For the week of December 3rd, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing the hit actioner Mission: Impossible - Fallout to Blu-ray. Other than Brian De Palma's virtuoso series opener and John Woo's terrible second entry, the M:I franchise is as consistent as these kinds of movies get. You know you're getting a psychotically committed Tom Cruise performance (and Lord, he does not disappoint in Fallout), a host of crackerjack suspense sequences, and more ludicrous exposition dumps than there are hours in the day. Take the plotting, for instance. In Fallout, Ethan Hunt (The Cruisemeister) and his team (series returners Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson, and Alec Baldwin) join forces with a CIA assassin (Henry Cavill, who I'm still not convinced is an action star. Cool mustache, though) to retrieve some missing plutonium, except a series of unfortunate incidents lead Hunt to free arch-nemesis Solomon Lane (Sean Harris, doing his menacing whisper, and quite well, for a second go-round) and become the unwilling patsy in a terrorist conspiracy. That all plays like, oh yeah, every M:I ever made. In particular, the Lane stuff reminds me a lot of Mission: Impossible III, except M:I 3 had a better villain and a director who used close-ups as a security blanket. Still, while I've accepted that each successive M:I is just a bigger-budgeted remake of what's preceded it, I do sometimes yearn for something more narratively surprising than Fallout. I rather liked what writer/director Chris McQuarrie brought to Rogue Nation, so I was disappointed that Fallout's only real twist, if you can even call it that, is something we first encountered with Henry Czerny in the first Mission: Impossible: whether or not Cavill is playing Dudley Smith from L.A. Confidential or Sam Gerard from The Fugitive. Why, then, do I wholeheartedly recommend seeing Fallout on the biggest screen possible? Because Tom Cruise is never more appealing than when he's desperate and flailing, and he's desperate and flailing a lot in the this. Because the action sequences are astounding. The big bathroom brawl physically hurts to watch, and we get two chases that are next-level propulsive: a foot-chase across the rooftops of London and a truck-to-motorcycle-to-foot-to-car chase through Paris that might be one of the two or three greatest chase scenes I've ever seen. And because the third act might be the franchise's highpoint. You got Cruise literally risking his life (first doing jungle-gym on a flying helicopter and then commandeering and flying the vehicle for real) as he pursues [REDACTED] in a separate copter, with editor Eddie Hamilton masterfully crosscutting between that and the IMF ground staff's desperate attempt to find and disarm two nuclear bombs, and Cruise even rock-climbs, to boot. So yes, I'd like more originality and yes, the whole "rogue agent" plot needs to go in the Disney Vaults for ten years, but when consistent is as entertaining as this? I'm happy.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "film doesn't reinvent the proverbial wheel in terms of dramatic content and core action elements but there seems to be no limit on Cruise's desire to push the physical envelope, inserting himself into countlessly and increasingly turbulent (literally!) and tricky situations for the betterment of the movie and for his audience's entertainment. His dedication to the craft, willingness to put himself on the line, and his natural talent and charisma drive the movie from the lead position; this, nor any of the other M:I films, would not be the same film without Cruise playing Ethan Hunt. Without giving away the film's four of five large-scale action pieces, suffice it to say that Cruise places himself in harm's way at several points, obviously with plenty of money and time spent on safety measures, but the film is much better for keeping the camera squarely on him - particularly in the IMAX scenes - which adds a level of realism and immersion for the audience. The movie does not shy away from scale or intimacy, depth and breadth of action; every scene is extraordinary, and the balance between big action set pieces, intimate drama, and narrative twists and turns keeps the film moving at a brisk pace that makes almost 150 minutes of cinematic greatness feel half that."
What happened with HBO's Westworld? I'll allow that Season One wasn't perfect - it isn't a third as clever as it thinks it is, and although showrunners Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy used its year-plus production hiatus to devise a compelling ending, the two did so at the expense of a half-dozen dangling plot threads that they never fully resolved - but the show offered a science-fiction landscape (a Western-themed amusement park where guests could do anything to the vast compendium of artificial lifeforms) so rich that it alone often compensated for the wonky plotting and inconsistent character work. Essentially, it's the kind of show with lots of room for improvement...which makes it all the more heartbreaking that Nolan and Joy doubled-down on the least effective elements of the first season. Season Two begins at the start of the A.I. rebellion against the human population, but you should not expect anything resembling a propulsive narrative. If Season One split the plot into two major timelines, I count at least three or four here, and that's not even including the various flashbacks and flashforwards that happen within the central narrative threads. The decision stalls the forward momentum. We might spend an episode with Evan Rachel Wood's Dolores and her violent march across the park, only to abandon that path for a full hour-plus episode centering on Tessa Thompson pre-revolt. Or the show will split the difference and follow Jeffrey Wright's Bernard, who's scrambled his own memory banks to hide an underwhelming something, and whenever this happens, Westworld makes like Slaughterhouse Five and starts skipping incoherently across multiple past, present, and future timelines. After a while, it's hard to figure out what's happening, and harder still to care. If anything, I just started feeling bad for the actors. Wright's character journey is so incomprehensible that he struggles to give Bernard anything resembling an emotional arc, and both Wood and James Marsden (who was so good in Season One as the sweet, deluded cowboy Teddy) only have about one note a piece to play. I guess that's still more than Ed Harris' boringly sadistic Man in Black, who might be the most irrelevant component of Season Two. It's isn't all so dire. Thandie Newton was Season One's MVP, and she's even better here - her episodes offer the only real fun to be had in Season Two, particularly when she's verbally sparring with Simon Quarterman's terrified park screenwriter. And occasionally, the show will offer a standalone episode reminiscent of the best moral/temporal quagmires on Lost. I loved the episode centering on Jim Delos (Peter Mullen), or the breathtaking character work afforded to Zahn McClarnon in the season's high-water mark, "Kiksuya." But then you get to the bloated, underwhelming finale, and you realize that all of this existential sound and fury is in service of something that Ex Machina pulled off better, and before, and with far more economy. I know HBO is desperate for a new Game of Thrones, but right now, Westworld isn't worth the trouble.
Finally, New Line and Warner Home Entertainment are offering the horror hit The Nun. It's very easy to respect what The Nun represents without liking it very much. In this post-Marvel world, so many studios have tried - and failed - to get their own cinematic universes going, and props to Warner and New Line for doing just that out of their most unlikely property: James Wan's 2013 The Conjuring is exquisitely made and consistently scary, but it doesn't seem to lend itself to serialized storytelling (too dark, too R-rated, too supernatural). Five years later (and more than a billion dollars grossed worldwide), we've got another Conjuring, two Annabelle thrillers, and now The Nun. You'd have to go back to the halcyon days of Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street for the last time a horror-themed franchise so captured the public's imagination. As a horror buff, I couldn't be happier, and I love how these features are able to turn such massive financial success off modest budgets (The Conjuring 2 is the most expensive, with its $40-million production budget). It's a shame, though, that other than the two Conjurings, none of these pictures are terribly inspired. The Nun falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Compared to the first Annabelle, it looks like The Thing, but it doesn't come close to approaching the populist thrills of The Conjuring, and I'd even rank it just below the surprisingly better-than-average Annabelle: Creation. What The Nun lives and dies off of is the title character. Valek was terrifying when Wan introduced her in The Conjuring 2, and she's still scary here, even if she's a variation on the bug-eyed specters Wan has used in both his Insidious features and the almost-underrated Dead Silence. But the design works - it's enough that you're only dimly aware Nun director Corin Hardy relies way too much on jump scares and variations on that old Internet trick that makes you stare at an image for ages before some shrieking digital monster materializes out of nowhere. Nothing I can say will take the bloom off of the Conjuring Universe's success. The Nun did well, and so will the upcoming Curse of La Llorona, Conjuring 3, The Crooked Man, and Annabelle 3, no doubt. But I do hope these films practice a little more in the way of reinvention. There are moments when you can tell everyone associated with The Nun thinks the shtick is running thin. How else to explain the more overt connections to the straight Conjuring movies, right down to casting Vera Farmiga's sister Taissa as The Nun's protagonist? If we're comparing these movies to the MCU, then we're at that inflection point where we're getting too much Tony Stark, so to speak. Bring on The Conjuring's Guardians of the Galaxy, whatever that may be.