"Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One"

    ☆☆☆☆½ 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explain the plot of Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, a title as un-punctuatable as the movie is inexplicable. I wasn't 30 minutes into this latest Mission: Impossible movie before I gave up trying to follow along, and I'm not sure my experience was diminished in any way.

I've seen all of the other Mission: Impossible movies, and of them and their globe-hopping, labyrinthine plots, here are the things I remember: Tom Cruise hanging on to a train inside a Chunnel tunnel; Tom Cruise hanging from wires; Tom Cruise hanging from the side of the Burj Khalifa; Tom Cruise in a motorcycle chase through Paris; Tom Cruise hanging from the side of an airplane.

I don't much remember why, and most importantly, I don't really care. The Mission: Impossible films seem to transcend plot, which is not to say they don't have any. Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One (there's got to be some punctuation in there other than that colon?) has a whole lot of plot, and even more characters. In one of the film's pivotal scenes, about six of the characters all meet up and discuss who's going to do what to whom, and when, and although it's all fantastically well acted, you can imagine the performers crying out, "What did I just say?" as soon as the camera shut off.

But it doesn't matter, and whenever the plot seems to overwhelming (which is frequently), there's only one thing to keep in mind: There's something everyone wants. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, naturally) and his tiny team from the Impossible Mission Force are looking for it. So is everyone else. And if the wrong people find it, something really, really bad will happen.

This time around, that something relates to artificial intelligence, and watching the film suddenly made me wonder if all the latest hand-wringing about ChatGPT and other AI systems hasn't all been a very elaborate marketing scheme for this film.

There are so many unanswered questions—none of which I can actually write here for fear of spoilers—and so many characters with murky motivations that you might be excused for thinking I'm putting this one on par with the equally murky and convoluted Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. But I'm not, because Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One has all of the things Indy doesn't:

This movie is impeccably well made, terrifically suspenseful, and moves with unbelievable swiftness: Its running time of 2 hours, 45 minutes may well be bloated, yet there's never any time this movie lets up. On top of that, one of the best car chase scenes in many years, this one involving Rome's Spanish Steps, is also the source of entirely unexpected humor—I laughed a lot at Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, and also gasped and even squirmed in my seat a time or two, and really, what more can you ask from a movie? Well, except a coherent plot.

But the best thing about this movie is that even if you're thoroughly baffled by what's happening on screen, you won't have time or the inclination to notice. 

Oh, but if you are, and you've seen the film, here's a terrific, spoiler-filled exploration of what you might have missed—because, let's be honest, you almost certainly did miss at least some of it. And, let's also be honest, it doesn't much matter. In 20 years, you're going to remember Tom Cruise on that motorcycle, or Tom Cruise on that train, or Tom Cruise in Venice, and that's what you came for, anyway.

Viewed July 22, 2023 — AMC Universal

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"The Blackening"

     ☆☆☆½ 

With Get Out and Us, Jordan Peele managed to be scary and socially trenchant. With Cabin in the Woods, Drew Goddard managed to be scary, funny and meta. But with The Blackening, Tim Story has created a film that's all of those things — while still being an engaging thriller with a mystery whose final revelation is one I never saw coming.

The Blackening begins with a pre-credit sequence that recalls movies like Scream with an unnerving twist as a couple visiting a remote house in the woods (more than a cabin one of the characters points out) to prepare for a 10-year college reunion timed to Juneteenth discovers a mind-numbingly racist board game. They decide to play a round. Bad move.

More of their friends show up, unaware of what has happened. The gang is made up of ridiculous stereotypes, which fuels the concepts of the film, and ensures the scenes in which we learn about their histories seemingly don't require too much in the way of attention — but offer ample opportunity for well-written zingers and one-liners. Then, in grand Agatha Christie style, they find themselves at the center of a sinister, murderous plot.

They're nominally led by Lisa (Antoinette Robertson) and Allison (Grace Byers), though it's truly an ensemble cast. In the midst of laughs and screams—and there are plenty of both, though the film is relatively bloodless for a slasher satire—their personalities come through thanks to a game cast and clever direction.

There's been no dearth of films with a similar approach recently: The Menu, Glass Onion, not to mention yet another Scream sequel, but The Blackening stands apart with its willingness to make cutting social observations and offer up some well-earned discomfort for viewers, while never forgetting its mission as a comedy, above all. At times you'll need to follow along closely, and by the end you may wish you had been listening just a little more closely at the start. The Blackening knows and appreciates that Black audiences will understand more of its references than non-Black audiences—and wears that knowledge proudly. Yet, few will ever really feel left out by its rare and winning combination of fun, games and just a little bit of gore.

Viewed July 4, 2023 — AMC Universal City

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"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"

          ☆☆        

"And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it,

But I probably will."

— Bruce Springsteen, "Glory Days"

When Raiders of the Lost Ark burst on the scene in 1981, it breathed entirely new life into an old, tired movie genre, turning cheesy Saturday-morning serials and slapdash adventure films into something grand and new. Four decades later, we have a new Indiana Jones film, and it's sad to say that it's more like the wheezing contrivances Raiders was sending up, and is nothing grand and new.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny calls to mind The Boss's lyrics of the embarrassing inevitability of looking back instead of moving forward. "Saturday matinées" are history themselves — today's audiences haven't known them and probably weren't born when Raiders of the Lost Ark or its first two sequels were released. Who is this film for? One audience only, that I can tell: Old guys who remember the glory days of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Considered entirely on its own merits, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny fails rather spectacularly. There's no sense of character or setting, no effort to evoke a sense of urgency or consequences, no forward momentum to a story that, for all its kinetic movement, feels oddly inert. The movie is filled with a sense of fan service, of obligation. Instead of an abiding, giddy desire to take us on a new adventure, there's a dutiful and dull responsibility to hit the marks and remember the lines.

Appearances by a couple of characters from previous films feel jammed in to a story that largely borders on incomprehensible. There is a "MacGuffin," as Hitchcock used to call it — a thing that everyone in the story is after — but it's a pretty dim one here: an ancient mechanism that, we are meant to believe, can identify previously unknown "fissures in time" that appear as big reverse funnel clouds in the sky. Since this film takes place in 1969 (it begins not just in 1969, but on the day of the moon landing, no less), you'd imagine that science might have observed these strange phenomena into which entire airplanes can fly, but, nope.

The chief bad guy is a Nazi (yes, again — that's Nazis in 60% of the Indiana Jones films so far) still alive and well in 1969 and working for the U.S. government designing the rockets that take men to the moon. Now, there's an interesting story: Indiana Jones working to expose the bad guy in NASA's ranks. But that's not at all what Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has in mind. The Nazi's motives are sketchy, but even cloudier are the motives and loyalties of Indiana Jones' goddaughter, Helena, who just happens to show up at exactly the right moment to set this convoluted story in motion.

It's impossible to fault Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny for never stopping — it is wall-to-wall action in a way that we like to recall the previous films being, even though they actually weren't. Until the final scene, there's not a moment of reflection or even explanation: when the film needs to explain something (which it frequently does), characters shout at each other while on the run.

Some characters, including one key "sidekick," appear and disappear seemingly at random, while another shows up at the last moment for a scene that tries hard to evoke real emotion, never minding that it undermines the only other moment of humanity in the film. It's false and fabricated, contrived to meet the expectations of fans, which so much of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny seems designed to do.

I've intentionally stayed away from revealing too much of the story for fear of spoiling the film for anyone yet to see it — but also because I'm not sure I understand much of it. Too many characters do and say too many things, to the point that the film seems to wind in on itself, and isn't even sure of its own trajectory. This is one strange, messy film that contains none of the assured storytelling and sharp wit that was the hallmark of the first three movies in the series.

As it nears its climax, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny goes in such a weird direction that I suddenly started thinking of the sharp and funny Bill and Ted movies. These scenes would be embarrassing except that they embrace their craziness so fully — and, oddly, they end up being the only ones in the movie I'm really likely to remember. For one weird, brief moment, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comes fully to life, resulting in a massive choice for Indy to make. But he doesn't make it, and for the umpteenth time in an Indiana Jones movie, our hero is denied the chance to embrace his own story, deflating the film just as it should be reaching its climax.

For the most part, Indiana Jones is a long, lumbering, confusing escape room puzzle. It often seems inspired less by its own predecessors than by The DaVinci Code and National Treasure. That both of those films were, in turn, trying to evoke the spirit of Indiana Jones films seems at once illuminating and awfully depressing.

Indiana Jones has had some glory days. Now, it really is past time for him to hang up that hat for good.

Viewed July 2, 2023 — AMC Topanga 12

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