Note: Sorry for the lateness of this post. I was at BlobFest this weekend attending MST3Kon which kept me pre-occupied.
Multiplex Madness
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
⭐⭐⭐
Genre: Action, Adventure, Spy
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Cary Elwes
What if Tom Cruise was so in love with the scene from the first Mission: Impossible where he performs a magic trick that he based an entire three hour McGuffin chase around it? Well, now we know.
There's an arrogance to making a two-part film that's hard to escape, because there needs to be enough story to sustain five to six hours worth of film and both parts need to work as cohesive wholes. A lot of two-part films struggle with this, even this year's otherwise outstanding Across the Spider-Verse, and the only example I can think of that pulled these goals off satisfactorily are Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is a fun movie, but it feels superfluous, like it easily could have told this story in the first act of one movie that was probably the same length as this one. This film sees Ethan Hunt going rogue (again) almost immediately at the start of the film, chasing after key that could control a powerful A.I. called "The Entity," which he intends to destroy so no global superpower can control it. But the Entity has achieved such a degree of awareness that it's also after its own key. And the majority of this movie is devoted to back and forth chase sequences over who does and does not have a portion of this key, fluffed out with character moments that rarely reach a weighted conclusion before the film's end. I probably would have been more content with Dead Reckoning Part One if its personal character beats did achieve a finality in this movie, which is something Across the Spider-Verse achieved more effectively. Dead Reckoning sets up certain ideas, but never really follows through with them. There are bits and pieces of an Ethan Hunt origin story that we catch glimpses of, but it never elaborates on. We don't know what is going on in any of it, setting up a history between him and the human villain that the film never embellishes (but presumably will in the sequel?). That's bullshit storytelling.
What saves Dead Reckoning is that as a Mission: Impossible movie it certainly does its Impossible Mission well. It's a breathless globe-trotting adventure of action, hijinks, plot twists, and daring do-gooders. The I.M.F. dream team of Ethan, Luther, Benji, and Ilsa are all back and doing the work that we love seeing them do, this time joined by a thief named Grace, of which the film serves as something of an origin story for her in the process. She probably has a little too much in common with Thandiwe Newton's Nyah character from Mission: Impossible II to stand on her own two feet as her own character, but Hayley Atwell is an absolute charmer in the role. Her chase scene handcuffed to Tom Cruise through the streets of Rome is probably the highlight of the action sequences, though unlike the other street race through Rome movie this year, Fast X, it's not a downhill experience after that. All the action sequences hold their own and are worth the price of admission by themselves, right down to the big base-jump stunt that Tom Cruise is selling in the advertisements and a pretty spectacular train crash sequence. The use of A.I. as the film's villain is interesting, because it gives our heroes an antagonist that is incorporeal, seemingly everywhere, and knows their every move. But it also gives interesting insight to Ethan's mind, because his outlook is that since the Entity is trying so hard to stop him, that means it has calculated a scenario where Ethan wins, and Ethan bets everything on that.
Mission: Impossible is the most reliably entertaining franchise currently running (lukewarm second film aside), and Dead Reckoning doesn't exactly hurt its record. This mission just feels more hollow than the others, even if it can still bring the thrills. There's nothing here to make the series feel like its running on fumes, but one does leave the film hoping the next film is meatier than this one is.
Netflix & Chill
Quicksand
⭐⭐
Streaming On: Shudder
Genre: Thriller
Director: Andres Beltran
Starring: Carolina Gaitán, Allan Hawco
Quicksand is an interesting movie, even if it's never actually a good one. What easily could have been "Open Water in the mud" is instead delivered as a story of a couple with seemingly irreconcilable differences in a situation where they're forced to look each other in the eye and figure out how to help each other, cue passive aggressiveness, bickering, and bittersweet reconnection in the face of mortality. Quicksand breaks down as it fails to reach the dramatic heights that it aims for. Part of this is because of casting, as Carolina Gaitán and Allan Hawco probably both fit the roles on a surface level, but their personal back and forth lacks the chemistry it needs to center an entire movie on them. They just don't feel like a believable couple, and I don't know if it's because the movie never establishes a moment of non-misery between them but it's hard to feel for them when we don't feel a spark within them. But as a survival thriller, Quicksand has sequences that serve its story and successfully thrill, meanwhile others lack impact and just feel present to bump up the runtime to eighty minutes. There's enough here to show the promise of a better movie, but it also makes you wish you were watching that movie instead.
New To Digital
New To Physical
Beau is Afraid ⭐⭐⭐
Kandahar ⭐⭐1/2
Scream VI ⭐⭐1/2
Shin Ultraman ⭐⭐⭐
Sisu ⭐⭐⭐
Coming Soon!
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