular, and our culture in general, has been decaying for the last decade, and in precipitous decline for the past four years, so much so that what was once second-tier, forgettable garbage like Mission: Impossible, is now considered elite franchise filmmaking.

This is a round-about way of saying that objectively, Dead Reckoning isn’t a good movie, but in the context of the shit filling the cineplex these days, it is entertaining and enjoyable.

What makes it entertaining and enjoyable? Well, first off, it makes the rather rudimentary and obvious decision, which Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ignored, to fill itself to the brim with a cavalcade of sumptuous eye-candy.

The eye-candy comes in the gorgeous form of Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby and Rebecca Ferguson. These three women are not only attractive, they’re very talented. Contrast that to Indiana Jones which featured only one woman prominently, and that was the ungainly Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a sub-par and rather unattractive actress.

Hayley Atwell is the best thing about Dead Reckoning and it isn’t even close. Atwell is charismatic, compelling and fun as Grace, the pickpocket/con artist who gives Cruise’s Ethan Hunt a run for his money. Atwell is so appealing she’s actually able to make it seem like she and the dead-eyed Cruise have chemistry…which brings to mind the Rolling Stones lyric from Start Me Up – “you made a dead man come!”

Vanessa Kirby is back as Alana - the White Widow, a sexy arms dealer and she is, as always, undeniably magnetic. Kirby smolders with a palpable dynamism that jumps off the screen. Kirby needs to be a bigger movie star than she already is.

Rebecca Ferguson is the rogue MI 6 agent Ilsa Faust who may or may not have stolen Ethan Hunt’s heart. Ferguson is actually quite good in this enigmatic role, which is no easy task opposite the often lifeless Cruise.

As for the eye-candy for women…well…sorry ladies…all you get is Tom Cruise. Cruise is in absolutely incredible shape but his boyish good looks are long gone and left in their place is a sort of strangely puffy, post-plastic surgery face that always looks just a bit off.

Cruise doesn’t so much act in these movies, as play-act, and it can be pretty cringe-worthy. Cruise is undeniably one of the biggest movie stars of the last forty years, but he is not a particularly good actor, and he lacks a physical presence and dynamism that you’d expect to see from someone of his standing.

Cruise’s attempts at being sincere always feel manufactured and his attempts at being tough feel hollow. But on the bright side we at least get to see Cruise run in this movie…a lot. Cruise’s Mission Impossible running is legendary to the point of being hysterical. It never fails to make me laugh when Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, busts out his hyper-focused sprint. That all of these movies feature numerous scenes of Cruise sprinting, and they all hold those shots of him running for roughly twenty to thirty seconds too long, is one of the more puzzling things about them. Are Cruise and the filmmakers in on the joke or do they think this is really awesome? Who knows?

For a franchise that has been around now for seven movies and nearly thirty years, it should come as no surprise that it is cannibalizing itself. For example, in Dead Reckoning Ethan Hunt is once again facing a villain intent on destroying the world. And once again this villain, a sentient AI named the Entity (no I’m not joking), is so omnipotent that it predicts what all of the Mission Impossible guys and gals will do before they do it…which leads to dialogue about ‘should we do this? – But the Entity KNOWS we’ll do it!!’ This is all very reminiscent of The Syndicate and The Apostles and every other villain in recent MI history.

Dead Reckoning is also seemingly stealing/paying tribute to other films including earlier Mission Impossible ones. For instance, there is yet another sandstorm featured prominently in a sequence in this movie, which also occurred in Ghost Protocol. There’s also a climactic train sequence, which is similar to the one from the very first M:I movie.

Other movies are borrowed from as well, like The Hunt for Red October and Jurassic Park 2. It is never clear if these are a result of homage or creative bankruptcy.

Ultimately, all Mission: Impossible films feel like ego-events with Tom Cruise playing messiah. Dead Reckoning is no exception. That said, it is much better and more entertaining than the vast majority of junk I’ve had to sit through in recent years, including Indiana Jones, The Flash and even everyone’s favorite piece of rancid pop culture shit Top Gun: Maverick.

If you liked any or all of those movies (God, help us!), you’ll think Dead Reckoning is Citizen Kane mixed with The Godfather. If, like me, you loathed those movies, you’ll find Dead Reckoning, filled with pretty woman and beautiful locations, to be a passable piece of franchise entertainment in a culture deeply enmeshed in a seemingly endless entertainment drought.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Pieces of a Woman: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. After the first thirty minutes the film isn’t very good but Vanessa Kirby is very good in it.

Pieces of a Woman is a story of forgiveness… so why is Netflix so keen to cancel its star, Shia LaBeouf?

Pieces of a Woman, the new arthouse film starring Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf that is garnering some Oscar buzz, premiered on Netflix on January 7.

The film, written by Kata Wéber and directed by Kornél Mundruczó tells the story of a Boston couple who suffer a traumatic home birth of their daughter. 

The film’s theme is the power of forgiveness, even for the most egregious of injuries. This would seem a prescient and poignant lesson in our current age of relentless cancel culture and shameless embrace of victimhood. Unfortunately, while that is a theme we need right now, this muddled misfire of a movie is not an adequate delivery system.

Pieces of a Woman starts off spectacularly, with a masterfully executed, compelling and captivating opening thirty minutes. But after that it quickly deteriorates into a maudlin, melodramatic exercise chock full of every dramatic cliché imaginable.

On the bright side, the film is an actor’s showcase and the luminous Vanessa Kirby makes the very most of the opportunity. Kirby, best known for her work on Netflix’s The Crown, gloriously transcends the mundane script and middling direction by giving a subtle, specific, dynamic and magnetic performance as the grieving yet resilient Martha.

Netflix is pushing for Kirby, already a Best Actress winner at the Venice Film Festival, to get a much-deserved Oscar nomination.

Netflix is also promoting the rest of the cast to get awards consideration… well, almost all of the rest of the cast. Every cast member is featured on Netflix’s “For Your Awards Consideration” webpage, except for Shia LaBeouf.

Why has LaBeouf, the main supporting actor in the movie who some critics – not me – claim is “remarkable”, been excluded from Netflix’s awards consideration material?

The answer is that LaBeouf’s former girlfriend, singer FKA Twigs, filed suit against him in December of 2020 for past sexual, physical and emotional abuse. In the wake of this lawsuit other women, including singer Sia, have come forward making varying claims of mistreatment.

In response LaBeouf wrote to the New York Times, “I’m not in any position to tell anyone how my behavior made them feel. I have no excuses for my alcoholism or aggression, only rationalizations. I have been abusive to myself and everyone around me for years…I have a history of hurting the people closest to me. I'm ashamed of that history and am sorry to those I hurt."

He later stated that many of the allegations were not true but that he owed the women “the opportunity to air their statements publicly and accept accountability for those things I have done.”

He added that he was “a sober member of a 12-step program” and in therapy. “I am not cured of my PTSD and alcoholism, but I am committed to doing what I need to do to recover, and I will forever be sorry to the people that I may have harmed along the way.”

So, in a surreal twist, LaBeouf’s character in Pieces of a Woman is an at-times abusive alcoholic and in real life the actor is now accused of being an abusive alcoholic.

This is obviously a complex situation, one that requires a foregoing of our culture’s compulsive and muscular Manichaeism. But it would seem Netflix has not absorbed the nuanced message of forgiveness highlighted in Pieces of a Woman and are, ironically, purging LaBeouf from promotional material for a film about the power of radical forgiveness.

LaBeouf is not alone in being tossed into the memory hole by Netflix over allegations of past misdeeds. Johnny Depp recently lost a libel case against The Sun whom he sued for calling him a “wife beater”. In response, Netflix removed all of Depp’s films from its service.

It’s important to note that neither LaBeouf nor Depp have been proven to have committed any crime, they’ve only been accused. And yet Netflix didn’t hesitate to swiftly punish them anyway.

It’s also curious that Depp’s former wife and alleged victim, Amber Heard, has also been accused of abuse (by Depp) but has faced no public consequences from Netflix or anyone else.

Another indicator of our culture’s victimhood bias is in nearly every internet article I’ve read detailing FKA Twigs’ lawsuit against LaBeouf and Netflix’s punitive actions, there was a notice informing readers of specific resources available to them if they ever “experience domestic violence”.

This is a commendable public service, but it’s striking that despite these articles also referencing LaBeouf’s alcoholism and mental health issues, none of them ever direct readers suffering from those conditions to equally helpful resources.

The reality is that these notices and Netflix’s punitive disappearing of LaBeouf and Depp are simply exercises in virtue signaling and pandering to the online outrage mob.

LaBeouf and Depp may be terrible people who’ve done terrible things, but dispensing punishment and condemnation before accusations are proven is unwise and unhealthy. Even after findings of guilt, we should attempt the difficult but imperative task of foregoing vengeance and victimhood in favor of cultivating repentance and forgiveness, which would have longer lasting effects and be a path to a more decent, kind and compassionate culture.

In conclusion, Pieces of a Woman doesn’t live up to the stellar work Vanessa Kirby does in it, just like Netflix doesn’t live up to the enlightened principle of forgiveness at the heart of the film.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Mr. Jones: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Not worth paying to see, but the striking and unnerving scenes of the Holomodor are worthy of your time to watch when it comes out on Netflix or cable.

Mr. Jones, directed by Agnieszka Holland and written by Andrea Chalupa, is the true story of British journalist Gareth Jones as he discovers and then reveals the horrors of Stalin’s genocidal famine in Ukraine in 1933. The film stars James Norton as Jones, with supporting turns from Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard.

Agnieszka Holland is an interesting cinematic figure. In 1990 she wrote and directed Europa, Europa, a staggeringly brilliant film about the remarkable life of Solomon Perel during World War II for which Holland garnered a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Ever since Europa, Europa though, Holland has churned out absolutely nothing of note.

The tepid mediocrity of Ms. Holland’s filmography from 1991 to present day may explain why I had never even heard of Mr. Jones until I was assigned to watch it and write about it.

That said, as a big fan of Europa, Europa, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard, as well as being a Russophile and an admirer of good journalism, I thought Mr. Jones might just hit my sweet spot and be a new cinematic feast amidst the current coronavirus movie famine.

Sadly…while there were certainly some powerful sequences, overall the lackluster direction and script left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

The biggest problem with Mr. Jones is that it is wildly uneven, with a devastatingly poor narrative structure.

The first half of the film plays out like a PBS melodrama…and not a very good one. Holland attempts to give a stylized view of the suffocating conformity of the British establishment, and then the debased debauchery of Walter Duranty’s Moscow, but is never quite able to adequately pull it off.

Another major structural issue is Holland’s choice to weave George Orwell’s writing of Animal Farm into the story. Shockingly, Orwell actually opens the movie and is used as a landmark throughout the narrative. The snippets of Orwell are at best frivolous and do nothing more than distract from the main dramatic thrust of the story.

The second half of the film is much, much better than the first. Midway through the film shifts to the devastation in Ukraine, and this is where Holland finds her footing. The scenes of starvation and desperation are exceedingly well-done and uncomfortable to watch. There is one sequence that is so brutal it left me unnerved for days. Holland’s use of the bleak and foreboding Ukrainian winter exquisitely conveys the existential depth and expanse of the ocean of suffering that was the Holomodor.

The problem though is that Holland failed to adequately build a dramatic foundation upon which to lay the tragedy of the Holomodor. I think the film actually would’ve been better served if it started with the trip to Ukraine, as that approach would have emphasized the brutal nature of the topic at hand from the get go. It also would have given context to Jones’ struggle and maybe even better fleshed out his character, which is remarkably paper-thin in the film.

Make no mistake though that Gareth Jones’ story is compelling and definitely worthy of a major movie, just that Ms. Holland is unable to tell the story with enough dramatic vigor or cinematic verve to do it justice. I couldn’t help but think that Gareth Jones life was worthy of an HBO or Netflix mini-series, as there is awful lot of meaningful story to tell.

In terms of the acting, the cast all do solid, if unspectacular, work.

James Norton brings an every man sort of energy to his Gareth Jones, which makes sense, but he definitely suffers from a charisma deficit, makes is a hindrance to his carrying the entirety of the movie. Norton never commands the screen or demands the audience’s attention, which at times undermines the film’s dramatic power.

The luminous Vanessa Kirby plays Ada Brooks, a sort of love interest to Jones. Kirby is an alluring and at times intoxicating screen presence, but is vastly misused and under utilized in Mr. Jones. Kirby is blessed with a striking screen magnetism but never gets to put meat on the bones of her character, which is a terrible waste of her prodigious talents.

Peter Sarsgaard is always an intriguing and emotionally complicated actor, and his morally compromised and diseased Walter Duranty is no exception. Sarsgaard has minimal screen time but makes the most of it as he limps and slithers through the scenery like the devil with whom Duranty made his deal.

Mr. Jones premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival back in 2019, and debuted for British audiences in February of 2020 and was scheduled to be released in the U.S. in April of 2020…but coronavirus rudely intervened.

The film was then released for purchase (but not for rent!) on streaming services in mid-June…and since I was hired to write about it, I reached into my expense account cookie jar and bought the movie for $14.99. Maybe it is my coronavirus budget talking but even though $14.99 is basically the price of a movie ticket here in the City of Angels, I found that price to be excessive.

My recommendation regarding Mr. Jones is not to purchase it…the cost is too high and it simply isn’t worth it. But I do think it might be worth watching for free on Netflix or cable when it comes out. The scenes of the Holomodor alone are worth the investment of time.

The bottom line is this…Mr. Jones is a great story (and Gareth Jones was a great man) but not a great film.

©2020

Mission Impossible - Fallout: A Review

***THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars              

Popcorn Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This is a rather absurd and relentlessly inane take on the tired old action movie formula.

Mission Impossible - Fallout, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, is the sixth film of the franchise and like all the others tells the story of Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Missions Force as he fights to save the world. The film stars Tom Cruise as Hunt with supporting turns from Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Rebecca Ferguson.

I have seen some of the previous five Mission Impossible films, I do not actually remember how many of them I have seen as they all blend into one gigantic ball of action, but I know for sure I saw the first (which was decent) and second (which was dreadful), and then the one where Tom Cruise interminably runs along canals in China. I would have skipped this newest member of the franchise except for two things....one - I have MoviePass so I could basically see it for free...and two - I had a conversation the other day with a friend and he said that he heard that it was a really good movie and was the "Dark Knight" of the series. This was high praise indeed, for Dark Knight is the Everest of superhero movies. So...for those reasons I ventured out to the cineplex to see Tom Cruise ply his trade.

Mission Impossible - Fallout is a weird movie and that is evident from the get go. During the opening credits they play the highlights of the movie that they are about to show you...this strikes me as incredibly, incredibly strange. I mean, why in the hell are the filmmakers basically showing us a commercial for the film we already bought a ticket to? Also...why are they showing us everything that happens in the entirety of the movie during the first five minutes?

These weren't the only questions raised by Mission Impossible - Fallout. Other questions I had were...what the hell is Tom Cruise doing and why the hell is he doing it? Cruise isn't so much an actor anymore as a professional athlete/stunt man at this point in his career. The plot of Fallout is nothing more than just an excuse for Tom Cruise to run, jump, fall, fly, drive, crash and fight with his usual over-the-top aplomb and as he is the first one to tell the world over and over again...Cruise does his own stunts...each more insane than the next. The marketing campaign for M.I.-Fallout is basically Tom Cruise doing interviews talking about all the stunts he does...which is all he has to talk about because the movie is so stupid that actually talking about it with a straight face is...ironically...an impossible mission.

Some of Cruise's stunts (did I tell you that Cruise does his own stunts?) are certainly daring...like Cruise doing his own skydiving and hanging from a helicopter, but the problem is, as challenging as those stunts were for Cruise to perform, they simply aren't very visually or cinematically interesting or satisfying. It is cool for Cruise to be able to say "hey I did this!" but it seems more important to me for those feats of derring-do to be filmed in a way to maximize their cinematic impact.

Cruise used to be the biggest move star in the world but now the world is sans movie stars and Cruise is reduced to jumping out of planes or zipping around Paris on a motorcycle or hanging off of a cliff or helicopter or whatever is in reach for him to grip. But if you are Tom Cruise...why the hell do this junk? It isn't like he needs the money or help getting women (or men or whatever he is into). It isn't like MI-Fallout will garner him respect from his peers or awards. So why do this soulless, mindless crap?

Of course the answer to that might just be that Tom Cruise is not an actual person but a business entity, and the flesh and blood Tom Cruise is subservient to Tom Cruise Inc. which is as soulless and mindless a venture imaginable and which leaves the person Tom Cruise less a human being and more an automaton...which is why Cruise fits right in as the Christ of Scientology.

What makes Cruise's absorption into the dead-eyed entity that is Tom Cruise Inc. is that there was a time in his career where he was a decent actor who strove to be better at the craft of acting. Cruise sought out great directors like Coppola, Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Kurbick and PT Anderson in order to try and become a great actor. These directors took Cruise out of his comfort and control zone and forced him to get better in films like Born on the Fourth of July, The Color of Money, Magnolia and even Eyes Wide Shut. It seems that Cruise threw in the acting towel after having not won an Oscar and now just churns out the worst sort of second rate action junk he can get made. This is a bad career decision as Cruise's time as an athletic action star are diminishing with every passing day...as any athlete will tell you, the older you get the harder it gets...and Cruise ain't getting younger. I think Cruise would be wiser to pursue the Magnolia approach, meaning he works with superior directors in smaller roles or smaller films in order to try and regain some artistic mojo before the lights go out on his career when he can't take the pounding of doing his own stunts.

Regardless of the Tom Cruise questions...the bottom line is this...Mission Impossible - Fallout is a terrible movie. I guess all things are relative, but calling this the "Dark Knight" of the franchise is sort of like telling a guy who stands three foot high that he is extremely tall for a midget. The Mission Impossible franchise has devolved into a parody of itself and the ever expanding absurdity of the films were highlighted by the resounding guffaws by audience members at my screening.

Fallout follows the tried and true formula of the other films in the series as there are a series of double and triple-crosses usually involving masks that are also accompanied by cheap fake out dream sequences, flash forwards and flashbacks and of course, to top it all off, Ving Rhames wears a hat.  

Two things stood out to me in Fallout...the first is that there is a climactic sequence that I have titled "The Longest Fifteen Minutes in Human History" that is so inane that the audience in my screening laughed out loud multiple times during the endless, allegedly fifteen minute sequence. Secondly, Alec Baldwin does one scene in which he does the worst acting of his entire career and maybe in the history of the artform. I found it incredulous that Baldwin didn't burst out laughing as he was saying his eye-rollingly awful dialogue and look to the camera and wink to let us know he was in on the joke that was this script.

There were some brights spots for me regarding Fallout...but I had to look very hard to find them. The first was Vanessa Kirby as the White Widow. I liked Kirby on Netflix's The Crown where she played the Queen's party-girl sister. I was pleased to see she is able to adequately fill the big screen...something television actors can at times struggle with...in Fallout. The other thing is actor Sean Harris who plays the bad guy Solomon Lane. Harris isn't particularly great in the movie but I just like him as an actor and was happy to see him getting a paycheck.

In conclusion, I found Mission Impossible - Fallout, to be repetitive, boring and entirely forgettable. Even though Tom Cruise puts himself through the ringer for this movie...have I mentioned that he does his own stunts?...the whole endeavor is for naught. Mission Impossible - Fallout will no doubt make a tsunami of dollars, but my recommendation is that you withhold your money from that green tidal wave.

ADDENDUM: WARNING - THE FOLLOWING SECTION HAS SPOILERS

And finally, another thing I found interesting about the movie is that in some ways it plays into my Isaiah/McCaffrey Wave Theory. Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt, symbolic of the neo-liberal world order, with his puffy, bloated cheeks, a result of his narcissism in the form of bad plastic surgery to, just like that tired old political philosophy, try and look young and vibrant again, is literally hanging by his fingers to stay alive and maintain the current world order. The bad guys...Solomon Lane and company...are fighting to take down that world order and only preposterous movie magic can stop them. Add in the fact that Cruise's character, Ethan Hunt, works for the IMF, which is supposed to be the Impossible Missions Force, but is also the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is the flagship of the neo-liberal world order, and you have a perfect storm for my wave theory.

The neo-liberal world order of the IMF (both the real one and the movie one) is hanging by a thread, and the likelihood of it surviving gets more and more unlikely with every passing second. Solomon Lane, the red headed anarchist...sound familiar (Donald Trump)?... has his heart set on destruction as the first act of creation "the greater the suffering, the greater the peace"...which sounds a lot like the best case scenario for the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Henry Cavill, who plays August Walker (is he a cross between August Wilson and Walker Percy...symbolic of the outcast modern man?), a CIA assassin. Cavill also famously plays Superman, and here he also represents the Nietzschean Superman. Walker (he is a White Walker...sort of like the villainous army in Game of Thrones) is the White Working class seduced by the red headed Solomon Lane/Trump...and does his bidding to destroy the world order.

I assume Fallout will be in the top ten in terms of box office this year, so its narrative/sub-text about a charismatic anarchist leader using his minions to destroy the world order is something that resonates in the collective unconscious right now and will continue to do so in the near future.

©2018