FOUR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

The best and maybe the only compliment I can pay to Fantastic Four, the third unsuccessful attempt at bringing the oldest of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's creations at Marvel Comics to the big screen, is that it's not obviously the worst of a sorry lot. Its big budget and generally solid (though not at all state-of-the-art) visual effects don't nearly compensate for the gung-ho charm of the unreleased 1994 film, famously made for $1 million to secure the production rights to the material, which improbably remains the best version of the story despite resembling a fan video made by some sugar-jacked kids in the basement. But its insipidities, and it is very insipid, aren't inherently worse than those of the ghastly 2005 big-budget version, just different. That film heralded the end of the "brightly colored larks that are wholly insubstantial but also not much fun" era of comic book movies; time alone will tell if its 2015 sibling will similarly ring down the curtains on the "ludicrously dark and serious-minded exercises in bitterness and misery" era, though I think we should be hopeful. Because Fantastic Four '15 is, if it is anything, alarmingly dark and serious-minded, to the point of parody.

How much of this is due to the awkwardly visible fencing match between director Josh Trank and the executives at 20th Century Fox is beyond our ability to say for certain. It does feel like a movie that wants to be anything than what it is: I am especially thinking of the rumors that Trank was hoping to make PG-13, summer-friendly body horror. There are vestigial traces of that conception: most notably, the giant rock-man Ben "The Thing" Grimm (Jamie Bell) darkly responding "I'm used to it" when asked if his body hurts. I guess it would have been better for the film to have gone all the way; at least then the incongruous bleakness of tone would have felt like it had some actual purpose. As it is, the movie doesn't have any clear intentions or personality, flattening everything into a single mood of aimless, sullen detachment, not caring about anything but just grinding through its leaden 100 minutes and getting it the hell over with. If it is possible for cinema to suffer from clinical depression, this is exactly what I'd expect it to look like.

The film laboriously reworks one of the most well-known origin stories in superhero comics, taking its cues from the Ultimate Marvel line rather than the more familiar story initially set out by Lee in 1961 (that is, the Fantastic Four are unlikable teenagers): in 2007, genius 5th grader Reed Richards (Owen Judge) set himself to the task of building a matter transporter, along the way picking up the support and friendship of classmate Ben Grimm (Evan Hannemann), a tough kid from a love-starved family, whose cruel older brother (Chet Hanks) would gleefully announce "it's clobberin' time!" before beating the 11-year-old into paste. Even if I had no goal but to write the bleakest possible grimdark parody of Silver Age comics, I don't think I could have come up with such a punishing origin for the Thing's corny-ass catchphrase. Anyway, Reed's early experiments are inconclusive, but by the time the two arrive in their senior year of college, with Reed now played by Miles Teller while Bell takes over Ben, he's almost got it down. And that brings him to the attention of Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), the director of the Baxter Institute, a research facility that has been working on very similar technology to open a portal to another dimension. Reed finds himself working alongside Franklin's son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) and adopted daughter Sue (Kate Mara), as well as the former prodigy and current joyless slacker Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), and they succeed in cracking the technology necessary to travel to Planet Zero, a physical space made out of pure energy, or something like that.

Sadly, an unauthorised drunken trip to that dimension goes wildly wrong, leaving Victor stranded on Planet Zero and the other three boys warped by the transportation back, while Sue also gets fucked up even though she wasn't part of the trip for some reason. This leaves them with the usual suite of powers: Reed can extend his limbs far beyond their normal range, Sue can phase out of the visible spectrum and create force fields, Johnny can set his entire body on fire, and Ben is an invulnerable rock monster. They are immediately taken by the U.S. government in the form of Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson), who hopes to weaponise them; Reed escapes and tries to hunt for a cure while the other three sullenly learn to harness their new powers. A year later, the dimensional gate has been rebuilt, and a path re-opened to Planet Zero, which has now become Doom's hellish personal playground, from which he plans destroy all life on Earth.

Origin stories are all well and good, but this one is exceptionally methodical; it's not enough to show us how the Fantastic Four (not so named until the line immediately following the last line spoken in the film) came into being, we also need to understand in exact detail what their lives were like prior to the accident. That's literally all this film is, a distended first act that fleshes out backstory in three times the fulness it probably requires, minutely spelling out points that could be implied, and generally using expository dialogue on the principal that you can never be too specific and it's better to have characters say everything germane to the moment all at once than to make them sound like human beings. I do not think we should blame the writers - Trank, with Simon Kinberg & Jeremy Slater are credited - who were dealing with one of the most extensive reshoots of any major tentpole film in recent years, and could hardly be expected to make a shapely creation out of this gross hybrid.

Besides, there's probably something in this: a more psychologically-oriented, character-driven superhero movie is exactly what pop culture needs. It's a shame that Fantastic Four ends up with such compromised, indifferently-performed characters: to look at the highs and lows of their respective careers, one might not think that Teller, Jordan, Mara, and Bell would all end up underplaying their roles in more or less exactly the same way (for which we can almost certainly blame Trank), each of them walling themselves off from the other three and completely failing to make the connections that the "modern families can look weird but still be loving" conceit of the script absolutely demands: Mara and Jordan have a prickly dislike between them that's especially damaging given what a big deal the film makes about their polyglot family, while Teller responds to Mara with hostile chilliness in all the places that the script indicates that they should be flirting. And Bell (who is visibly far too old for the role) is completely checked-out, swallowed up by an American accent that sounds acutely painful.

Even setting aside its failure to execute the one thing that might have made it distinctive, Fantastic Four turns on itself the second that it puts its characters through their mutation. I can't recall if there's ever been a major big-budget superhero movie that breaks down so quickly and so completely as this one does after that "One Year Later" card. We know that whole sequences were ripped from the film, we know that much of it was re-conceived and re-shot, but it doesn't take following the gossip rags to sense that something went deeply wrong in putting the film together: Reed's escape ends up serving as nothing but a parenthetical, the return to Planet Zero is rushed and Doom's return and the battle to stop him abrupt and confusing, and the whole last 40 minutes generally ape the shape of a superhero movie without having any kind of meaningful content. It is as dysfunctional as anything in the genre has been since... I don't even know, Blade: Trinity? It's a damned ghastly wreck, anyway.

There is absolutely nothing in the aesthetics to prop this up: Matthew Jensen's cinematography uses the full palette of slate greys to be as unattractive as possible, and George L. Little's costume design fully commits to the trend of superhero garb looking functional in the bluntest way, all drab blacks and technologicalish lines. The score by Marco Beltrami and Philip Glass is a heartbreaking disappointment outside of its main collaborative motif, which mixes midcentury scientific optimism and contemporary soaring action music well, but otherwise sounds like a slightly less generic version of the banalities that show up in all the Marvel Studios films. The CGI is serviceable to very good, and is especially fin in the case of the Thing, captured in terrifically realistic shifts of rock against rock, aided by some great sound design. But the same veil of grimness that coats the rest of the visuals infringes on the CGI as well, and instead of being bowled over by how real and imaginative things are, it's easier to be depressed by how morbid Planet Zero looks, and how irritatingly off-putting they've made Doom's design.

It is, all told, a greatly joyless film, without any purpose to that joylessness; and it's dragged down further by its perfunctory, formless narrative. The homogeneity of recent superhero movies has very little to recommend it, but it means a certain level of basic competence: films this bad in that genre have been driven almost to the point of extinction. Hopefully, the failure of Fantastic Four on all fronts will be enough to finish the job.

3/10

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ROGUISH CHARM

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

After Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol came out in 2011, it seemed that the series had finally figured out how to become the best version of itself and could go on forever doing the same thing. It was with that film that the movies stopped being somewhat dimwitted star vehicles for producer Tom Cruise and instead finally turned into the thing that the 1966-'73 TV series Mission: Impossible had once been: a well-built exercise in fluffy spy adventure that found a team of talented people using their very particular skills to solve complicated puzzle boxes and save the day from other, more evil spies. And while plenty of what made Ghost Protocol so particularly excellent was the intelligent popcorn filmmaking of director Brad Bird, nothing he did was so ground breaking that it couldn't be copied. And that's exactly what has now happened: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is slightly worse than its immediate predecessor in nearly every way, slightly better in a couple of others that are especially important, and is light years beyond the first three movies released between 1996 and 2006.

Like every M:I film, Rogue Nation is an almost perfect standalone object, with a couple throwaway lines referencing previous adventures and the assumption that you already know and like brash, middle-aged Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise), but otherwise assuming that it needs to make its own case for existing (I find it enormously gratifying in this age of shared universes and heavily choreographed multi-film narrative arcs that there's still one franchise out there that's willing to just make movies that work solely in reference to themselves. And it does this splendidly, throwing us right into the action with that "Tom Cruise hanging from the side of a plane" setpiece that has been the the focal point of the ad campaign, and building up to bigger and better things from there.

The story, put together by Christopher McQuarrie (also directing, his third movie in 15 years; on this film's evidence, he should have quite an enjoyable career for himself going forward) from an initial draft by Drew Pearce, ends up becoming a little too convoluted and heightened for its own good - though there are some ever so slightly tongue in cheek "my eleven dimensional chess skills are better than yours" moments near the end that suggest that this was entirely intentional - but initially, at least, it's a pretty clear piece of spy movie boilerplate: Hunt has been making a boob of himself insisting that something called the Syndicate is out in the world, murdering important figures to kneecap the world economy. His latest attempt to prove this organisation exists leads him to London, where he's nearly caught and killed, escaping only through the momentary kindness of wavering Syndicate agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). He goes on the run, while territorial CIA director Hunley (Alec Baldwin) manages to have the IMF absorbed into his agency and turning high level IMF agent William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) into his personal dancing monkey.

Six months later, Hunt has learned enough to know that he can't learn any more without help, and so he picks up former IMF agent Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), currently crunching numbers to no purpose in a CIA computer lab, to help him. As Hunley uses this new activity to close the net on Hunt, Brandt recruits Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames, the only actor besides Cruise to have gone 5-for-5 in the series to date) to help him find Hunt before the CIA can. Meanwhile, Hunt and Benji partially foil an assassination plot that throws them in with Faust, who now reveals herself to be an MI6 agent deep undercover as the right hand of Syndicate leader Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), though Brandt's information suggests that the double agent is, in fact, a triple.

That's about where the convolutions kick in, and I confess in my boring, simple way that I prefer the way that Ghost Protocol mostly abandons its plot in the third act to Rogue Nation's attempts to double-down on it. But the draw of either film is really the same thing: grand action sequences and upbeat, easy banter between the various members of the team. All the script needs to do is to construct a plausible enough ludicrous spy thriller that we won't complain about the interstitials.

With those goals in mind, Rogue Nation passes all its challenges with flying colors: this is a terrific action movie that suffers only from coming out in the same summer as the unbeatable Mad Max: Fury Road, and the character beats rank among the best in the franchise. The expanded role given to Pegg pays off well in giving Cruise a reliable comic scene partner, and Renner is a great deal looser and more charismatic than in the last film (to say nothing of his stilted turns for Marvel). The clear stand-out is Ferguson, a Swedish actress who has worked in her native country and on British TV, but is making just her second English-language feature here. It's a performance that, in a fair world, we'll all look back on as her great star-making turn; sharing virtually all of her moments with one of modern cinema's most charismatic stars and photogenic faces in the form of Cruise, she nonetheless runs away with the movie, playing a dangerously mysterious figure as a frank, open, likable human being and exactly matching Cruise's playful-serious attitude. It's a drag that the Mission: Impossible films seem so weirdly committed to limiting themselves to just one significant female character at a time (though it is said that Paula Patton's absence from this film was because of scheduling, not because the filmmakers didn't want her), but at least Ferguson is the best performance of the most complex woman the franchise has witnessed to date.

The setpieces, meanwhile, are too good to spoil in detail, but I'll give it a go at being vague. They're impressively shot and cut - the great Robert Elswit is on cinematography duties for the second M:I film running, and Eddie Hamilton edits - so that each of them has a different style: the opening plane stunt has lingering wide shots to stress the grand scope of the aerial action; an underwater suspense scene finds the camera drifting along with fluid, weightless dance moves (it's also a tremendously great piece of sustained tension even though it's much too early in the film for anything bad to happen); a motorcycle chase regular cuts over to manic bike-mounted angles that play up the speed and chaos of the action. The best sequence, the one destined to be this film's signature piece like the suspended computer hacking in Mission: Impossible or the Burj Khalifa climb in Ghost Protocol, is an elaborate multi-tiered fight sequence that follows Hunt's attempt to stop gunmen at an opera performance in the constantly-shifting flies behind the stage, cutting like a whirlwind and exploiting the bombast of "Nessun dorma" from Turandot to give it rhythm and momentum (Joe Kraemer's score then adopts elements from the aria as motifs for the rest of the movie). It's ballsy and insane how much McQuarrie and company encourage us to to flashback to Hitchcock's legendary Albert Hall sequence in The Man Who Knew Too Much; it's beyond belief how well the film ends up doing in that head-to-head comparison.

It's frivolous tosh, far less connectable to anything resembling real-world politics than a film with the subtitle Rogue Nation should possibly think it can get away with; but such very enjoyable, confidently-made tosh! This is big-budget major studio summer spectacle-mongering at its best: tightly paced, ambitiously conceived, superbly executed, and greatly enriched by the instincts and wits of its producer-star Cruise, but by no means dependent on him. It's terrifically entertaining, and if it's not smart, at least it's not stupid, and it's certainly never boring or anything less than fully committed to being the most high-energy entertainment it can be.

8/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THIS MISSION WILL SELF-DESTRUCT

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation continues the unexpected late flowering of a TV-derived spy franchise into its best self. And now, may I present its worst self.

There's nothing new in the observation that anybody with in any interest in the matter already made between 1993's Hard Target and 2003's Paycheck: for an unqualified genius of an action movie director, with two different candidates for Best Action Film Ever Made in his career in the form of The Killer and Hard Boiled, John Woo surely could not put a single foot right during his layover in Hollywood. Out of his six American features, the absolute best is surely 1997's Face/Off, and even that film is closer to "good enough" than "all-time genre classic". We can't just blame the language barrier: even the most culturally non-specific elements of action filmmaking are deeply compromised.

I bring this up in connection to Mission: Impossible II, from the summer of 2000, both because it is possibly my least favorite of Woo's American films (though that is a competitive race), and because it so beautifully typifies how badly he was fumbling the basic skills that he had so recently used better than just about anyone else living. M:i:II (I had forgotten how beastly the abbreviations of the titles for this and Mission: Impossible III looked) was a movie literally conceived around its action setpieces; this was not merely something the filmmakers weren't ashamed of, they broadcast it, like it was a proof of how focused they were on a great action experience. Now that it's standard operating procedure for the Mission: Impossibles to construct their narratives exactly this way, it's easy to lose track of how thoroughly dangerous a strategy this is, because there is a very strong possibility that you end up with a story exactly like the one M:i:II suffers from, but my present concern isn't the film's storytelling woes. The thing is, if you make a point of coming up with action sequences along which to strong a narrative, rather than the other way around, it stands to reason that the action will be pretty fucking terrific, right? And M:i:II can't even get that right.

It has one gunfight scene that is, so far as you can make it out through the choppy editing, solid middle-tier Woo, and the climax involves one very impressive knife fight stunt and some fantastical wire work that, is, so far as you can make it out through the outright incoherent editing, daunting and impressive and poetic. But that's pretty much it, unless you count the early rock climbing scene that's more of an amuse bouche than an action sequence proper. There's a ghastly car chase sort of sequence that doubles as the two main characters flirting, and it is utterly dumb and plagued with slow motion (the film as a whole is plagued with slow motion, like Woo decided it was his "thing" and never stopped to wonder if it belonged in this shot or that shot particularly), and there's a scene that tries much too hard to remind us of the exquisite "suspended in the computer room" scene from the 1996 Mission: Impossible, undone by familiarity and the worst visual effects of the whole movie. And when all is said and done, none of these things represent nearly a large enough percentage of the 123-minute running time - itself cut down savagely from Woo's mythological intended cut of some three and a half hours - which is largely devoted to inching through a bare bones plot. Even that's being polite: the first 33 minutes of the film aren't "inching". They're just fucking stopped there, staring earnestly as the characters repeat the exact same beat for 20 minutes.

The plot this time: Russian scientist Dr. Vladimir Nekhorvich (Rade Serbedzija) has a cutesy-named bioweapon "Chimera", and its even more cutesy cure, "Bellerophon", and he's taking them to the United States and the Impossible Missions Force, owing to his trust and friendship with IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Unfortunately, ex-IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), wearing an Ethan Mask and a little electronic patch that allows him to speak in Ethan's voice, confronts Nekhorvich on a plane and steals the chemicals, before forcing the plane to crash. Naturally enough, Ethan himself is assigned by IMF executive Swanbeck (Anthony Hopkins, somnambulant) to track down Ambrose, with one curious point of insistence: Ethan can pick whatever two IMF agents he wants, but he absolutely must also recruit the civilian con artist and thief Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton).

And here the film walks out of the room, right in the middle of a sentence, leaving us all baffled as to whether we should, like, follow it? Or just wait there for it to come back? Anyway, it is pure cinematic death as we watch in what feels like real time for the days that it takes Ethan to persuade Nyah - whose special skill, it turns out, is not thievery, but being Ambrose's ex-girlfriend, which easily makes this the most condescending of all the female roles in this enormously sausage-festy franchise - to join his team. At a certain point, that highly elaborate car flirtation happens, to augment the implausibly fast and thorough physical flirtation they've already launched into, and it is hard to completely hate it, because of how elaborately and well-executed it is, but it's also hard to love it, because it is the silliest goddamn thing.

Eventually, the movie starts to move again, though not with any particular urgency. What happens in the remaining three-quarters of the film is frankly a bit unfocused: we know all along that Ethan wants to stop Ambrose from using an apocalyptic bioweapon, but not always how this or that particular scene is going to aid him in that goal. On paper, this is all marvelous: Woo and screenwriter Robert Towne, working from a story originally by Ronald D. Moore & Brannon Braga, are more interested with lingering on moments and characters, and allowing production designer Tom Sanders and cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball to stage beautiful collages of color and light and kinetic movement. It's a massive tentpole action movie that wants to attend to small poetic moments in the background, and allow the characters to inhabit moments, and what's not interesting about that? In practice, everything. Part of it, surely, is that the film was cut down so dramatically, suggesting that what's left is connective tissue more than narrative movie. But part of it is just plain ol' rocky, confused filmmaking.

Certainly, the film's editing (by Steven Kemper and Christian Wagner) is as conspicuously lousy as it could possibly manage to be. From the moment during Ethan's re-introduction on Utah mountaintops that the scene cuts between four different angles of his hands slipping in less than a second, the movie throws its lot in with hectic, clarity-demolishing over-editing, sometimes so giddy that it's almost fun in a bad way (the explosive cut to the Utah scene, a dancer spinning across the screen to create the gaudiest wipe I have ever seen in a professional motion picture). Hans Zimmer's score, I suspect at Woo's urging, also trips near to "so bad it's good" territory, with its soaring use of a wordless female voice doing more than all the slow motion and all the doves in the world ever could to render Woo's aesthetic as a self-parody. The performances are all over the map: Cruise plays his cocky charming shtick with an unusual layer of uncertainty and inauthenticity, and Newton is astonishingly, uncharacteristically leaden, though with a role like that, how could she be otherwise? Scott is the most blank villain in a franchise that has had a fairly consistent villain problem, and the best thing about his presence here is that it prevented him from playing Wolverine in X-Men. And those are basically the only actors that the film cares about in the slightest.

As for what it does care about? I cannot say. Woo's best films are all about movement of people relative to the camera and the violence happening around him, but M:i:II is almost exactly the opposite of that: it is inert, subdivided into tiny little static moments cut together fast enough to synthesise kineticism. Visually, the film is soothing, not exciting: exactly the wrong thing for an action movie of any sort to be, or a sequel to a film noted for its intense thriller sequences, or a movie whose character beats are so generic that we just need to be distracted from them. Oh, it's pretty in it's gauzy way: the polish is there, but it's all in service to nonsense.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: YOUR MISSION, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation continues the unexpected late flowering of a TV-derived spy franchise into its best self. Is it not right, then, to take a look back to that franchise's beginnings?

There's an elephant in the room that two decades haven't gotten rid of: the 1996 feature film Mission: Impossible commits to a twist at the three-quarter mark that serves almost no purpose other than to thoroughly and pointlessly piss off anybody committed to the 1966-'73 American TV series Mission: Impossible to enough of a degree that the movie's title would function as a draw. There's damn little about the movie that capitalises on that connection: the plot, attitude, and even the genre are all completely different from the show, although obviously any movie that gets to include Lalo Schifrin's glorious theme music will benefit from doing so. So why do it? The character involved is enough of a non-entity within the film in and of itself that any subversive bite goes awry. The commentary on post-Cold War aimlessness in the intelligence community is identical if you change that character's name and thus avoid the whole bloody affair. All it really does is telegraph a lazy contempt for the property and its fanbase, and even if Mission: Impossible had no other flaws - and it certainly has other flaws - this would be enough to keep me from ever particularly cottoning to it, for I am indeed quite a fan of the show. And also, for some reason, I've spent all my energy so far trying like mad not to spoil a movie that came out two full generations of movie audiences ago, but it's a good habit to keep.

Despite its thorough and conscious rejection of the show it was based on, this was ground zero for the trend of strip-mining classic TV for new action tentpoles (most of the previous TV-to-film adaptations during the 1990s had been sitcoms turned into the movie version of sitcoms), and I will concede that the film's enormous financial success is easy to comprehend: the parts of this film that work, work really damn well, most especially but not only its instantly-iconic thriller sequence that finds Tom Cruise suspended from the ceiling of an austere white room while trying to silently hack a computer. The film kicked off one of the 21st Century's most interesting (even in its worst entries) action franchises, but Mission: Impossible is not itself all that much of an action movie: it's much more interested in plumbing the paranoia that attends to the life of a super-ultra double-top-secret spy, which it does through some elaborately staged moments of high tension that are frequently communicated through mundane speech and character beats.

"Just like Hitchcock!" one might want to say, upon recognising that M:I was directed by Brian De Palma, history's most famed Hitchock impersonator, but by 1996, he'd largely worked that out of his system, and the film is working in a different vein than that. This is still a big-budget studio movie, Paramount's big play for the summer, if not indeed the whole year (it ended up being the third-highest grosser of '96, behind the VFX tag-team of Independence Day and Twister), and it carries with a certain shallow gloss as a result of that. The incongruity of faces like Kristin Scott Thomas and Emmanuelle Béart (in, I believe, her only English-language film prior to 2014) cropping up in such an obvious Hollywood commercial play is one thing that might make us want to credit M:I with a little more artistic gravitas, as does the presence of De Palma, for that matter, clearly more interested personally in pulling at the wires inside a gigantic studio production than actually sitting down to make one like a good boy. These things are all to the credit of producer Cruise (his first project with Paula Wagner under their Cruise/Wagner banner), already at this point looking to start his fascinating project of tweaking, self-analysing, and inverting his superstar persona - Jerry Maguire came out later the same year, and his dates with Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson were next in line. But these things ultimately do not make Mission: Impossible any less of a '90s popcorn movie.

Nor, frankly, is it one of the better examples of such things. The blunt fact is that the story - credited to David Koepp and Steve Zaillian, with the finished script handled by Koepp and Robert Towne - is a bit of a shambling mess, bearing the unmistakable mark of a movie that was assembled from pieces of movies that were not made, with a couple of tremendously obvious loose ends (the most conspicuous being a Bible that serves as the clue to unlock the film's twist, but it makes absolutely no sense how it manages to do so), and a final act that takes the delicacy of the preceding 100 minutes and says "fuck it, just throw an exploding helicopter at it". De Palma's directing doesn't do much at all in the way of obviating these flaws, and it usually feels that he was more invested in pursuing ideas for the sake of it, than pursuing ideas for the sake of this exact movie. That pays off: Mission: Impossible is always at least interesting as an exercise in De Palma stylistics. The problem is that it is, frequently, only interesting as such an exercise.

But anyway, I should get around to the plot before I hit the 1000-word mark, even though in ignoring it I'm doing no worse than the movie. The Impossible Missions Force, a top-secret US government agency that solves the problems that can only be cracked with creativity, cunning, and extra-legal means, has lost a list of its agents' true identities, and top agent Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) and a team he's hand-picked have traveled to Prague to retrieve it. The team, including Ethan Hunt (Cruise), Sarah Davies (Scott Thomas), Jack Harmon (Emilio Estevez, uncredited), and Phelps's wife Claire (Béart), successfully infiltrate the American embassy in Prague, but the mission otherwise goes spectacularly wrong: starting with a sudden and shockingly gruesome death for Jack, the entire team except for Ethan ends up dead, a mere 26 minutes into the film. IMF director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) informs Ethan (rather stupidly, when it comes down to it) that this suggests to all involved that Ethan must therefore be the mole that the IMF was trying to smoke out with this mission, and so the agent now finds himself on the run to clear his name and find the real traitor, even if he has to enter the grey world of disavowed IMF agents and shady arms dealers to do it.

The scenario and tone split the difference neatly between the sour espionage realpolitik of John le Carré and the florid fantasies of James Bond, and that's by far the nicest thing I have it in me to say about Mission: Impossible as a story. The whole thing is so damnably confusing: not in the rewarding way where we're navigating a puzzle that snaps into place at the end as long as we've been paying full attention, but in the frustrating way where we only have to pay such close attention because the filmmakers made a huge mess of things. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the TV series's focus on group efforts to solve problems as a team of specialised experts; really, it's nothing but a spy-themed variant on the infinitely more satisfying The Fugitive from three years prior, subbing Cruise during an uncertain transitional phase for Harrison Ford at his peak powers. Like many an action film before or since - including all four of its own sequels to the date of this writing - it's primarily a scaffolding for setpieces, and it has the grave misfortune to end with by far the worst of its big three: a helicopter vs. train chase through a tunnel that suffers from all the idiotic bigness of popcorn cinema and lacks any grace in the filmmaking, on top of having primitive CGI that has aged unexpectedly poorly.

The other two are pretty great, though. The hacking scene I've touched on, but it's worth reiterating how well it uses deathly silence and uncomfortably intimate close-ups on Cruise's sweaty face to ramp up the suspense to exquisitely painful levels. The opening scene at the embassy, the only part that feels anything like the old Mission: Impossible, is a nifty marriage of quick cutting between elements of the team's plan, inspired spy movie balderdash (the series' beloved mask machines put in their first, most dramatically "Look at me! I'm cool!" appearance), and beautiful style: an overhead shot of the embassy stairs is an exercise in pure geometrical composition that speaks especially highly of De Palma's visual sensibility. The sequence uses unexpected but totally successful first-person shots to work us into the action; editor Paul Hirsch plows through scenes and lines with terrific momentum-building speed.

De Palma is good enough at suspense that he can even get some really taut tension from scenes where nothing seems to be happening at all: the conversation between Ethan and Kittridge is shot from an inconsistent array of sickening angles, far nastier than any basic two-shot situation has the guts to be, and it's great. It only goes so far, though. Ultimately, the film has a hard time defining its stakes (the MacGuffin is particularly MacGuffiny, primarily because of the number of different times it turns out not to be real), and its characters range from distinct but under-used (Scott Thomas gives Sarah attitude that's not in the script, but she dies before the conflict even begins) to dull functional objects in the script's gears (everybody else, though Béart is the most flaccid, I assume for reasons of language discomfort). After the later sequels left Cruise totally at ease with the role of Ethan Hunt, charming and hard and visibly thoughtful, I'd quite forgotten how stiff he was here; by '96, he'd already given some very good performances, but the real loosening-up that came from working with Cameron Crowe in Jerry Maguire and Anderson in Magnolia was needed before he could make Ethan anything but a generic action movie superhero, here unfortunately stuck in a wannabe-brainy spy thriller.

Credit where credit is due: the film tries to push against its genre, and the auteurist flourishes are unmistakable, which is much more than can be said for the vast majority of films at this level of commercial ambition in this era of Hollywood filmmaking. Mission: Impossible isn't always successful, but it's certainly never lazy. Its earnest desire to be a Bond picture with more thoughtfulness and challenging aesthetics are to be lauded, though I think it's telling that 15 years later, when Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol finally carved a top-notch movie out of this material, it was by going in a different direction than the original film in almost every way other than the mechanical ingenuity of its setpieces.

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GAME OVER, MAN

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

There's a good movie to be made out of Pixels, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to get there. First, keep all of the visual effects setpieces from the movie as it exists, for they are surprisingly beautiful and convincing considering how much lower the film's budget than the usual summer tentpole. Second, make exactly the opposite choices that the filmmakers actually did, because there's literally not one thing about the plot, characters, tone, morality, or basic comprehensibility about Pixels in this form that works.

The film began life in 2010 as a lovely little conceptual short by French filmmaker Patrick Jean (which you can watch here, and have a far more enjoyable 2.5 minutes than anything in the lugubrious 105 minutes of the feature), whence it was almost immediately nabbed by Adam Sandler, who wanted to transform it into a feature. And that's really sad, because of all the changes that would have clearly benefit Pixels at some stage in its development "don't make it an Adam Sandler vehicle" is unquestionably at the top of the list. Sandler tapped Tim Herlihy to write the first draft, which was supplanted by a rewrite by Timothy Dowling, making this the most Timmed-up Hollywood movie in recent memories, and makes me gravely unhappy at my name.

All those Tims whipped up a rather peculiar monstrosity, in which Sam Brenner (Sandler), a video game champion during his teen years in the early '80s, is called upon by his dumpy buddy Will Cooper (Kevin James), now President of the United States, to help save the world. It is first among the film's gaping flaws - not worst, not most inexplicable, just first - that the film makes the stock Kevin James character, the schlubby loser best friend, into the President without having any slight idea of how to make that funny. Or believable. I know that expecting rigorous realism from a Happy Madison joint is my problem, not the film's, but like anything else, comedy needs a baseline of logic to develop from. Given his background as a suburban nerd, given how viscerally everybody in the country hates him, and given that he clearly has no friends besides a sad sack tech nerd working at a Best Buy knockoff, it's impossible to imagine how Cooper got elected in the first place, and if we can't make that leap, there are huge swaths of the movie that never feel like anything other than the standard Happy Madison formula forcibly lacquered onto a framework that doesn't fit them. It's like a comedy sketch that everybody realises is going wrong, but has committed to in front of a live audience and can't back out of.

Earth's existential crisis, anyway, is an alien race that received our transmissions of video game footage in the early '80s and took it as a challenge to attack. So they use their highly advanced ability to form energy into cubes - voxels, technically, not pixels - and they form those cubes into three-dimensional versions of '80s arcade figures, who come to do battle with the ill-prepared human military. Lt. Col. Violet van Patten (Michelle Monaghan) quickly leads an R&D team to build an energy gun - a blaster, basically - that can disrupt the alien cubes, but it will take a genius arcade gamer to know how to use that technology to beat the aliens. And luckily, the president's buddy is just that genius. How this will work in tandem with the antagonistic sexual tension between Cooper and van Patten is anybody's guess, by which I mean that the second Monaghan appears onscreen and Sandler makes all sorts of leering, drooling faces at her, you're able to guess.

Now, that's one of the worst flaws: the insistence on welding the helpless Monaghan into the unenviable position of playing the woman who just can't help herself from being attracted to the life force that is Sandler at his most disengaged and inarticulate (you would never know he originated the project, based on how mopey he is onscreen). It is astonishing to me that in the year that the infamous The Cobbler was released, there'd be an even more off-putting, shambling Sandler performance than that film gave unto the world, but it's really not even all that close. The nominally comic actor pushes through the role with a single, unyielding sense of bitterness, as though trying to make any of the scripts theoretical jokes play as funny was a disgusting idea to him. But there he is, anyway, as Our Guy battling for the girl. It is all very dismal, at a level that goes beyond the usual "women in movies are objects to be won by vaguely unpleasant men" boilerplate. Brenner is viscerally repellent, both in his physical carriage and his defeated personality; trying to sell him as a romantic lead - even just the star of an enjoyable summer action-comedy, for that matter! - is a crime against decency.

Meanwhile, Brenner revives his 33-year-old rivalry against the loathsome video game superstar, Eddie Plant (Peter Dinklage, correctly concluding that he could only make the role interesting by playing it as a Lynchian satire and giving the film's sole effective performance as a result), an arrogant weirdo who dresses and acts like time stopped during the first term of Reagan's presidency. This is slapped onto the film crudely, but Dinklage is a life raft while you're watching the film, and I wanted to praise his name.

It's next to impossible to tell who is supposed to find any of this interesting. Chris Columbus directs with all the slam-bang gee-whiz gusto that a filmmaker of his punishingly anonymous style can muster, and in concert with the film's broad-as-a-barn dialogue, this makes it impossible to assume that this is meant for anybody but kids. At the same time, the film is anchored to Brenner's perspective, and so indulgent towards the video game culture of the early '80s (you are expected to know such games as Frogger and Galaga by sight and without explanation) that it seems unlike that the filmmakers genuinely cared about bringing in any audience member under the age of 35. And anybody who cares enough about the mere fact of watching '80s video games rendered as live action giants for nostalgia alone to carry them through the galling screenwriting and insipid directing is unlikely to make it past the film's misunderstanding of what playing those games consists of (a cheat code to make the ghosts warp around in Pac-Man? What the fuck does that even mean?).

But against all of that, I present the film's visual effects: loving and creative renderings of iconic characters who glow with diffuse internal light before collapsing into piles of shiny cubes. Not even during the asinine finale, a battle against Donkey Kong, had I grown so immune to the texture and color that made up the video game characters, that I ceased to enjoy staring at them as they danced across the screen. That's not a whole lot, but- no, I don't have a "but". It's not a whole lot, and you can see enough of it in the film's trailer to get the best of the experience. Fuck Pixels.

2/10

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ANTS, THEN, WHEREVER YOU MAY BE

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

Ant-Man is maybe the most typical film yet made in the now 12-picture Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is up to the individual viewer to decide if that's a compliment or a vicious & lacerating criticism. But it's really hard to think of it as anything other than a factory-pressed rebuild of the same basic story beats, character arc, gags, and conflicts that have become locked-in through Marvel's seven-year multifranchise experiment.

The film's distinguishing elements are all at the margins: in the hands of director Peyton Reed (who is much more in Yes Man-style "mercenary hack" mode than Down with Love-style "crafty stylist" mode), this is the most generously comic of all Marvel films to date, with the zippiest, silliest performances; the stakes are refreshingly low, and there's no aerial battle with the fate of nations and worlds at stakes in the final act. The cinematography by Russell Carpenter - an Oscar winner for Titanic - is distinctly more interesting than anything in any Marvel movie so far, with something resembling a thought-out purpose for the muted lighting. In concert with the production design by Shepherd Frankel and Marcus Rowland, it strips back some of the polish and gleaming surfaces in the Marvel movies of yore, to make a film that feels like it takes place in an actual world.

Behind the uncharacteristically soft visuals, though, lies a perfectly ordinary story, originally by Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish, then revised and "Marvelified" by Adam McKay & the film's star Paul Rudd when Wright dropped out of directing in 2014. I should say, "perfectly ordinary at best", since whatever would have been true of Wright's version - and there's really nothing even vestigial in the script that tells me that this wouldn't have been his worst movie - it's unquestionably true that the corporate insistence on tying the movie in with the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe, the most persistently-rumored explanation for Wright's departure, has had specific negative effects across the board. The film opens with a gaudy, stultifying scene whose awe-inspiring CGI avatar of a youthful Michael Douglas is its sole justification for existing, while its pointless introduction of minor characters from the franchise's established back history, is conspicuously unnecessary in every way; later on, the most spurious and least-interesting action setpiece, by far, is the one that exists solely to introduce a pre-existing character into the goings on. The dozen or so lines of obviously inserted dialogue self-consciously referencing the other movies in the franchise all clang uncomfortably against the rest of the movie - there is a scene in which Douglas, otherwise a cheery, charismatic presence, downshifts so hard to talk about Robert Downey Jr's unseen Tony Stark that one half-wonders if Douglas was trying to get the line snipped from the final cut of the movie through turning in a totally unacceptable take.

The less corporate Ant-Man gets, the more enjoyable it is, though there are problems that go down to the bone: the Marvel problem with boring villains, for one thing, has only ever been worse in Thor: The Dark World, with slimy corporate boss Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) steadfastly refusing to be interesting for any other reason than his arrestingly shiny bald head. But at least the plot tries to have something animating it. Newly-released con Scott Lang (Rudd), desperate for any way to reconnect with his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson), over the objection of his ex-wife (Judy Greer, in a role marginally less thankless than her performance as the wallpaper in Jurassic World) and her boyfriend Paxton (Bobby Cannavale), almost turns back to crime. But he is saved by Dr. Hank Pym (Douglas), a disgraced genius ever since his refusal to weaponise his miraculous Pym Particles. These particles, in combination with a contained environment, allow him to change the size of any human being down to the size of, well, the title makes it pretty clear what size Scott ends up becoming for large portions of the movie. The mission: stop Cross from selling the rediscovered shrinking technology to God knows what kind of shady characters. The stakes: two different generations of shitty dads attempt to reconnect with their daughters. For Pym's resentful offspring Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly, making a generic "The Girl" role even shallower through her colorless performance) is his man on the inside, and she's disgusted by his literally patriarchal refusal to let her take on the Ant-Mantle, at least up until the sequel hook.

The littleness of Ant-Man is extraordinarily soothing after the increasing bloat and bombast of Marvel movies in the past few years: no more plot than breaking into a single facility, and the emotional hook of lousy parents wanting to redeem themselves but not knowing how is refreshingly intimate and humane. It's not always the case that the execution is up to the concept: Lilly is a tremendous detriment that the film has a hard time compensating for, and nothing that Rudd does can make the "criminal dad resents his burly rival for his child's affection" stock scenario feel minutely insightful, while Cannavale and Greer are just going through the motions.

But more of Ant-Man is likable than not, especially when it goes off the map completely to indulge most fully in comedy. The film's obvious secret weapon is Michael Peña, ostensibly just one of Scott's ex-con buddies and eventual helper, but beyond a shadow of a doubt the most captivating figure onscreen: what madness drove him to decide that the way to play the role was as a combination of a plucky reporter from a '30s screwball movie and the designated pothead from an '80s teen comedy is hard to imagine, but the results are truly impeccable. There's not a single line delivery that doesn't shock and delight me with its unexpected velocity; he's invaluable to selling the film's best conceit (which feels like Wright through and through, but it's been confirmed as a wholly new invention of Peyton Reed's tenure), in which he narrates nested flashbacks through a flurry of zoned out, slangy patter. I frankly don't want to ever watch another Marvel movie without Peña in it; his performance adds a lighting strike of weird, wonderful energy to Ant-Man and manages in the process to completely transform my expectations for what a superhero sidekick can be.

Even without Peña, there's enough bright comic momentum in the movie to make it fun to watch, when it's not going through the motions. The good news is, things never ends up in the latter rut long enough for it to detract from the film as a whole; the bad news is, there's enough of those longueurs that the whole movie, which is already overlong and far too slow to rev up, is rather sleepy and aimless, two unfortunate descriptors for a popcorn movie. Comic book pictures have been worse - comic book movies have already been worse in 2015, frankly - but they're not usually this indistinct.

6/10

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COME WYTH ME YF YOU WANT TO LYVE

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

"The best Terminator movie since Terminator 2: Judgment Day" is a statement like "Jai Courtney's best-ever performance in a movie": they both have the functional shape of a compliment, but they're not actually saying very much that's complimentary. And they're both true of Terminator Genisys, the little movie that couldn't, currently on pace to be one of 2015's most visible and embarrassing box office flops.

That's not... entirely... fair. It is probably the case that Genisys gets more wrong than it gets right, starting right from that ghastly title (it's derived from an in-movie brand name designed for maximum marketing impact, but that hardly makes it less obnoxious). But it doesn't only get things wrong, and some of its successes are genuinely worth the time it will take to watch the first half of the movie on Netflix several months from now. Hell, even worth a trip to the dollar theater, if there are still dollar theaters where you live. Let's be generous.

The plot is a jam-packed muddle, but the basic strokes are that, in the war-torn California of 2029, human resistance leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) is about to stamp out the evil artificial intelligence system Skynet, but before he can, Skynet sends an assassin robot called a T-800 (Brett Azar's body with Arnold Schwarzenegger's younger face CGI'd on) back in time to 1984. Its mission is to kill Connor's mother Sarah (Emilia "Not related to Jason at all" Clarke), when she was just a helpless 20-year-old. Connor sends his right-hand man, Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back to save history, only by the time Reese arrives, the events of the first three movies have so badly mangled the timeline that Sarah is now a bad-ass warrior with an aging T-800 named Pops (Schwarzenegger himself) as her protector and sidekick, and moved the end of the world from 1997 to 2017. The time machine she luckily has prepared for just such a situation provides their path to the future in the hope of stopping Judgment Day from happening, though Skynet fights them from two different time periods to preserve its existence and to destroy all humans.

That is literally the most concise version of Laeta Kalogridis & Patrick Lussier's screenplay that I could manage, which speaks to one of the bigger issues with Genisys: it wants badly to tell a vast, epic story, but it gets tangled up in the details. Ultimately, the only internal logic is a wearied "time travel works this way in this scene because we said it does", begging for our indulgence in promising not to think too hard about whatever the hell is going on. Around the time the story lands in 2017, the film has given up trying to tell a clear story, and has turned into a dispensary for action setpieces, which really aren't all that great; there's a lot of choppiness in the editing and the stakes are never clear on a scene-by-scene basis at any greater level than "try not to die".

Prior to 2017, though, there's actually enough that Genisys does well that it goes down pretty smoothly. The best thing that the writers and director Alan Taylor do is to present much of the first half-hour or so as a remix of plot points and specific visuals from 1984's The Terminator, letting the franchise faithful relax into the movie before it starts to rewrite the rules in front of us (those who aren't already invested in the franchise need to walk on by; this is a piece of unapologetic fan service). It's smarter than anything else in the film, more challenging to our baggage as an audience and more willing to use that baggage to its own end, exploiting the material of a remake as a way of digging into its own story rather than simply relying on nostalgia. When it starts to break the old Terminator mold, it is in crafty, pointed directions that don't treat us like morons who need to have things told at us repeatedly, but can pick up on shifts and understand what makes them important. Nothing else in the whole rest of the movie capitalises on any of this, which is one of the film's great sins. But at least it's playful, and when it was the only thing the film had going on, I was entirely prepared to sing the praises of this Genisys as a creative solution to a question that never had ought to be asked: so how can we do anything new in this sandbox, given that Terminator Salvation was plainly not the way to do it?

Besides, in the first half, the action sequences are a great deal of fun, however openly indebted to T2; the villain of the first third of the movie, for no reason other than "because it's cool", is a metallic shapeshifting T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun), and all of the tensest moments and most exciting action sequences pivot around that character - there is one sequence that brings us almost into Aliens territory (since once you've started copying James Cameron, you can't stop, like potato chips), in the form of a trap for the T-1000 that melts it into a scarred collection of jagged fingers of metal, and it is a lovely throwback to the traces of metallic body horror that were part of what made the first two Terminators so viscerally memorable, on top of being the only place where the 2015 CGI bringing the creature to life looks every bit as good as the 1991 CGI.

The other thing the film gets right is bringing Schwarzenegger back, and finding a way to do it that isn't transparently idiotic. Generally speaking, the human contingent of the movie is "fine" in the most sullen way: Emilia Clarke at times feels like a little girl playing at being a movie hero, and Courtney's strength in the role goes absolutely no farther than being perfectly serviceable and affable. But I had no problem watching either of them existing onscreen. But their co-star is a delight in his return to one of his great signature roles. An emotionless robot is hardly a showcase for an actor's sense of fun or comic timing, but even with that limitation, Schwarzenegger is obviously having a blast putting a deadpan spin on the corny gags the film tosses his way. The unblinking frivolousness of the performance and the role verge on parody of the classic-recipe Terminator, but with a film that goes off the rails when it takes itself seriously, a little bit of frivolous whimsy, even in the form of an angry machine, is exactly what Genisys needs to redeem itself into being at least watchable.

Because oh, how it goes off the rails. It's not, precisely, that it gets all that confusing, though it doesn't pay to think too hard about how time travel works in this franchise as a result of the revelations made in this franchise, since you would certainly put more thought into it than Kalogridis & Lussier did. What does happen is that it gets massively perfunctory, pulling out minimally surprising shocks - the big twist spoiled by the ad campaign might have been tricky to see coming, except that nothing the plot developments that force it into being make any sense without some kind of heel turn - and staging remarkably dull action. The climactic Terminator-on-Terminator fight is damn ugly, in its colors, its cheap CGI, and its broken-down editing. And it's still not as embarassing as the asinine "flipping bus" moment that made it clear from the ads that this would be an ultimately worthless experience.

Worthless is maybe strong. One good performance (two, actually: J.K. Simmons is an unadulterated delight as a conspiracy-minded ex-cop, but he barely affects the plot and simply vanishes out of the movie when his minor contribution is done) and some fun throwback action are all this movie has going for it, and while that's really not much, it's something. A very little something. As far as world-building and crafting a satisfying time-travel story go - as far as being a junk food action movie, frankly, except for a twenty-minute stretch in the first movie Genisys is a complete misfire, and being unexpectedly fun on the margins is nowhere near enough for this film to live up to the standards of its predecessors.

But fuck it, I liked it more than Jurassic World.

6/10

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YOU STOOD ON THE SHOULDERS OF GENIUSES TO ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING AS FAST AS YOU COULD

Jurassic World is absolutely the best sequel yet to the 1993 Jurassic Park, which is one of the least-impressive compliments you can pay to a record-setting summer blockbuster. We should not feel obliged to mark it down as a strength when a movie can be confidently declared to be better than not just 1997's enervating The Lost World: Jurassic Park, but also 2001's brain-dead Jurassic Park III. Better than those should be obligatory. People who can't make a better summer thriller than those shouldn't be allowed out of Popcorn Movie School. But this is not the best of all possible worlds, and there's shit worse than that every year. So yes, it is the second-best Jurassic Park movie, and that is a good thing and worthy of note.

It is not, however, particularly good or interesting on its own merits, and it really doesn't even seem like it's trying to be. Even by the standards of nostalgia properties, Jurassic World goes all-in on nostalgia, and very rarely to its benefit, allowing fannish enthusiasm for recreating moments from the first movie to overwhelm the new movie's own ideas and characters and especially basic story logic. I would go so far as to call the script by director Colin Trevorrow & Derek Connolly, retrofitting an original by Rick Jaffe & Amanda Silver, a catastrophe, and not simply because of how readily it drifts into Jurassic Park fanfiction, though that happens all the time. It's criminally undernourished and erratic: filled with plot holes and unearned leaps of faith, to a degree that it's practically daring you not to nitpick every last thing to death.

Which I will not do, because that's a lazy form of criticism, but at least this much needs to be said: at no point in the movie did I get any sense of what Jurassic World, the dinosaur zoo/theme park at which the film takes place, is actually like. That is, I couldn't imagine what a tourist's trip to the park would be like on a day that all the dinosaurs didn't break out and try to kill everybody, nor how it's geographically laid out (a neat trick for a movie that keeps returning to its Big Electronic Map), nor even what attractions it contains besides the ones conspicuously designed to be death traps. Like the self-guided gyrocopic balls that allow you to zip around under dinosaurs' feet, and which don't automatically return to home base when the park managers flip the "rampaging killbeast on the loose" switch, but simply assume the teenagers joyriding around in will return in an orderly fashion because they've been asked to do so. That makes for some impressive popcorn movie imagery - very impressive, in fact - but fuck Jurassic World forever and always for pretending that it could possibly exist in anything like the form we see it.

That's one of the most glaring examples of many places where the film demonstrates a complete disinterest in building a coherent, sensible world, and it's ruinous. Any film whose plot depends on such utterly fantastic nonsense as cloning dinosaurs needs to have a stable, utterly plausible foundation - even the entirely flimsy Jurassic Park III knew how to do that - without which it's nothing but scenes of monster mayhem stitched together by mind-sapping bullshit. And surprise of surprises, that's exactly what Jurassic World turns out to be. The plot feels like a Mad Libs completed after a lazy day of watching creature features on SyFy: one day at Jurassic World, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) finds herself obliged to take care of her nephews, Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray Mitchell (Ty Simpkins), while their parents (Judy Greer and Andy Buckley) are busy getting divorced. It being a particularly busy day at the park, she hands them off to her assistant Zara (Katie McGrath), while she deals with an immensely important business meeting on top of all her normal duties. Meanwhile, the current park owner, multibillionaire Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), is concerned that their new showcase attraction, a genetic experiment built on a Tyrannosaurus rex base by head scientist/Frankensteinian supervillain Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong, the sole character and cast member returning from an earlier film), will be unsafe, so he sends the park's tart-tongued animal trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to take a peek at its enclosure. He finds that the animal, Indominous rex, is a supervillain in its own right, able to form complex plots that, in record time, leave it rampaging through the park and triggering the usual monster movie action. And this allows the venal Vic Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio) to try out his pet theory that the park's velociraptors, the pride and joy of Owen's career, can be weaponised.

None of the above is particularly bad as such, though it's preposterously clichéd. None of the Jurassic Park movies have been models of narrative ingenuity, and it would be unfair to expect them to start after 22 years. Still, the lifeless way that this has all been stitched together is unlovely at best, and the uniformly flat characters and performances don't offer any distraction from how the film requires all of its humans to make the most obviously stupid decision possible at virtually every turn. Howard fights with the film's laziest character and manages to turn her into something that doesn't feel totally useless, and Jake Johnson is actively good as the nerdy comic relief character in the park's control room, and that's about it as far as memorable acting; even Pratt, who so nimbly played a sarcastic dick at the center of a summer tentpole in last year's Guardians of the Galaxy, offers no personality or charm to a totally generic action hero who emerges as the structureless film's protagonist largely through attrition.

Yeah, but the dinosaurs, or so the internet tells me. And I'll spot the film that: almost all of the dinosaur scenes are terrific, up until they're not. Several of them suffer from the same basic lapses in logic as the rest of the film (the film's best monster, far more impressive than the rather dopey looking Indominus rex, is a seafaring mosasaur that's comically oversized and presented in a context where it is impossible to believe that it doesn't murder a couple dozen park visitors every week), but in such places the film exploits the rule that if the genre parts of a genre film are good enough, it gets a pass on having a brain. I mean, it exploits that rule constantly, but this is the only time it works out. Everything about the action and suspense feels mercilessly pre-ordained and overfamiliar - its best sequences don't so much "steal" from Jurassic Park, Aliens, and Predator, as they use different colored crayons to fill them in - but the film's largely gorgeous CGI (I can only point to one shot where the effects fall apart, a child awkwardly "hugging" a baby brachiosaur) makes those borrowings enough of their own thing that it feels okay to forgive them.

Even as broad spectacle, the film can't quite put itself over: the Michael Giacchino score is shockingly insipid when it's not directly quoting from John Williams's awestruck motifs (and even that poorly: the first appearance of the main Jurassic Park theme accompanies a shot of Nick Robinson's feet), and the final climax gets more and more dumb as it adds more and more complications and self-conscious bigness. But the costliness and grandeur of the spectacle is enough to keep the film from being as totally sour of an experience as its disastrous scriptwould otherwise make it. It's not memorable, and it's rarely fun, but at least the film offers up a summer movie's worth of summer movie opulence.

6/10

Reviews in this series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)

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THE LITTLE BIG ONE

San Andreas, a by-the-books disaster movie in which Dwayne Johnson fights an earthquake, is exactly the movie you suppose it to be, except in one, absolutely crucial regard: it's weirdly allergic to fun. By which I guess I mean that "by-the-books disaster movie" suggests one particular register of sobriety and anguished emotions, where as "Dwayne Johnson popcorn movie" suggests something infinitely goofier and more charming and dippy, and at all junctures, San Andreas elects to be the former thing and not so much the latter. I wasn't enough of a fool as to actually expect a movie where The Rock punches the San Andreas fault back together, but I was hoping for something that was ever silly in any way. Spectacularly bad science aside, San Andreas isn't that.

Let me re-emphasise, that this is a very by-the-books disaster movie. In a genre that's particularly beholden to formula and common elements, San Andreas still stands out for the purity of its commitment to that formula. We have the couple about to get a divorce thrown together by the terrible events unfolding around them, a daughter readying to go to college when her life is thrown into disarray, a puffy scientist trapped with a designated audience surrogate, a slimy capitalist whose fate is ironically tied to his profession. The opening scene is a mostly stand-alone setpiece designed to show off the hero's particular skill set; the final scene involves an enormous American flag slowly whipping in the wind. It's almost a holy thing, I really mean that. Not since, good Lord, maybe Volcano back in 1997 have I seen a disaster movie so painstakingly eager to be the most prototypical disaster movie it could possibly be. Or at the very least, The Day After Tomorrow in 2004.

This is not at all meant to be a slight against San Andreas, which knows exactly what it is, what it's doing, and why. Disaster movies, like romantic comedies and slasher films, derive much of their pleasure from being predictable, and finding most of their individuality in their execution. And this is the slight against San Andreas, which is many things that aren't terribly complimentary - unbelievable in the extreme for one, unusually indifferent to deaths of human beings beyond its core group of named characters for another - but is worst of all for being preposterously not-fun. Since the all but forgotten days of The Mummy Returns, Johnson's screen persona has fully coalesced into a big meaty goofball, too campy to be a serious action star and too imposing to be a standard-issue comic character actor; isolated counter-examples in the intervening decade and a half like 2013's Snitch only demonstrate his considerable onscreen charisma and movie-star qualities thrives in an atmosphere of jokey flippancy. The screenplay by Carlton Cuse, from a story credited to Andre Fabrizio & Jeremy Passmore (though "writing" the "story" in a film like this is mostly a matter of plucking down plot elements like overripe apples), is absolutely not jokey, nor flippant, even when it seems like that would be the obvious thing to do with it: Johnson gets a grand total of one dumb one-liner.

Instead, we get standard-issue family drama presented with an extraordinary lack of irony: Ray Gaines (Johnson) is a helicopter rescue pilot with the Los Angeles Fire Department, and a wife named Emma (Carla Gugino) who is leaving him, and about to move in with a handsome architect, Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffudd). Ray does his best not to be a jerk about this, even when it falls to Daniel and not himself to bring his daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) up to Seattle. For Ray, in the time-tested way of action heroes, spends more time attending to work emergencies than his loved ones. Meanwhile, a pair of Caltech professors, Dr. Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) and Dr. Kim Park (Will Yun Lee), have a perfect opportunity to test out their earthquake-predicting model during a freak event in Nevada. Kim dies rescuing a child from the collapsing Hoover Dam, but in the process, he and Lawrence prove their model works, and Lawrence is able to use the data to discover that the San Andreas fault is about to blow. Like, now. Too soon for there to be any chance of evacuating the tens of millions of people who will be immediately affected by the gigantic quake, but enough time that he can get on the air with CNN reporter Serena Johnson (Archie Panjabi) to explain to the audience what earthquakes are.

The movie doesn't genuinely care about Lawrence, but Giamatti is the second-biggest name in the cast, so it keeps cutting back to him without ever finding a remotely organic or elegant way of tying its two subplots together (the solitary link is that, prior to heading to Caltech, Serena went on a ride-along with Ray's crew in the opening scene, as he fearlessly rescued a young woman from a fissure that foreshadows the quakes to come). This leaves San Andreas moving along only in the lumpiest sort of way, on top of how clumsily it juggles the two plots it's actually committed to: Ray and Emma flying, driving, and otherwise scrambling northward through the devastation of southern California on the way to San Francisco, where Blake has teamed with a pair of English brothers, sexy Ben (Hugo Johnston-Burt) and tween Ollie (Art Parkinson), after Daniel reveals how totally craven and Evil Movie Capitalist he is. For as the most brazen of all its clichés, San Andreas goes all-in on "architecture is the path to enormous financial success" as its villain's backstory and personality. But anyway, as Lawrence tells everybody to beware the even bigger second quake on the TVs that no longer work, what with the California power grid being gone, the estranged couple reunites on the hard road north, while Blake proves to be her father's daughter and manages to use wits and survivalist know-how to keep herself and the brothers alive through fires and floods and collapsing buildings.

The least we can say about all of this is that the visual effects and especially the sound work are pretty good, though the film suffers from some particularly weightless CGI (almost the first thing that happens in the whole movie is an animated car flipping down a hill like a tin can, and a mere two weeks after the heaving metal of Mad Max: Fury Road, it's even more depressing to watch than it might have been otherwise). It suffers much worse from director Brad Peyton, whose entire list of features preceding this have been worse sequels to bad children's movies (his Journey 2: The Mysterious Island was one of those very same movies where Johnson got to be good and campy and fun), and who comes to this film totally without the skills required to make large-scale destruction looking visually spectacular and exhilarating. There are scattered scenes that work tremendously well: Emma scrambling through a disintegrating skyscraper to jump on Ray's copter in the midst of an explosion of dust could stand with any mid-level tentpole movie in recent memory, and there are some aerial shots that show off the enormity of the destruction with an appropriately epic popcorn movie sensibility. But they are much outweighed by sequences that feel limited in scope and ambition. It's never persuasive that anything bigger than what the heroes can see with their own eyes - nothing here like the last time San Francisco was devastated onscreen in 2014's Godzilla, and the terrible grandeur of the action seemed bigger than human understanding. San Andreas is cramped, without the compensating factor of being more intimate with its characters by virtue of backing away from a broad canvas. It's scared of ambition and too flimsily-written for anything else, and while it's sufficiently noisy and pretty to exist as a big ol' summer picture of no distinction, it's definitely not the kind of thing that anybody will remember a couple of years into the future.

5/10

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SHINING AT THE END OF EVERY DAY

There has been some effort online to stress Damon Lindelof's presence as co-writer of Tomorrowland and thus somehow save the reputation of the film's director and other writer, Brad Bird. Which presumes in the first place that Tomorrowland is bad enough to justify insulating the beloved auteur from it, and I think that's far from an objective truth, even though it's obviously the worst of his five features. But more to the point, there's no separating Bird from Tomorrowland: it might share the name with a large segment of the Disneyland and Magic Kingdom theme parks and thus be part of the Disney corporation's endless game of "brand extension", and it might be a phenomenally overpriced summer tentpole, but this is no director-for-hire job; this is absolutely a movie made by the director of The Iron Giant, and much of what some people find annoying about it thematically derives directly from that fact. What people find annoying about the story structure is vintage Lindelof. I'll spot that part of it, not least because I absolutely agree with it.

That structure gets off to an inordinately rocky start, with one of the most damaging and irritating framework narratives I've seen in a long time. Damaging, because when it returns at the end of the movie, it sets up an implied relationship to those of us in the audience that Bird and Lindelof couldn't possibly have actually intended. Irritating, because it feels like a filmed improv exercise circling around the drain for endless agonising minutes, as two characters we'll eventually learn to be Frank Walker (George Clooney) and Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) bicker mindlessly about the right way to tell the story and the right place to start (and, incidentally, Frank's attitude in this scene also feels profoundly miscalculated given where it ends up arriving in the film's overall chronology). Eventually, they get out of this rut to open on the story of young Frank's (Thomas Robinson) experiences at the 1964 World's Fair in New York, where he introduced a semi-working jetpack to a glum fellow we'll later know as Nix (Hugh Laurie), and is invited by Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a girl about Frank's age, and despite her youth apparently an adviser to Nix. She's the one who gives Frank a pin that allows him access to a teleporter that takes him to a fantastical world of high technology, and then we trot ahead to 2015, our appetites having been presumably whetted.

Whetted, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and Tomorrowland makes the strategically baffling decision to simultaneously align itself at an audience of children and their families, while also basing virtually all of its appeal on nostalgia for the Space Age - something that not merely the children, but even their parents are largely too young to possesses, except secondhand. And this is the element of the film that directly recalls The Iron Giant: the wholehearted belief that things were better when there was more optimism about the future and less terror, and the promise of space exploration made everything seem bright, shiny, and futuristic. This sits comfortably right next to the film's thesis that the biggest problem with contemporary life is that we've gotten tremendously good at identifying everything rotten, and then putting exactly no effort into fixing it. Which I think is entirely true, though the movie's somewhat pie-eyed idea for solving this human shortcoming largely through the power of wishing and reminding everybody how much we all used to want jet-packs is not entirely true. Maybe not even mostly true.

So the movie is in 2015, where we find Casey, a high schooler who has been instilled with the very same belief in choosing optimism over fatalism by her dad (Tim McGraw), a NASA engineer. Casey's gung-ho attitude is so pronounced, it brings her to the attention of Athena, who hasn't aged an hour since 1964, and who gives the older? younger? girl a pin that, when touched, transports her into a strange high-tech world full of, wouldn't you know, jet-packs and such other chrome-coated signs of mid-century futurism. And her tour of this world, once she figures out how to use the pin safely (when in Tomorrowland, for that is this place, she still interacts physically with the real world), is the film's outright highlight, a synthetic long take that moves through one of the most impressive CGI landscapes ever put into a movie, craning around to catch every last detail. It is the perfect cinematic mechanism to put us in the exact same place of dumbfounded awe and childlike excitement that Casey feels, and if that was the solitary triumph of Bird and cinematographer Claudio Miranda's work on this project, I wouldn't be able to reject the film outright.

It triggers a quest, and that's exactly where Tomorrowland collapses. It's not worth going into all of the movie's odds and ends as Casey and Athena hunt down angry grown-up Frank, and Casey learns the secret of Tomorrowland, a place where all of the most gifted geniuses of the 20th Century gathered to make the world a better, kinder place, until cynicism and hopelessness caused them to lock it away and watch it decay into a husk of its former self (it's an unambiguous though maybe unintentional parody and subversion of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - the best and brightest hiding in a gulch, only here the geniuses are presented as moral failures because they refuse to freely share their knowledge and achievements with all of humanity. This has not prevented the film from being used as further evidence of Bird's crypto-Randianism by people with nothing more interesting to do with their lives than willfully misunderstand movies). The biggest flaw of the movie, in fact, is the fascination it has with those odds and ends, and the greedy way it dolls them out, piecemeal. It's the whole "mystery box" shtick that was pioneered by J.J. Abrams, mentor in different ways to both Lindelof and Bird, and it doesn't work in Tomorrowland at all.

The film is a punishing 130 minutes, and most of that is taken up with the endless second act, in which Casey drives from Florida to Texas to New York all while failing to learn things that could speed the film up considerably. That's not fair, actually. I mean, it absolutely is fair - the movie would be cleaner, faster, and more engaging if Athena and Frank would just fucking tell Casey what she eventually finds out. And we'd have a sense of the conflict sooner than 90 minutes into the movie, which would be nice, in this children's film from Disney. But it's not fair because the film also suffers from unneeded bloat: there's a trip to Paris that could be written out of the script with the barest amount of work, and several other moments that could be snugged up and shortened. The film could fly and get to the collapsing Tomorrowland well before the one-hour mark; instead it creeps and drags, with the heftiness of an epic but the simplicity of message movie for kids and parents to share. It's a terrible combination of flavors, and it makes a solid 40 minutes of the film seem to exist for no reason other than to keep the good parts as far separate as the filmmakers dared.

It's a pity that the script is so puffy, because a lot of Tomorrowland is really quite lovely: the design is terrific, Bird's adoration of mid-century science fiction is so palpable that it almost veers into self-parody (at one point, it does just that: there's a trip to a curiosity shop selling geek-friendly trinkets that's very little more than a delivery system for in-jokes), and the ingenuity of some of the setpieces both at the level of conception and visual execution is fun and playful. Clooney plays a snappish old man well enough, and Robertson and Cassidy are two absolutely indispensable discoveries - neither of them a "discovery" per se (it's not even Robertson's first leading role - she was in the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Longest Ride earlier in 2015. Though I imagine that Tomorrowland probably shot first), but given exemplary showcase roles her that make a strong argument for how much we should all want to follow both actors in the future.

All of the ingredients of the film are there, and many parts of it are beguiling summer movie candy; it's just not a great story. The beginning I liked, even for all its saccharine sentiment; the end I liked, even for its contrivance and one hellaciously stretched-out death scene. The middle, though, is nothing but an endurance test. I'm not even sure that the middle is what there's the most of it, but God knows it feels that way, and that's exactly the problem.

6/10

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BACK WITH AVENGEANCE

During the press tour for Avengers: Age of Ultron - a press tour marked by an uncommon number of wrong turns by the participants - writer-director Joss Whedon admitted almost in so many words that making the film was exhausting and no fun and he wasn't happy with the final product. It helps to know that, but it's easy to guess something like that was the case: more than any other film yet made in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, an eleven-film franchise marked above all by the commercial slickness and uniformity of its products, Age of Ultron feels helplessly obligatory and formulaic.

In the three years since The Avengers came out and made utterly silly amounts of money, the studio's "Phase 2" of movies have all tried to push into new territory, even if it's all within the limits of the most obviously corporatised filmmaking in contemporary Hollywood: Iron Man 3 dug down into character details and flashed some acerbic, Shane Black flair, and 2014's one-two punch of Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy saw the franchise at its most seriously consequential and then its most beguilingly sugary and breezy, ending in what could easily be defended as its two most self-contained, satisfying achievements since it kicked off. Even poor Thor: The Dark World tried to expand the scale and grandeur of the series' universe, no matter how badly it fumbled every aspect of carrying out that task. And here's Age of Ultron, and it is the most disappointing thing possible after that run of four movies: it's a straight-up retread, soullessly grinding its way through most of the exact same things that worked before in the hope that they'll work again, only all of the individual elements were more novel and more impressively achieved three years ago. There's too much of Whedon's personality bleeding through, in good ways and bad, to write it off as an impersonal non-effort, but damn, it does manage to feel perfunctory.

The film begins in medias res, which is probably the best thing it ever does; re-introducing the six-hero team of the Avengers by showing them as the exemplars of self-consciously iconic kinetic moviemaking. Honestly, get as far as the end of this sequence, and Age of Ultron seems to be setting itself up to be a much better work of popcorn cinema than the original - while the "Avengers diving across the screen in slow-motion" shot heavily pimped in the trailers isn't a patch on the "360° around the Avengers" shot heavily pimped in the trailers for the original, there's no other respect in which sequence isn't an improvement on all the action in The Avengers: the CG-aided long takes are wonderfully woven through the action and the location, the way that the characters' zingy quips punctuate the action feels perfectly like the way dialogue and violence interact in a comic book, and the characters are each showcased doing something specific and important. I had a better idea of why the archer Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) was even a member of the Avengers within Age of Ultron's first ten minutes than after the whole running time of the last movie.

It's not true that the film never matches this moment again, though this is absolutely the peak as far as action goes. The lack of context for what's going on - and we'll eventually receive an explanation, but not till after it's all over - means that the action really doesn't feel like anything but raw, untethered spectacle, making it hard to care beyond the momentary rush of adrenaline and the sheer pleasure of onscreen momentum. Which, to be sure, I don't regard as a problem. But motivating its action sequences never gets much easier for the film, no matter how much plot it packs them in, and there's nothing to follow that's as impressively mounted or stylistically ambitious (and we're not talking about off-the-charts ambition even in this case). The big sprawling climax, which enormously resembles the big sprawling climax of The Avengers with a paint job on the bad guys and different backgrounds, is clumsily paced and littered with moments for the action to stop to show us the heroes patiently saving civilians - a pointed riposte to the destruction-happy Man of Steel (or at least, the moralistic dialogue that happened around Man of Steel), but one that could be easily handled with about a quarter as many cutaways, which only really serve to inelegantly stomp the film's rhythm to the curb.

But let's back off from the climax. There's a lot of movie to get through before that point, some of it fun, much of it dismayingly samey and forced - Whedon's habitual quips have maybe never, in all of his writing, seem so joylessly fitted into a movie that doesn't quite know what to do with them, and delivered by actors who seem so annoyed at having to speak them (Renner is the only recurring cast member who could even arguably be accused of giving his best performance in his role in this particular entry). The best moments are the quietest, character-driven ones; the ones in which Natasha "Black Widow" Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Bruce "Hulk" Banner (Mark Ruffalo) fence around their mutual attraction (though there's a tone-deaf scene where she discusses her biological past that's an especially weird choice coming from somebody as proud to declare himself a feminist as Whedon), or the film's obvious, maybe even objectively best scene, where the heroes get drunk in Tony "Iron Man" Stark's (Robert Downey, Jr.) high-tech superbuilding, goof around with casual camaraderie, get into the best dick-measuring contest in any recent movie, and make terrible decisions. These parts of the film are marvelous. The parts that aren't are the ones where the actual plot tries to do anything, with Stark making one of those terrible decisions, and creating an unbeatable sentient robot named Ultron (voiced and motion-performed by James Spader), who does what super-intelligent movie robots will do, and decide that to preserve peace and harmony, he must destroy all humans.

Everything to do with that whole deal is just a pointless retread of The Avengers, with Spader's sarcastic, self-aware performance making for a great character - it's the best performance in the film - and yet another in the long line of lousy Marvel movie villains whose plots are too convoluted and huge and generic to take seriously or remember clearly. The film doesn't manage to take advantage of the one strength afforded by the somewhat cumbersome "shared universe" conceit, and draw on our awareness of how the characters have changed and grown in their own movies - Stark, Romanoff, and Steve "Captain America" Rogers (Chris Evans) don't seem nearly as nuanced or complex as they did the last time we saw any of them, and they don't seem particularly interesting purely in reference to this film: Stark gets the first two-thirds of a really deep and dark character arc that the movie pointedly fails to follow through on. The film's new characters, twins Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) are inconsistent and plain, with motivations that vanish three-quarters of the way through the film, and comically awful Eastern European accents preventing either actor from doing much of interest with the roles. The film cares not a whit for psychology, even though it keeps pantomiming as though it does; it mostly wants to fit colorful personalities into situations and fights that have come to feel increasingly routine as we see the same basic plot beats from every other Marvel movie play out (I swear to God: I don't care how bland or ineffective it might be, I want just one of these movies to end with a final setpiece that doesn't take place in the sky).

I have to say one thing in the film's favor, though: it didn't really strike me as overstuffed - at least, it didn't feel like it had the wrong running time. Perhaps the wrong things were pulled out to carve it down, leaving such obviously dangling plot threads as basically everything surround Thor (Chris Hemsworth), easily the character left with the least to do in this film, as he busily disappears for what feels like a whole act to go set up his next film. Due in 2017, because try as one might, it's hard not to have the whole ungainly mess of upcoming Marvel releases lingering on one's brain. For example, the whole time I was watching Age of Ultron, I kept thinking about how much I wished it would just skip ahead to next summer's Captain America: Civil War already, which feels like its going to be consequential and character-driven in all the exact ways that Age of Ultron signally isn't. It's just one more damn world-ending plot foiled by characters doing exactly what we expect them to do in action sequences that are shot, edited, and scored like a whole bunch of other action sequences in the last few years, only with more of a palpable sense of exhaustion. It's a thoroughly competent movie, sure; but its competence is so routine and mechanical as to leave the thing overwhelmingly dull.

6/10

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