Movie Reviews
Movie review: “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning' still thrills after slow start – UPI.com
1 of 5 | Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) hangs on in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” in theaters May 23. Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures
LOS ANGELES, May 14 (UPI) — Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, in theaters May 23, delivers on the level of the franchise’s most recent films once it gets going. It does, however, have the slowest start of all eight Mission: Impossible movies.
In 2023’s Dead Reckoning, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) took on the villainous Gabriel (Esai Morales) to retrieve the key that unlocks the source code of the rogue artificial intelligence known as The Entity. Final Reckoning opens two months later, with Ethan unsure what to do with such power.
As The Entity holds hostage all of cyberspace and the world’s electronics, including military weapons, there is a deadline before the AI will control the world. That is, if Ethan doesn’t stop it first.
The plan to destroy The Entity requires Ethan’s teammates, hackers Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Gabriel’s turncoat assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff). The mission is complicated by U.S. President Sloane (Angela Bassett) sending agents to recover The Entity’s controls for U.S. purposes, which Ethan knows will backfire.
The missions live up to the movie’s title by devising ways to keep making the task harder for Ethan. For example, he’s already diving to crushing depths to activate computers in a sunken submarine when the sub rolls towards an abyss.
Not only does this add another ticking clock to his task, but the water level rotates around Ethan and causes missiles to fall and shift, blocking his path and exit route.
The climax, which has already been shared during the film’s publicity, features Ethan hanging from a propeller plane. The scene is more than just a spectacle — writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen craft a sequence that justifies the stunt and continues to build as the pilot attempts many different ways to shake Ethan.
Final Reckoning does play the same trick one too many times, where Ethan’s team goes to meet someone and finds someone else waiting for them. The second and third iterations lack surprise, but the interlopers at least complicate Ethan’s plan, necessitating some fun improvisation.
Leading up to such sequences, this Mission: Impossible unfortunately becomes tedious and repetitive. The problem could easily be solved by cutting 40 minutes out of the film — which would still leave it at over two hours long.
Final Reckoning recapping Dead Reckoning is the least of these worries, as it gets handled before the title sequence, which admittedly comes some 20 minutes in. What does become redundant are long sequences of Ethan walking through a war room looking at models as the DEFCON clock ticks down to The Entity’s takeover.
Ethan explains to Gabriel, then to the President, then to Admiral Neely (Hannah Waddingham), how dangerous The Entity is. There’s buildup and then there’s just wallowing, and this leans towards the latter.
He keeps warning that The Entity expects them to act a certain way and advising they should instead surprise the AI. He says it enough times that the audience has surely caught on, if not The Entity itself.
Furthermore, The Final Reckoning becomes the most convoluted of all the Mission: Impossibles, which is no small feat, by connecting the plot to all seven previous films. It is an odd choice in a series predicated on standalone entries, and a mistake also recently criticized in the James Bond films starring Daniel Craig.
Bringing back some characters from previous entries is fun and gives them satisfying character arcs to imagine in the time between films, while others concoct unimportant connections. Just let some people be new characters.
For example, tying in The Entity with the Rabbit’s Foot from Mission: Impossible III is wholly unnecessary. The Rabbit’s Foot was one of that director J.J. Abrams’ trademark unanswered mysteries, so saying now that it was a component of The Entity adds little to the current film.
The pieces of The Entity could be any Maguffin. Making Ethan feel responsible for it just forces more spurious connections. Ethan was going to stop The Entity anyway, whether he indirectly helped build it or not.
This is not to criticize the scenes explaining the missions, which effectively establish the impossible tasks at hand. Those scenes are not included in the superfluous 40 minutes of exposition.
Potentially interesting threads are also abandoned, such as a doomsday cult that worships The Entity but never becomes a factor in the mission.
When the screen expands to fill the entire IMAX frame, rest assured the show is about to start — and it is worth it. The unfortunate issue is that it happens about 80 minutes into the film, not including a few earlier IMAX shots of The Entity’s core. The submarine is the first proper IMAX action scene.
During the intense scenes, the film has a sense of humor about its own tropes of deadlines and cutting wires. It’s only when it’s taking itself seriously that it drags.
Gabriel becomes more of a mustache twirling, cackling villain in this film. It’s motivated by his loss in Dead Reckoning but still a drastic shift, though the film has a sense of humor about his behavior too.
The second half of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning makes up for earlier mission failures, and this level of craftsmanship is still worth experiencing. Otherwise, the script problems would be unacceptable.
movie review
TOY STORY 5
Running time: 102 minutes. PG (some thematic elements, rude humor). In theaters.
Long before ChatGPT was a household name, Hollywood had been making AI the villain for decades — from HAL 9000 to Skynet to Agent Smith.
Yet the most emotionally involving spin on the terrors of tech in ages arrives not from groundbreaking sci-fi, but the smart, wonderful and tremendously funny fifth “Toy Story” movie.
That’s a surprise, since it’s a film that I really hoped would never happen. After middling “4,” which was a giant step down from the heartbreaking third, the world was more than ready for Woody and Buzz to ride off into the sunset. Woody actually did.
Well, it’s good that Tom Hanks and Tim Allen got back behind the mike, because the digital age gives Pixar’s playthings a renewed sense of purpose and atypically high stakes. Usually the gang helps a young person stay in touch with their childhood. This time, they save one in progress.
That’s the formative years of little Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), the girl who inherited the dolls from Andy (who’s now, like, 40) in the last movie. She’s 8 years old, paralyzed by shyness and totally friendless. Desperate, Bonnie begs her parents to buy her a Lilypad, an interactive touchscreen that’s all the rage at school.
Yes, the baddie that Woody (Hanks), Buzz (Allen) and Jessie (Joan Cusack) must face this time is an alarmingly cute tablet, voiced by Greta Lee.
So, rather than humanity’s fears of artificial intelligence taking control of the nuclear arsenal or replacing us with cyborgs, director Andrew Stanton’s “5” taps into a much more immediate concern: screens rewiring kids’ minds.
Much like when action figure Buzz arrived, sigh, 31 years ago, the toys are mortified by the mysterious intruder and her luminescent ilk. As they look across their neighborhood, all they can see for blocks are glowing blue windows with zombie youths staring into the 10×10 void.
The end is nigh, they think. How can a cowboy, cowgirl and a space cadet compete against a reactive mini-computer that connects a lonely child to the entire planet?
But these toys aren’t ready for the dark recesses of eBay just yet. They go head to head — or plastic to plastic — with Lilypad, whom Lee gives a voice that’s both bestie and “Mean Girls.”
You may recall lovebirds Woody and Bo Peep went off on their own at the end of the last chapter. Of course, they find their way back, but Jessie is running things now. That’s a refreshing and appropriate switch-up. Cusack’s maternal performance is better suited to this particular adventure than Hanks’ “old buddy, old pal” delivery.
After a sleepover mishap, Jessie winds up lost at another house — her first one, it turns out — where a girl named Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris) lives. And it’s there we meet perhaps the best new character in this franchise since 1995: Smarty Pants.
The real misfit toys aren’t the OG crew, we learn, but obsolete computer devices from the aughts. One is Conan O’Brien’s Smarty Pants, a hysterical, hyperactive box that teaches tykes how to use the toilet. He’s been powered down for years and therefore goes berserk when juiced up.
O’Brien is — and I’m sure he’d agree — a toy trapped in a man’s body. He’s practically typecasting. And his demented acting is so energetic and untethered, you can picture Disney security guards hauling him out of the recording studio. I mean that in a good way.
There’s also a lot of fun mined from a shipment of misplaced Buzzes. We check in on the look-alikes occasionally as they morph into a phalanx of determined Navy SEALs to eventually join Jessie and Co.
“Five” is arguably the first new “Toy Story” film to be both watched and understood by the kids of the 1995 original’s millennial audience. That shared experience is very moving all by itself.
But, even more poignantly, who can teach these young parents this vital lesson in 21st-century child-rearing better than their own toys?
3.5/5 stars
The notoriously treacherous hurdles that Hong Kong telecommunications company i-Cable used to put in front of customers looking to unsubscribe from its internet and pay-TV services throughout the 2000s and early 2010s provide the premise of this Kafkaesque comedy-drama – an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking case of raging against the system.
By Susan Granger
With the release of his 35th movie, it’s obvious that Steven Spielberg is not just a good story-teller, he’s a GREAT story-teller.
The suspenseful tale he spins this time is “Disclosure Day” about the U.S. government’s attempt to keep the truth about UFOs secret.
Sinister Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) heads WARDEX (Waived Reporting, Development and Extraction), a quasi-Defense Department agency from which cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) has stolen a powerful device of alien origin along with extensive classified information and video files.
Although his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) is held hostage by Scanlon’s underlings, Daniel manages to free her and get away, igniting a manhunt.
Supported by WARDEX’s Director of Biological Assets, paternal Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), whistleblower Daniel believes people have a right to know about the coverup, dating back to the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, paranoia and the Nixon Administration.
Meanwhile in the middle of a TV broadcast, Kansas City, Missouri, meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) suddenly begins making bizarre, guttural clicking sounds which make no sense – except to Daniel, who recognizes the alien code.
To the bewilderment of her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell’s son), Margaret can suddenly speak foreign languages – like Korean and Russian – and manipulate the minds of everyone she encounters.
What Daniel and Margaret have in common is a terrifying childhood trauma that neither wants to remember. To tell you more would ruin the film’s many white-knuckle surprises and insights about faith in a supreme deity and the philosophical essence of humanity.
Scripted by David Koepp from Steven Spielberg’s story, it revolves around a nefarious conspiracy, cloaked in sci-fi mystery, tracing back to “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of a Third Kind.” And it’s a timely topic since former President Obama said he believes aliens are real, prompting President Trump to accuse him of revealing “classified information.”
Sure – there are some gaping plot loopholes – but cinematographer Janusz Kaminski dazzles with a high-speed train chase. Buoyed by John Williams’ throwback score – on the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Disclosure Day” is an exciting 9, playing in theaters now.
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Susan Granger
Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in Journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has appeared on radio and television as an anchorwoman and movie critic for many years. Read all her reviews at susangranger.com.
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