Action

Mission: Impossible—Fallout: Run! Jump! Amaze! Defy Death and Sense!

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Cruise returns in "Mission: Impossible—Fallout"

In a movie as relentlessly loud as Mission: Impossible—Fallout—a boisterous extravaganza full of screeching tires, whirring rotors, and crackling gunfire—one of the most gripping scenes takes place in virtual silence; the only sound is supplied by Lorne Balfe’s score, which suddenly drops its pounding percussion in favor of weeping strings. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, duh), eternal superagent and mayhem magnet, is spearheading a raid to extract a prisoner from an armored police convoy. It’s a brisk and bloody sequence, full of bullets whizzing through the air and bodies crashing to the ground.

It’s also a feint; turns out, Ethan was just listening to someone else’s plans for the raid and envisioning it in his mind. But he conceives of a smarter and less lethal way of executing the snatch-and-grab, at which point the film rolls the sequence again, resulting in yet another bravura set piece that begins as a similarly efficient incursion but then transforms into a sprawling vehicular chase. You may think of the initial fakeout as a cheat, but I prefer to view it as a distillation of this glorious franchise’s maximalist ethos. The raison d’être of the Mission: Impossible movies is a bit like the first rule of government spending: Why make one amazing action sequence when you can make two for twice the price? Read More

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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: Terrible Lizards for Hire? Dino-Mite!

Jeremy BeckReviews
A T-Rex roars in "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom"

The only thing harder than cloning intelligent life, it appears, is cloning intelligent movies. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is the latest failed attempt to replicate the wonder and the horror of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, that quarter-century-old landmark that brilliantly married new-age special effects with old-school filmmaking craft. Fallen Kingdom, with its toothy lizards and toothless people, takes place in the present day, but it feels like it’s an entire geological era removed from the original film; in fact, it expends little effort trying to even resemble a good movie. Instead it recognizes its role in the contemporary blockbuster landscape: to supply a steady stream of loud, reasonably coherent set pieces in which fearsome dinosaurs do battle with one another and occasionally pause to munch on the hubristic humans who are either too foolish or too unlucky to get in their way.

As with many forgettable and unpretentious movies, Fallen Kingdom aspires to be labeled “dumb fun”. It’s dumber than most. Where its predecessor, the uneven but not unentertaining Jurassic World, envisioned Michael Crichton’s theoretical theme park as finally becoming a commercial reality—a tourist mecca that attracted throngs of imbeciles who thought peeking at prehistoric man-killing monsters from behind six inches of glass qualified as a vacation hot spot—Fallen Kingdom considers the aftermath of its collapse. A volcano is now set to erupt on Isla Nublar, the fictional island that hosts the now-ruined park, thereby imperiling the many dinosaurs who still thrive there ever since humanity fled in a mass panic. This pending natural disaster engenders a spirited political debate, the kind with Senate hearings and grim newscasts. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum, returning for just a few pointless scenes) deems the volcano a critical evolutionary corrective, and he urges the American government to live and let die. (You might call his approach, “Death finds a way.”) But Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), who has apparently changed careers from middle manager to conservationist, pleads with reclusive billionaire Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) to transport the not-so-terrible lizards to a safe haven, where they can roam and roar in peace. Read More

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Solo: A Star Wars Story: Getting Cocky, Even as a Pup

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alden Ehrenreich is a young hero in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"

There’s a quick shot in Solo: A Star Wars Story of someone in a spacecraft sliding into the copilot’s seat, ready to help guide the ship out of danger. Taken in a vacuum, it’s an unremarkable image, just a basic establishing shot of the type we’ve seen in countless sci-fi films. But while this fun and frisky movie may take place in outer space, it most certainly does not take place in a vacuum. Instead, it is set within the Star Wars mythos, which means that the pilot is a cocksure grifter named Han Solo, the copilot is a gigantic walking carpet called Chewbacca, and the spaceship is none other than the Millennium Motherfucking Falcon. And for viewers of a certain generation, the image of Han and Chewie sitting side by side in the cockpit of one of the fastest ships in the galaxy carries with it a frisson of elation, because we are witnessing not just the usual collaboration of roguish outlaws, but the birth of a partnership that served as a cultural touchstone of our youth.

This is almost unfair. By telling a story about characters I grew up with, Solo is capable of hard-wiring into my lizard brain, remapping my neural pathways and convincing me that it’s a good and meaningful movie simply by reason of its existence. So perhaps the happiest surprise about Solo is that it does not coast along entirely on nostalgia. There is some of that, sure—hey, do those dice look familiar? What’s that adage about Wookiees pulling people’s arms out of their sockets?—but there is also a breezy sense of adventure, along with a winning atmosphere of wonder and discovery. By and large, the film gets by on its own merits; there’s no mystical energy field that controls its destiny. Read More

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Ready Player One: For These Teens, It’s Game On or Game Over

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke in Steven Spielberg's "Ready Player One"

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: An intrepid young man, living in a dystopian future, must use his pluck and ingenuity to defeat a powerful villain whose mercenary greed threatens our hero’s livelihood, along with the rest of the planet’s. In so doing, he will assemble a ragtag team of similarly disenfranchised youths, one of whom will catch his eye as a potential love interest, another of whom will support him with weapons and wisecracks. Foes will be vanquished, bonds will be forged, and while setbacks will surely be suffered (tertiary characters may even be killed), in the end, the world will almost certainly be saved.

Ready Player One, the robust and flawed film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s immensely popular book, doesn’t so much follow this familiar script as live inside it. It envisions a universe where the very act of engaging with popular art—mostly playing videogames, but also watching movies and spotting references—becomes the fulcrum of its story. It’s a recursive premise that’s less interesting than it sounds, primarily serving as the excuse for a non-stop parade of pop-culture allusions and winking asides. And perhaps in an alternate dimension—maybe one reached by traveling through some sort of vaguely defined wormhole whose laws are breathlessly explained to us in a bout of foggy exposition—Ready Player One would have been a piece of hackwork that turned out to be a tedious, imitative slog. But in our reality, it’s better than that, because in our reality, it’s been directed by Steven Spielberg. Read More

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi: As a New Hope Emerges, an Old Fight Rages On

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daisy Ridley and Mark Hamill in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"

For all its deafening noise and frantic activity, Star Wars: The Force Awakens concluded with a quiet and surprisingly stirring image: the aspiring Jedi named Rey (Daisy Ridley) tentatively approaching the long-vanished Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, as if you didn’t already know), reaching out to offer him his cherished lightsaber. It was a tantalizing ending, one that sent Star Wars fans—a sect that, according to the box-office receipts, appears to constitute most of the known world—into a state of delirious anticipation that has persisted for two full years. So it is difficult to exaggerate the audacity with which The Last Jedi, the eighth episode in the Star Wars saga (excluding the standalone Rogue One), chooses to resume this fateful encounter set on the verdant island planet of Ahch-To. Rather than expressing gratitude or even curiosity toward Rey’s arrival, Luke simply accepts the weapon, grimaces, and promptly flings it over a cliff.

This is a hilarious scene, a swift and brutal undercutting of fans’ long-gestating expectations. Yet it also symbolizes the refreshing streak of independence that Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi’s fearless writer and director, has brought to cinema’s most gargantuan franchise. The Force Awakens was a fun and spirited adventure, but it also felt somewhat safe, J.J. Abrams carefully returning the enterprise to the tracks that George Lucas’ (unfairly) maligned prequels so gleefully leapt off. The Last Jedi, by contrast, is a more interesting and exciting movie, flawed in its own ways but charged with genuine unpredictability and risk. In taking the reins from Abrams, Johnson pledges fealty to no one—not even Star Wars fans. Read More

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