Tag: Tom Cruise

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The Mummy

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful place called Hollywood. In that place lived a company called Universal, which made movies. One of those movies was about a vampire named Dracula, and people really, really liked it. So the people of Universal, in their wisdom, said “We should make more movies like that!”

And so they did. They made a movie called Frankenstein, which was liked by even more people. And Universal said, “We should do, like, a lot of these.”

Universal made a movie called The Mummy. It was like Dracula, only with a mummy instead of a vampire. The mummy was played by Boris Karloff, who also played Frankenstein, so for Universal, it was like two movies in one. People really liked The Mummy, even though it wasn’t as good as the other two. In a happy coincidence, Universal made a lot of money.

So Universal said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” They kept making movies about monsters. One of them was about an Invisible Man, who you would think wouldn’t be such a great subject for a visual medium, but he was. Another one was about a good guy named Dr. Jekyll who takes drugs and becomes a bad guy named Mr. Hyde. They made a movie about a man who turns into a wolf when the moon is full. You’d think that would make him happy because wolves are awesome, but it made him sad because he killed and ate people. And on and on it went.

When they ran out of ideas for new movie monsters, they used the old ones again. They made The Mummy again but called it The Mummy’s Hand. Then they made The Mummy’s Tomb, which made sense because tombs are where you find mummies. Then, The Mummy’s Ghost, which didn’t make sense, because mummies are kind of like ghosts already, so that’s like a ghost of a ghost. They got back on track with The Mummy’s Curse, because cursing is definitely something mummies do. Then the writers at Universal said, “Help! We’re out of mummy ideas!” So the Mummy met Abbott and Costello, and it did not go well.

Annabelle Wallis and Tom Cruise fear for their careers in the new Universal reboot of The Mummy.

Universal couldn’t think of anything else to do with the Mummy, so they sold him to a bunch of British people called Hammer, who made a movie called The Mummy. Then they made four more movies until they, too, ran out of mummy-related ideas.

Many years passed, and the rights to the Mummy reverted to Universal. In 1999, they decided to make another movie about a mummy. It was called The Mummy, and it starred a goofy fella named Brendan Fraser, not as the mummy, but as a guy who winked at the audience and said, “Get a load of this mummy, will ya?” This mummy movie was pretty boring, but people liked Fraser, and it had something called “CGI,” so Universal made a lot of money. Again, they said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and made a sequel and a prequel and a prequel to the prequel, which itself had two sequels, and then another sequel, which had nothing to do with the prequels.

Several years passed. Disney started making movies about superheroes from Marvel comic books, all of which happened in the same universe and all of which made money. “Hey, we like money, too!” said Universal. “What if we took all of our movie monsters and put them in the same universe?” And so they made a movie about a vampire called Dracula Untold, and it was awful.

So Universal said, “Everybody forget about Dracula Untold!” and made a movie about a mummy called The Mummy. This time, instead of Boris Karloff, the Mummy would be played by a hot chick named Sofia Boutella, and instead of Brendan Fraser, the guy who says “Get a load of this mummy” was Tom Cruise, Captain of the Douche Canoe. And to help put flesh on the bones of the new universe, which Universal called the Dark Universe, they got Russell Crowe, who used to be a gladiator, to play Dr. Jekyll and also Mr. Hyde.

Then, a writer said “Hey, Universal! We used up all the good mummy ideas in The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, so how about we steal some scenes from An American Werewolf in London?”

And Tom Cruise said, “Steal some scenes from Mission Impossible, too. People like me in those movies.” Then he dove into a swimming pool full of money.

And Universal said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

And that, children, is why the new Mummy movie sucks.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Never Go Back: It Ain’t Really Reacher, but it’s Passable Entertainment

Ignoring the caveat implicit in the title of his second Jack Reacher film, Never Go Back, Tom Cruise is indeed back in a role that still seems unsuited for him, despite some improvements over his first try in 2012, the eponymous Jack Reacher.

Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher

Bear with me: It needs to be understood that author Lee Child is releasing his 21st novel featuring the Jack Reacher character later this fall, and the Reacher of the eminently successful potboiler series has not shrunk. As always, the character is 6’ 5” tall, weighs 240 or so pounds, and is an absolute minimalist about weaponry, clothes, and transportation. Typically, he wears cheap but sturdy shoes, a t-shirt, off-the-rack pants, and a jacket if need be — all acquired at sale price (in thrift stores, if possible). His rudimentary clothing ensemble is intended to be discarded rather than washed and replaced with something similar.

Child’s Reacher is a nomad, a hitchhiker who, quite literally, follows his thumb, no destination known, like a rolling stone. Sometimes he takes a bus. As he avers in several of the novels, he doesn’t like driving, is not much good at it, and will sit behind the wheel of a car only when absolutely forced. As an Army veteran (last rank Major) he knows guns but normally disdains them. Reacher’s minimalism extends to language, as well. He speaks rarely, confining himself to the essential, as if to embody Strunk/White’s Elements of Style, and the single most recurrent phrase in Child’s novels, relevant to almost every situation his character encounters, is “Reacher said nothing.”

Jack Reacher has been the main character for 21 potboilers by Lee Chase.

What the randomly itinerant Reacher does do is find himself, at every turn of the innumerable roads he wanders, up against it with every variety of crook, scammer, bully, murderous megalomaniac, or sinister syndicate his author can devise. Normally Reacher himself is not the target of this evil; Odyssean Good Samaritan that he is, he finds himself in the position, more or less accidentally but over and over, of having to shield or avenge some innocent or group of innocents from villainous ill Intent (frequently stemming from ostensible pillars of society). More often than not, his mode of response is brute force, though some passing good intellection normally precedes his use of it.

And then there is Tom Cruise, 5’ 8’, who can’t possibly weigh more than 160 pounds sopping wet, and despite what has obviously been an enormous amount of pumping iron prior to filming, blowing his welterweight body out to absolute max, incapable of the pure strong-arm stuff the literary Reacher does. So what Cruise/Reacher does to right wrongs and conquer evil is a whole lot of martial-arts stuff, swift-kicking and karate-chopping four or five baddies at a time, simultaneously unloosing wisecracks of the pardon-my-knuckles variety. As in Jack Reacher, Cruise demonstrates a Nascar-style driving moment in an obligatory chase scene and wields assault weapons out the kazoo.

Tom goes bang bang.

In Never Go Back, Cruise’s reductio Reacher is assisted in his prodigies by Cobie Smulders as Captain Susan Turner, a wronged Army Captain whose mastery of Eastern combat arts and guncraft is, if anything, superior to his, and the screenplay — attributed to director Edward Zwick , Marshall Herskovitz , and Richard Wenk — arms her further with an up-to-date feminist pride that won’t play second to Reacher’s banana.

The plot, little more than an extended McGuffin chase, concerns a nefarious scheme by Turner’s superior officers to sell deadly arms to bad-guy insurgents in Afghanistan, and, though it takes most of the film’s 118 minutes running time to overcome, it Is quelled fairly easily. More interesting is a sub-plot involving Danika Yarosh as Samantha Dayton, a 15-year-old waif who may or may not be Reacher’s daughter from a long-ago tryst with a prostitute. Needless to say, Dayton becomes an integral and resourceful partner with Reacher and Turner in resolving the main threat, and her relationship with Reacher is the source of some genuinely affecting moments like those between Alison Lohman and Nicolas Cage as another are-they-or-aren’t-they father-daughter team in Ridley Scott’s 2003 film about con artists, Matchstick Men.

It ain’t really Reacher, since the Cruise character is more Jackie Chan than Paul Bunyan, but the film makes for passable entertainment, especially for those who aren’t purist aficionados of the Lee Child books. Director Zwick, a onetime journalist, developed his chops in tv shows like Thirtysomething and Family and went on to do some impressive hit movies, like Glory and Legends of the Fall. He’s more or less slumming here, but his sense of pacing, at least, can’t be faulted.

Never Go Back: It Ain’t Really Reacher, but it’s Passable Entertainment

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Film Features Film/TV

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

It’s been 19 years since Tom Cruise first portrayed Ethan Hunt in an adaptation of the hit spy show Mission: Impossible. That’s longer than the show had been off the air when the Brian De Palma-helmed reboot hit theaters with the now-iconic image of Cruise hanging over a computer terminal, suspended by impossibly thin wires. Since someone born on the first film’s premiere date would be college-aged by now, it’s likely that there are many people in the audience who don’t know the self-destructing message sending spies off on an elaborate and dangerous mission is a callback to the show’s weekly cold opening. But it’s the formula Desilu Productions developed for TV that has allowed the Mission: Impossible franchise to outlive the Cold War. A highly trained team of agents working for a shadowy, quasi-governmental agency undertaking missions so sensitive and difficult that their government will “disavow” all knowledge of their existence if they fail works just as well in the age of terrorism as it did in the days of KGB vs. CIA spy-jinks.

The latest installment, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, is nothing if not formulaic, but the movie is self-aware enough to preemptively ask if it’s still relevant. We first meet returning player William Brandt (Avengers‘ Jeremy Renner) defending the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) before a congressional committee as CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) successfully argues that they are redundant and dangerously out of control. Hunley puts the IMFers, including computer wizard Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), on desk duty, but their first assignment is tracking Hunt, who has once again gone rogue. Hunt thinks he’s on the trail of yet another shadowy, elite force of spies called the Syndicate, but almost no one else believes they exist. Hunley accuses him of making up threats to justify the IMF’s funding with one of the film’s best lines: “Hunt is both arsonist and fireman.”

But since Tom Cruise is both star and producer, we know that the Syndicate is real, and it includes stock characters like the strangely cold, vaguely European mastermind Soloman Lane (Sean Harris), a Russian sadist named the Bone Doctor (Jens Hultén), and British double (or possibly triple) agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). Hunt gets the old team out from behind their desks — and in the case of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), out of retirement — to stop the Syndicate from — well, doing something that’s probably real bad. Details like the bad guy’s motivations and the exact nature of the MacGuffin (It’s a list of agents! No wait, it’s a list of bank accounts! No wait, we’ve got to rescue Benji!) are not Mission: Impossible‘s strong suit.

What Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie are all about is crafting high-quality action, and judged by that metric, they succeed. The “gain access to an impossibly secure computer system” sequence is set underwater this time, to spectacular results. But the best part of the film is the second-act set piece in a Vienna opera house that references Hitchcock’s climax to The Man Who Knew Too Much.

While the Daniel Craig/Sam Mendes team has taken James Bond into more serious character territory, Cruise and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company have taken the opposite approach. Rogue Nation plays like a fond memory of Roger Moore-era Bond films such as Live and Let Die, only without the misogyny — or sexiness, for that matter. Even though Ferguson, a British actress making her first foray into the action genre, is captivating onscreen, she and Cruise share only a single extended hug.

Like Adam Sandler, Cruise’s wealth and status remove the usual motivations for doing a movie: He doesn’t need the money, so why bother? In Sandler’s case, the leaked Sony Pictures emails allege his films are little more than ways to get his friends and family free vacations. Cruise, on the other hand, appears to be motivated by the desire to perform increasingly over-the-top stunts. Rogue Nation‘s big moment comes right off the bat, when Hunt, trying to recover a biological weapons cache, clings to the side of an Airbus military transport as it takes off and flies away. At least that’s more fun for the viewer than watching Sandler yuk it up on a waterslide.