Opened 25 Years Ago: STRANGE DAYS (10/13/1995)

 

STRANGE DAYS
(US - 1995)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

STRANGE DAYS opening in Toledo, OH on 10/13/1995

In Theaters: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT (2018)

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT
(US/China - 2018)

Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Cast: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Alec Baldwin, Michelle Monaghan, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, Wes Bentley, Vanessa Kirby, Frederick Schmidt, Liang Yang, Kristoffer Joner, Caspar Phillipson, Alix Benezech. (PG-13, 147 mins)

Big-budget summer blockbusters don't get much more entertaining than MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT, the sixth film in the durable, 22-year-old franchise. An incredible jolt of adrenaline in cinematic form, FALLOUT is easily the best in the M:I series so far, and it might even be the best movie Tom Cruise has ever made. Setting aside his batshit religion, Cruise may very well be The Last Movie Star and only a fool would count him out after a trio of forgettable underperformers--JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK, THE MUMMY, and AMERICAN MADE--that had all of the entertainment industry prognosticators concluding that the now-56-year-old (!) actor was washed-up and his time had passed. While we justifiably question the necessity of a TOP GUN sequel that's due out next year, FALLOUT is Cruise here and now in a series that's been on a roll, reteaming him once more with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning USUAL SUSPECTS screenwriter who emerged from an eight-year sabbatical to become Cruise's most trusted aide-de-camp in either writing (VALKYRIE, EDGE OF TOMORROW, THE MUMMY) or directing (JACK REACHER, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION) capacities in the ensuing decade. What everyone was saying about MAD MAX: FURY ROAD three years ago holds true here: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is an instant classic in the action genre.

A direct sequel to ROGUE NATION, FALLOUT is as convoluted as you'd expect, with IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), botching a mission to intercept three weapons-grade plutonium orbs that end up in the hands of The Apostles, a splinter cell offshoot of The Syndicate, the organization run by international terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), who was apprehended in the previous film. Assigned to retrieve the plutonium by IMF boss Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), the team is overruled by CIA chief Erica Sloane (Angela Bassett), who orders her own operative and attack dog Walker (Henry Cavill) to tag along. The story moves all over the globe, as Hunt ends up posing as a mystery man named John Lark, set to buy the plutonium from the Apostles with a wealthy socialite and arms dealer known as The White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) acting as a go-between. Things get even more complicated when The Apostles refuse to pay for the plutonium, instead insisting that if "Lark"/Hunt wants the plutonium, he has to help Lane escape from a military-fortified prison transport. Throw in MI-6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and her own assignment to kill Lane, Hunt being framed as a rogue agent once more, and a scheming Walker clearly up to games of his own, and the stage is set for one double-cross and jaw-dropping action set piece after another for a two-and-a-half hour stretch that's over before know it.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is a movie that just doesn't quit. It's a preposterous delight and a rare instance of an action film that actually merits the comparison to the proverbial standby blurb of a non-stop rollercoaster ride. Though there's some conservatively-deployed CGI and visual effects, the abundance of practical stunt work and action choreography solidifies Cruise's standing as Hollywood's most death-defying madman. McQuarrie's puzzle-like story construction and recurring motif of "Who's really who?" recalls THE USUAL SUSPECTS, but there's also generous helpings of humor and warmth among the IMF characters who, to borrow a term from the FAST AND THE FURIOUS series, have really become family by this point (it's Hunt's unwillingness to sacrifice Luther that causes him to lose the plutonium in the prologue, something that Sloane and Walker never stop reminding him). FAST AND THE FURIOUS fans may want to argue the point, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a big-budget franchise still creatively firing on all cylinders and running better than ever six installments deep. It's impossible to pick a best scene--the HALO jump, the bone-smashing men's room throwdown, the epic boat/car/motorcycle chase through Paris, the greatest "Tom Cruise running" sequence ever, or the nerve-wracking, INCEPTION-like cross-cutting race against time in the climax, when the team tracks Lane to a medical camp in Kashmir where a smallpox outbreak caused by The Apostles has just been contained, which involves a helicopter chase, a brawl that spills over to the side of a mountain, and the defusing of two nuclear devices. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is crowd-pleasing, edge-of-your-seat, popcorn movie perfection, the kind of relentlessly heart-pounding, balls-to-the-wall barnburner that restores your faith in the summer blockbuster.

In Theaters: LONDON HAS FALLEN (2016)

LONDON HAS FALLEN
(US - 2016)

Directed by Babak Najafi. Written by Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedict, Christian Gudegast, and Chad St. John. Cast: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Alon Moni Aboutboul, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, Jackie Earle Haley, Melissa Leo, Radha Mitchell, Charlotte Riley, Colin Salmon, Waleed Zuaiter, Patrick Kennedy, Sean O'Bryan, Clarkson Guy Williams, Bryan Larkin. (R, 99 mins)

This sequel to 2013's OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN has a giant "America! Fuck yeah!" boner swelled to a degree the likes of which we haven't seen since the flag-waving RAMBO sequels and Chuck Norris action movies of the Reagan era. Playing out like what your conservative, Fox News-watching uncle imagines the war on terror to be, LONDON HAS FALLEN has a script that took four credited writers to assemble and may have even been given a final polish by Donald Trump, judging from shouted dialogue like "Just assume everybody is one of those terrorist assholes!" and "Why don't you boys pack up your shit and go back to Fuckheadistan?"  Like the first film, it's an acceptably dumb action time killer and yet another attempt to make Gerard Butler a thing, with the star and producer dropping endless action hero bon mots as Mike Banning, the top Secret Service agent to President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart). Banning and his wife Leah (Radha Mitchell) are expecting their first child and he's just started his vacation and is considering resigning his detail when the President receives word that the British Prime Minister has died of a sudden heart attack following knee surgery. With all the world leaders and dignitaries converging on London for the funeral (of course, the establishing aerial shot of Big Ben, the London Eye ferris wheel, the Palace of Westminster, and the Westminster Bridge over the Thames is accompanied by the caption "London"), the time is right for a massive terrorist attack, which Banning's Spidey Sense naturally detects ("What's wrong?" he's asked, grunting "Nothin'...bugs the hell outta me"). Almost every landmark in London is blown up using what appears to be an explosion app on director Babak Najafi's phone, and when every world leader is killed except for the new PM and Asher, Banning and the President are on the run, pursued throughout London by the interchangeably swarthy, ISIS-like flunkies of Yemen-based terror mastermind Aamir Barkawi (Alon Moni Aboutboul). Barkawi has spent two years planning this highly coordinated attack as revenge for a US military drone attack that took out his daughter on her wedding day and left one of his sons a double amputee. Banning manages to get Asher to an MI-6 safe house run by Agent Marshall (Charlotte Riley), who correctly assumes that someone in the British government is a mole working for Barkawi and that the Prime Minister was murdered.

One of the cheapest-looking $60 million films you'll ever see, LONDON HAS FALLEN has plenty of shoot 'em up action sequences that are fairly well-done, especially a few longer ones that try to go for the CHILDREN OF MEN-type set pieces. Najafi (who directed the Swedish crime thriller EASY MONEY II: HARD TO KILL and episodes of the Cinemax series BANSHEE) can't resist presenting Butler's Banning as a gun-toting, knife-wielding, indestructible smartass killing machine who resembles the John McClane of the later, terrible DIE HARD movies, a crack shot who can take out dozens upon dozens of terrorists who fire straight at him and somehow always miss. The bush-league CGI courtesy of Millennium's usual Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX is just an embarrassment throughout, almost Asylum-level chintzy and frankly unacceptable for a major, nationwide theatrical release--it doesn't matter how many big stars Cannon cover band Millennium rope in or how much money they spend, their visual effects and CGI splatter have never progressed beyond their DTV inception in the '90s when Frank Zagarino was the biggest star they could afford. As incredible as it seems, Worldwide FX's craftsmanship is getting worse. Even with all the rampant xenophobia and over-the-top jingoism, the shitty effects are the most off-putting part of LONDON HAS FALLEN, unless you count Butler's incessant one-liners constantly clanging to the ground (on Asher's bad driving, Banning quips "The car's bulletproof, not politician-proof!" and when Asher, hiding in a closet in the safe house, storms out and blows a bad guy away, Banning snarks "I was wonderin' when you'd come out of the closet!"), the completely illogical plotting (Barkawi spends two years planning the attack at the funeral as if he knew that far in advance that the Prime Minister would need knee surgery) or the unfortunate wasting of a slumming and visibly bored supporting cast.

London

Several OLYMPUS alumni return for some easy paychecks and a visit to scenic Bulgaria at Millennium's renowned Nu Boyana backlot: Angela Bassett briefly returns as Lynne Jacobs (all of the characters get pointless name-caption intros), the director of the Secret Service and Morgan Freeman's Speaker of the House Trumbull has been promoted to VP, essentially serving the same function running the War Room, which looks like the backup conference room at the Sofia Holiday Inn. A sleepy-looking Freeman gets to pretty much be Morgan Freeman and gets a decent amount of screen time (he has one scene with Butler, but they obviously weren't there at the same time). Also returning are Melissa Leo as the Secretary of Defense and Robert Forster as the Joint Chiefs chair, and along with new addition Jackie Earle Haley as the White House Chief of Staff--three veteran, rock-solid character actors with four Oscar nominations and one win between them who have maybe a combined 100 words of dialogue as their sole purpose seems to be grimacing at the events in London being displayed on a giant monitor, though from the looks of it, they could just as easily be reacting to the CGI. Moving fast, with the credits rolling at 90 minutes and the new definition of "It is what it is," LONDON HAS FALLEN is a junk movie that nobody other than Butler's agent was really demanding but it at least knows to not overstay its welcome.

In Theaters/On VOD: SURVIVOR (2015)

SURVIVOR
(US/Italy/UK - 2015)

Directed by James McTeigue. Written by Philip Shelby. Cast: Milla Jovovich, Pierce Brosnan, Dylan McDermott, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, James D'Arcy, Roger Rees, Benno Furmann, Frances de la Tour, Genevieve O'Reilly, Sonya Cassidy, Alex Beckett. (PG-13, 96 mins)

Ten years ago, SURVIVOR would've opened nationwide--probably in January, April, or early September--and likely been the #1 movie in America, at least for a week. Now, it's in "select theaters" (meaning, maybe ten) and on VOD, with US distributor Alchemy not even bothering to prepare a domestic trailer. Even with the relatively low budget of $20 million, SURVIVOR should look better than it does (obviously, the money went to the cast and little else). It's a brainless but fast-moving B-movie that Cannon cover band Millennium/NuImage didn't feel had the potential to be their next OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, despite corralling three of its cast members--Dylan McDermott, Angela Bassett, and Robert Forster--in supporting roles, which also begs the question "How is Morgan Freeman not in this?" Set mostly in London but primarily filmed in Bulgaria, SURVIVOR stars Milla Jovovich as Kate Abbott, a top-level security expert at the US Embassy (this is the kind of film that feels the need to accompany a shot of the Thames and the London Eye ferris wheel with the caption "London"). Driven in her job and haunted by memories of being in one of the WTC towers on 9/11, Kate has an almost Spidey Sense when it comes to terror threats and something seems off with Dr. Emil Balan (Roger Rees), who's trying to get a visa to visit the US to attend a pediatrics convention. Balan is really in the employ of wealthy and generically Eastern European terrorist Zafer Pavlou (Benno Furmann), who has a half-assed plot to launch an attack in Times Square on New Year's Eve in order to manipulate the global economy in his favor. Pavlou's found the perfect patsy in Balan, a grieving, vengeful man who blames the death of his ill wife on US customs' hemming and hawing about allowing her a visa to travel to the US for treatment. When Kate's persistent questioning of Balan threatens to derail the operation, Pavlou dispatches The Watchmaker (Pierce Brosnan), one of the world's deadliest and most elusive assassins ("He's had so much reconstructive surgery, nobody knows what he looks like anymore!" says one US Embassy official) to take her out.

The Watchmaker is introduced completing a complicated repair on an expensive watch to show how methodical and precise he is, but of course, he repeatedly fails at killing Kate or there wouldn't be a movie. His initial actions--which include pointlessly blowing up an entire city block where Kate and some co-workers are having dinner, when all he really had to do was sneak up on her and put a bullet in her head--end up inadvertently making Kate the prime suspect in the eyes of the US Ambassador (Bassett) and the angry M.I.5 official on the case (James D'Arcy), but her boss and vague love interest Sam Parker (McDermott) is the only person who believes that she's being set up. Directed by Wachowski protege James McTeigue (V FOR VENDETTA, NINJA ASSASSIN), SURVIVOR is a watchable if unspectacular actioner that seems ready-made for Netflix Instant. It wants to have that sort-of globetrotting BOURNE momentum to its cat-and-mouse, race-against-time plot, but it doesn't have the cash flow to pull it off.  Or, perhaps more accurately, it doesn't have the cash flowing to the right departments. Working with a significantly lower budget than he did in his days on the Wachowski payroll, McTeigue can't do much when he's saddled with the likes of the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX, whose cartoonish CGI histrionics here continue to make one appreciate the relative care and craft of the folks at The Asylum. On top of that, McTeigue and screenwriter Philip Shelby really dumb it down, not trusting their audience with anything. Needless captions are one thing ("Times Square," shown over a stock footage shot of the iconic Coca-Cola sign), but when Kate reflects on losing her friends in the World Trade Center on 9/11, was it necessary for McTeigue to cut to cable news stock footage of the second plane hitting the tower just in case anyone in the audience was unaware of what "9/11" means?

A classic case of "It is what it is," SURVIVOR is chintzy and aggressively dumb, but at least it's never boring. Jovovich is fine, but Brosnan doesn't really do much with the opportunity to dig in and play a ruthless, unstoppable killer. The Watchmaker almost seems like a distant relative to his KGB assassin in John Mackenzie's underrated and little-remembered 1987 espionage thriller THE FOURTH PROTOCOL. Granted an opportunity to play a bad guy right on the heels of his Liam Neeson "aging action guy" bid with last year's minor hit THE NOVEMBER MAN, a slumming Brosnan just looks annoyed. It doesn't help that Shelby's script introduces him as one of the most lethal assassins on the planet but has him continually presented as an incompetent fuck-up. There's some attempt at topical ISIS metaphors--almost certainly accidental--in the way that the US, in their efforts at thwarting terror, only succeeded in creating a terrorist, however hapless, in Dr. Balan. By the climax, which has The Watchmaker and Balan in Times Square trying to detonate a bomb set to go off in the ball as it drops at the stroke of midnight, all that's really left to do is marvel at SURVIVOR's almost adorable attempt to recreate New Year's Eve in Times Square on a Bulgarian backlot, with some stock footage shots inserted into the mix with maximum obviousness. And it gets better, as Kate encounters The Watchmaker on the roof of a nearby building, against a backdrop of what's supposed to be the NYC skyline. Instead, it looks like Jovovich and Brosnan fighting it out on a set against a large screen with the Troma intro on pause. Originally set to star Katharine Heigl and Clive Owen, SURVIVOR doesn't make the best use of its stars, all of whom seem above the Redbox-ready material that feels like a dusted-off and slightly updated script that executive producer Avi Lerner had sitting around from the days when Frank Zagarino was the biggest name he could afford. Even VOD seems too gala a premiere for something like this, and I recommend waiting until the right time and watching it the way it was really meant to be seen: when nothing else is on and you remember you grabbed it months earlier as an impulse buy in the $5 dump bin while waiting in a slow checkout line at Wal-Mart.

In Theaters: OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (2013)

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN
(US - 2013)

Directed by Antoine Fuqua.  Written by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt.  Cast: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, Rick Yune, Melissa Leo, Dylan McDermott, Radha Mitchell, Ashley Judd, Cole Hauser, Finley Jacobsen, Keong Sim, Malana Lea, Phil Austin, Sean O'Bryan. (R, 120 mins)

When the trailer for OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN started making the rounds a couple of months ago, with its seemingly intentionally bad visual effects and dialogue like "I'm the best hope you've got!," "America does not negotiate with terrorists!" and "They've opened the gates of Hell!," one could be forgiven for assuming that a bunch of big-name actors agreed to take part in a fake trailer mocking big-budget, overblown, jingoistic, flag-waving, "America! Fuck Yeah!", porn-for-red-states action explosion epics.  But no...OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is a real movie with real actors.  And what's most surprising, other than it's not nearly as terrible as that trailer made it look, is that the actors lured by fat paychecks actually seem to be taking it seriously, as if this is the first film of its kind and they're really doing something groundbreaking.  The outrageously overqualified cast is pretty much all this has going for it.  They're the reason this thing cost $80 million and still looks like a shot-in-South Africa, straight-to-video Frank Zagarino flick directed by Sam Firstenberg in 1996.  Avi Lerner and his Cannon cover band Millennium/Nu Image may be able to somehow pull $80 million out of their asses several times a year despite most of their films going straight-to-DVD and the two EXPENDABLES films being their only recent hits, but true to their Golan-Globus heritage, they haven't been able to shed their B-movie skin despite Herculean efforts to do so.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in their continued employment of the Bulgarian visual effects outfit Worldwide FX, whose trademark digital splatter and SyFy Channel-level CGI is showcased here in all its chintzy, D-grade glory.  Rushed into production in true Cannon fashion to beat Roland Emmerich's upcoming and very similar WHITE HOUSE DOWN into theaters, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is fast-moving and brainlessly entertaining, but the extended CGI destruction of Washington, D.C. (itself CGI'd even before the mayhem, as the film was shot in Louisiana) that's displayed here would've looked subpar in the mid-1990s.  No matter how many A-listers they manage to reel in, Millennium/Nu Image will never be a major player with these kinds of shit-ass visual effects and shoddy, blurry greenscreen work.

Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler, who also co-produced) has been wallowing in guilt at his desk job at the Treasury office. 18 months earlier, he was the chief agent on the security detail of President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart), when a car accident during a snowstorm on a bridge along the icy road to Camp David resulted in Banning saving the President's life but not that of the First Lady (Ashley Judd), whose seatbelt was jammed as the limo plummeted into the cold waters below.  The widower Commander-in-Chief removed Banning from his detail, not because he blamed him, but because his presence would be a constant reminder of the First Lady's tragic death to himself and his young son Connor (Finley Jacobsen).  While staring at the computer monitor at his desk after another day of feeling sorry for himself, Banning gets a shot at redemption when North Korean terrorists attack D.C. from the air, killing hundreds of citizens and toppling the Washington Monument in a sequence that would be a stunner were the visuals not so cheap and tacky.  The President is hosting a South Korean delegation, allowing them into the underground PEOC bunker when he and his staff are moved there. Of course, the delegation has been infiltrated by the same group of terrorists, led by the nefarious Kang (Rick Yung).  Kang wants the US military to pull out of the DMZ between North and South Korea and he's prepared to kill President Asher, Vice-President Charlie Rodriguez (Phil Austin), and Secretary of Defense Ruth McMillan (Melissa Leo) before turning America into a post-nuke wasteland if his demands aren't met.

Kang's army overtakes the half-destroyed White House, wiping out the entire security detail, led by Banning's buddy Roma (Cole Hauser), a character who was doomed to die, as he's played by Cole Hauser.  Banning takes out a number of Kang's men before infiltrating what's left of the White House, which apparently doesn't change any passwords or security codes over an 18-month period since Banning still has full access to everything in the Oval Office.  He gets in contact with the Pentagon, where House Speaker Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) is the acting President, providing intel to him and his advisors, Secret Service chief Jacobs (Angela Bassett) and General Clegg (Robert Forster).  Once he locates Connor--codename "Sparkplug"--and gets him to safety through an air vent (Banning sure knows a lot of easy, unsecured ways in and out of the White House), he goes to work eliminating Kang and his cohorts--including former Secret Service agent-turned-hired gun traitor Forbes (Dylan McDermott), who helped coordinate the infiltration--and rescuing the President.

If you think this sounds a lot like DIE HARD, well, you're right.  Several scenes are restaged almost in their entirety, including a botched chopper rescue attempt that's shot in such a similar fashion that you almost expect Robert Davi and Grand L. Bush to show up as Agents Johnson and Johnson.  And of course, even though he's "the best hope you've got," someone--in this case, Clegg--has to be the requisite "Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson" of the film and doubt Banning and his intentions at every turn, if only to have someone else pipe up about what a dedicated badass he is.  And there's also the tough guy wisecrackery, but when Banning tells Kang "Let's play a few rounds of Fuck Off...you're it!," it doesn't quite have the same iconic punch as "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!"  Butler is OK in Hollywood's latest attempt to make Gerard Butler happen, though he isn't really exerting himself here in what amounts to a two-hour Bruce Willis impression.  He does have a nice rapport in his scenes with young Jacobsen.  Eckhart mainly clenches his teeth and yells "Fuck you!" a lot, while the hammy overacting is left to Leo, who gets kicked and beaten to a pulp not once but twice (after the first, she asks President Asher, with blood dripping from her mouth, "How's my hair?"), and in the film's most unintentionally hilarious moment, is dragged down a hallway by her hands to her presumed execution while kicking and shrieking "I pledge allegiance to the flag!  Of the United States of aaaaagggghhh!"

Freeman brings surprising humanity and gravitas to the Speaker of the House, a man who disagrees with the President but puts politics aside and demonstates humility and nervousness over the role he wasn't expecting to be playing when he woke up that morning.  Considering the stock, one-dimensional characters in Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt's script, I'm sure this level of complexity was brought to the table by Freeman himself, and his scenes have some unexpected credibility to them.  I particularly liked his initial anxiety when confronted with the situation and how he's stammering and indecisive and rapidly losing the confidence of everyone in the room when he dodges questions and instead asks someone for a cup of coffee, "with double cream and three Sweet & Lows...and put it in a real cup, not one of those styrofoam things," then closes his eyes, and something snaps in him and he's ready to take charge.  It's just a little moment of real, human feeling in an otherwise dumb movie, and Freeman, pro that he is, totally sells it when all he really needed to do was show up.

Directed by the underrated Antoine Fuqua, who fares much better with more grounded and gritty films like TRAINING DAY and the criminally underappreciated BROOKLYN'S FINEST, the shockingly cheap-looking OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN isn't quite the laugh-riot you'd expect from the trailer, and if it weren't for the horrible CGI and the fact that the President's high-tech bunker looks like it was quickly thrown together in Avi Lerner's basement, it would almost certainly play better.  As it is, it's the kind of movie where an aerial shot featuring the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument includes a caption that reads "Washington, D.C."  It's a forgettable but stupidly entertaining enough way to kill two hours, and for what it's worth, it's miles ahead of the abysmal A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD.  But really, it's long past the time for Worldwide FX to install a software update or close up shop because their work just isn't cutting it anymore.  Say what you will about Roland Emmerich, but he's a guy who knows how to convincingly destroy Washington D.C., and his WHITE HOUSE DOWN (with President Jamie Foxx's life in the hands of Secret Service agent Channing Tatum.  No, really) will undoubtedly make OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN look even more amateurish than it already does.