At one point, midway through the big, noisy Mission Impossible -- the Fall Out (2018), one of the characters gives the game away: "Why do you have to make things so fucking complicated?" a triple-agent assassin angrily exclaims. This line is a glimpse through the fourth wall and, obviously, a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the film's baroque plot-line. And it's accurate. The film is irritatingly complicated to the point that I defy anyone to explain what is happening after the first half-hour. Normally, I might argue that this is a serious defect in the film -- but principles of rational narrative don't apply to a big blockbuster actions films of this sort: a movie like this is more akin to an amusement park thrill-ride than to a novel or, even, a film that aspires to tell a story about characters with whom the audience might have some faint empathy. Mission Impossible (Fall Out) is just a series of well-staged and convincingly orchestrated action sequences -- the story is so secondary that during the screening that I attended, audience members loudly discussed current events and gossip during the interludes during which characters harangued one another about plans for future mayhem. In fact, when the film reached the end of its last action sequence with poor Tom Cruise lying battered and bloody atop a 2000 foot granite cliff, most of the audience simply got up and walked out of the movie, perfectly satisfied that film's violence had earned their eight dollars, and completely uninterested in the picture's final five minutes of tedious denouement. (This coda to the film's endlessly protracted action sequences contains the only real acting in the show with the wounded Tom Cruise whispering apologies to his former wife, his big eyes welling with tears and his pretty cupid's bow mouth with lips slightly apart trembling in a most fetching manner. But at the show I attended, all the kids left as soon as the last punch had been thrown and the last murder accomplished.) In fact, there's no real performances in the film and no direction -- a thing like this is "produced", not directed, constructed like a big deal in real estate or the acquisition of a large corporation. There's nothing like art in a film like this, merely production values. And by the criteria of production values, much of the film is fairly effective so long as you don't mind having not one scintilla of empathy or interest in any of the characters.
MI (Fall Out) is about a clandestine group of spies who operate outside ordinary parameters of espionage -- famously, the "Secretary will disavow" knowledge of their exploits if these operatives are killed or captured in the course of their exploits. (This premise is the faint connection the blockbuster MI films share with the old Sunday night TV show -- a program that also featured ludicrously complicated schemes to either capture bad guys or extract good guys from imprisonment or, generally mind-fuck the opposition, usually sinister and dim-witted Eastern Europeans if I recall accurately.) The story involves three or four groups of highly trained and deadly assassins all competing for two softball-sized globes of plutonium that have been fashioned into nuclear weapons. At intervals of 12 to 15 minutes, three or four characters will convene to discuss developments in the plot that are beyond comprehension and, then, set up the next action sequence. These dialogue interludes are about 3 to five minutes long and, generally, ignored by the audience. The action sequences are all stuff that you've seen before many times -- a lethal and bloody karate fight in a men's restroom, a chase on motorcycle through wrong-way traffic, an excursion through a sewer, some people dropping perilously out of the sky in a paratrooper sequence, the obligatory helicopter chase through a narrow fissure in a mountain, the duel on the glacier and, then, the duel on the face of a sheer cliff. These action sequences are clearly staged and edited for lucidity and so you can generally tell what is happening -- why it is happening is another thing. The first half-hour is very good and the film shows some genuine ingenuity in setting up the complicated chase (through about a half-dozen countries) involving the plutonium. In fact, a sequence in which the MI crew fools a bad guy into thinking that the apocalypse that he has plotted has already happened has real pizzazz and is as clever as some of the sequences in the old TV show -- this part of the movie features CNN's Wolf Blitzer in an amusing cameo. The first big fight in the men's toilet in Paris is explosive and exciting -- Tom Cruise gets kicked around pretty badly and, for a moment, the audience is permitted to hope that the diminutive leading man will be maimed or, at least, seriously injured and, so, have to sit out the rest of the film -- alas! no such luck. But there are already bad signs that the film isn't going to make much sense. The scene preceding the big rest-room brawl involves sky-diving and, although what we see on screen is pretty thrilling, in retrospect I can't even remotely reconstruct what happened or why -- something goes wrong, possibly because one or the other of the characters betrays the other, but it's not at all clear why there's a problem or, even, what the problem is. This is pretty much par for the course. The rest of the movie involves Tom Cruise running at top speed -- very impressive for a man his age, but a little exhausting to watch. Sometimes, Cruise jumps out of buildings or hurtle himself from rooftop to rooftop -- but I can't recall now who he was chasing or why: I think it was one of the triple or quadruple agents who all look like larger, younger versions of the hero. The ending of the movie is utterly baffling -- throughout the picture, we have been tutored to regard the steely Angela Basset as a brutal, iron-lady CIA spy-master, the source of most of the evil in the film. But after the bad guys have been thwarted and the nukes de-nuked who appears to bask in the MI triumph but Angela Basset who seems to have been the spy who created all of the problems in the first place. I have no idea if she is supposed to be rehabilitated or was just pretending to be evil or if she has switched sides or if the whole ending (this is unlikely) is some kind of ironic and bitter joke. Probably, I missed some crucial snippet of dialogue somewhere that would explain her appearance on the side of the angels after she, in fact, dispatched the assassin who has been vigorously trying to kill Tom Cruise on the 2000 foot cliff and tasked him with tormenting our hero when she first appeared in the movie two hours earlier -- but like the rest of the audience, I guess I wasn't playing any attention when this plot point was made. The film is maximalist in the extreme. A third of the way through the film a bad guy is spirited from a heliport down a steel stairway made from metal gratings. The scene requires only a short shot of the bad guy in his black hood being hustled down the steps. But the film uses three shots, including one pointlessly showy image taken from beneath the steps so we see the characters' shoes and lower legs as they scoot down the stairway. In another sequence near the end, a character is using a Geiger counter to search for the nukes -- he gets a positive "hit" and rips open a box only to discover that it's an x-ray machine. One shot is required to show that the content of the box, labeled "X-Ray", isn't the bomb the character is seeking. But, for some reason, the film uses two shots in a kind of mini-montage to establish that the box contains an x-ray machine and not a nuke. It's annoying because two shots, taken from slightly different angles aren't required and just confuse the issue. Similarly, the film has not one but three leading ladies, all of whom seem to have some kind of backstory with Tom Cruise's character -- the women each about thirty years younger than our hero, all look alike, play similar roles, and are inscrutably impossible to distinguish from one another. This sort of maximalist film-making is tediously and redundantly obvious at the climax -- the secondary characters are trying to defuse the two nukes; at the same time, Tom Cruise is flying a helicopter and, then, engaging in bloody fisticuffs with the villain (who used to be a good guy) to get the bomb's detonator. For some obscure reason, you have to shut off the nukes at both their detonator and then clip wires at the devices themselves (and there are two bombs) as well -- this is exceedingly labor intensive. (Maximalism: not one nuke but two.) Somehow or another, the villain gets his face sprayed with scalding helicopter fluid (What is this? Who knows and the film makers at least don't care.) So the bad guy has to fight Tom Cruise on the edge of the abyss with half his face melted off. Its pointlessly gruesome and pointlessly brutal and the bad guy's hideous disfigurement adds nothing to the movie -- of course, Tom Cruise is going to kill him in the end mutilated or not. That's a fait accompli and, so, of course, there is precious little suspense in the climactic sequence or, indeed, in any part of the film.
No comments:
Post a Comment