End Times:MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING

There’s something genuinely apocalyptic in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. It sure does feel like an ending. The plot finds a rogue artificial intelligence wants to extinguish humanity. We’re told it has invaded the controls of half the nuclear weapons in the world and stokes geopolitical tensions with misinformation and deep fakes—all ways of hoping those missiles will drop one way or another. Though we really only learn that from blinking screens, since the tension is all on our ensemble’s faces. The score rumbles darkly, the camera tilts and looms, and every ridiculous turn of tension brings with it a somber sense that a fan favorite character will die. (Some do.) The previous entry, Dead Reckoning Part 1, had hugely enjoyable pleasures. It’s ebullient and energizing despite its weight and melancholy, a three-hour action extravaganza that, like all the best of this series, rockets through one sensational sequence after another. It was wholly satisfying and even complete in its way, though it leaves off on a literal cliffhanger. The first hour or so of The Final Reckoning is atypically tedious setting it all up to be a grand finale, regrouping and reorienting an audience it doesn’t have faith will remember, or even have seen, its immediate predecessor. We get several flashbacks to previous movies, some played multiple times, in this stretch, and endless exposition that shifts the characterization of a few characters and reassembles the team for a new last-ditch mission with those world-ending stakes. In this hour I found myself befuddled that it’s all gone so wrong.

Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s work in this series is usually so joyfully clockwork precise, a delightful dance of complications and stunts that escalate well and resolve brilliantly. This one’s tedious and ponderous at first, endlessly explanatory, and laboring under the weight of retcons and loose threads. For a series that’s often been dinged as difficult to follow—I wouldn’t agree, until maybe now—this one doubles down on inscrutability and referentiality. They’re the same impulses that hold back Deathly Hallows Part 2 and Endgame and Rise of Skywalker and most other attempts to coast a lumbering franchise narrative to something like a finale from being fully satisfying. Mission: Impossible has the good sense to have a mission, though. Once Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is back in the field, the movie steadily picks up momentum and builds to a truly ecstatic sequence of cross-cutting between various team members pulling off their own impossibilities—hanging off planes, cutting wires on a bomb with a countdown clock, waiting to flip a switch in a split second. Because it builds up such a head of steam on its commitment to feeling like the world truly hangs in the balance, the release of the climax is satisfying enough. It hits that classic sense of teamwork and underdogs and long odds and preposterous close calls and real death-defying stunts. I'll miss it.

Family Style: FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES

The Final Destination movies are dances between predictability and randomness. Of course they’re about dying. The fun conceit is that a character’s vivid premonition of a mass casualty event causes them to prevent said event. Death then stalks the survivors to claim them with random acts of mayhem. Small details accumulate through insert shots—loose screws, leaky faucets, groaning chains—until a quick pile-up of calamities leads to a sudden accidental death. The movies are structured more or less identically, but the renewable novelty of these accidents keep them fresh. Blissfully free of tortured lore or a villain morphing into a mascot, here’s a horror franchise that has a consistent quality, a modest groove, and evergreen appeal. The sixth and latest entry, somehow the first in 14 years, is Final Destination Bloodlines. From the directors of Disney Channel's live-action Kim Possible remake, it somehow disappoints by hitting the right beats while going even bigger and broader. Where the franchise started with gore as delayed morbid punchlines, it’s now fully cartoony and excessive, over-the-top at any given chance. 

Part of it is the tone, a light and casual breeziness even when dread should be kicking in. A larger part of it is the style—an overly clean digital look with bland straight-to-streaming sitcom lighting and animated effects that make everything look totally artificial. The movie’s one new wrinkle is making the victims a family. It starts with grandma as a young woman preventing a collapsing sky-view restaurant. (The sequence has a fun rhythm but a totally phony look.) Decades later, the last of those survivors are finally dead and the curse descends the family tree, whacking branch after branch on the way down. This should escalate the tension, but it somehow evokes the flimsiest emotions of the already just-south-of-comic premise. They never feel like a convincing family, and by the second or third death their behaviors make little emotional sense. There are some good gags in the sequences—a tattoo parlor up in flames has some sly twisting humor, and a thwack from a soccer ball in the background of a shot is a fun jolt. But by the time, after nearly two hours, of the movie’s final deaths—a typical blackout gag in classic Final Destination style—the specifics of the variables are too outsized and the violence not too far removed from Frogger splats. This may be an official continuation of the series, and has some of the surface-level appeal of all of its superior predecessors. But the aesthetics make it feel like a knock-off. It left me craving the real deal.

Partially Assembled: THUNDERBOLTS*

If you’re looking for signs of life in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thunderbolts* has you covered. It gets back to what these Marvel movies did best in the first place: gathering a fun ensemble of character actors, turning them loose on eclectic comic book characters, and making the audience care about their plight as they banter and battle through a simple set of genre set-pieces. The larger world-building post Avengers Endgame remains a muddle, but this one goes a long way towards righting the ship and establishing a new normal—before it’s probably exploded in the next Avengers, but that’s next summer’s problem. With this kind of interconnected storytelling, this entry’s needs for the stage cleared for a straightforward plot even go a long way toward explaining why Captain America: Brave New World had to be about mopping up loose ends from The Incredible Hulk and Falcon & the Winter Soldier (plus the most conspicuous one from Eternals). It doesn’t explain why that movie had to do that badly, but, hey, you can’t win them all. And anyway, Thunderbolts* is pretty fun. It leans into our ambient cultural suspicions that the MCU has lost its way by centering characters who’ve lost theirs. Best is Florence Pugh’s Yelena, a sad black-ops freelancer who hasn’t had a passion for her spycraft since the death of her sister. She was a bright spot in Black Widow, but here her light is dimmed. So says her father (David Harbour), a once-super hero now down in the dumps as a limo driver. They’ll be pulled back into the action as the story kicks in. It’s about a ragtag group of misfit antiheroes targeted for elimination who, to the surprise of the villain, instead team up to take their collective antagonist down.

It’s a typical Marvel group project with snarky asides and sentimental heart, collecting supporting villains from other projects—Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Falcon’s U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ant-Man 2’s Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Widow’s Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko)—and sets them through their paces of quick-cut, well-choreographed action. As proficiently and capably directed by Beef’s Jake Schreier, the characters bounce off each other well, physically and in prickly chemistry. The CG action doesn’t get too outsized, and accentuates the team dynamics without drowning them out in the third-act sci-fi threat that’s actually deployed cleverly. It helps that it is all done up in pop psychology, playing off metaphors for emotional repression and depression, with flashbacks in settings overtly labeled The Vault and The Void. It’s all rather neatly pulled off, light and suspenseful in the right proportions, with characters made improbably lovable and leave you wanting more. That used to be the MCU’s stock in trade. We’ll see if they can sustain that again, but this is a good (re)start.

Dark Night of the Soul: SINNERS

There’s a transcendent sequence in the middle of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners where the power of blues music blows apart the boundaries between space and time. A 1930s’ speakeasy concert starts with a few chords on an inherited guitar and then suddenly, with a fluid camera move, is layered with inspirations past and present until ghosts and premonitions share the same space as the roof is set ablaze. It’s as bold and earnest and symbolically rich a gesture as any sequence a Hollywood genre picture has ever given us. It’s also the highest high in a high-powered movie—a musical and muscular and confident piece of craft. Coogler gives us a historical dark fantasy Deep South vampire musical and plays fair with each component part as he makes them a coherent whole. It’s a film that flows with The Blues, a heartfelt yowl of pain so potent it summons the supernatural. It’s also a film that moves with an urgent craftsmanship that propels its images and ideas forward to populist crowd-pleasing effect. Coogler has long been one of our most promising young directors. His based-on-a-true-story Sundance debut Fruitvale Station is a warm, intimate real-life tragedy. His following franchise efforts somehow center that same intimacy, with Creed finding new nuanced character studies stepping out of the shadow of Stallone’s Rocky, and his Black Panthers tackling messy sociopolitical and moving interpersonal concerns within the slam-bang explosions of CG expected from such entries. So of course Sinners shares the recognizable thematic preoccupations of a Coogler picture. It’s about legacy, lineage, protecting one’s community with a tension between insularity and inspiration, fraught family dynamics, grief, manipulation, and the light of mortal goodness in the depths of immortal darkness. And it displays these themes in massive, iconographic shots in filmic IMAX frames—a deeply satisfying crackling warmth imbuing its story with the personal touch—set to a crunchy, textured, regional score from the reliably excellent, and surprising, Ludwig Goransson.

It’s a visually and sonically enveloping blockbuster, suggesting an enormous world beyond its margins while balancing the genuine emotionality of characters’ earnest communications with the outsized metaphors of supernatural invasion. The first half of the picture follows twin gangsters (Coogler’s regular star Michael B. Jordan in a neat dual role) returned to their rural hometown from a stint in the Chicago mob wars. They’ve escaped with enough money and booze to build their own juke joint on the outskirts of sharecropper’s cotton acres. We watch as they set out recruiting people who’ll help them with their grand opening—an innocent cousin (Miles Caton), an ex-wife (Wunmi Mosaku), a bouncer (Omar Miller), a drunk pianist (Delroy Lindo), bartenders (Li Jun Li and Yao), and some attractive partiers (Hailee Steinfeld and Jayme Lawson). Their business is intended to be a refuge from Jim Crow oppression and hard work in the fields. But their solidarity is threatened by the vampire (Jack O’Connell) who hears the call of their music and demands to be let in. Coogler frames the conflict in eerie slow building to spasms of violence. In its melancholic final moments, quiet after the loud catharsis, we see a young man, changed by his experiences of that fateful night, fully embodying a memorable observation of Bram Stoker's Dracula: "No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be." The movie’s moral seriousness and storytelling seduction are clearly in conversation with others of its blood-sucking genre—Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark’s roving rural vampires and John Carpenter’s Vampires’ pseudo-mythic realism, and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn’s giddy fang reveals. But it’s all Coogler in its crackling synthesis that’s a hugely satisfying popcorn experience and an honest expression of his thematic and stylistic concerns. It uses the tropes well, and has a tense escalation from the logic of their clever deployment, cutting on actions, and cross-cutting with a teasing sense of build and release that matches its emotional skill. To see it is to see one of our best young filmmakers step fully into his power.

The Least of These: THE KING OF KINGS

The King of Kings is an unusual hodgepodge movie: a Sunday School-style Biblical literary adaptation twice removed made by a South Korean animator with Hollywood voice performances and released by Christian indie production company Angel Studios. All that to end up with a pretty routine retelling of the story of Jesus Christ in blandly produced, generic family-friendly digital images just in time for Easter. As is always the case with interpretations of religious texts, however, it’s most interesting, and revealing, for what it leaves out and for what it emphasizes. Furthermore, this one’s complicated by being based on a slim posthumous Charles Dickens book called The Life of Our Lord. That book is a charmingly Victorian effort, not up to the depths of feeling and wit of Dickens’ best work, but an earnest effort at distilling the importance of the Gospels’ message for an intended audience of his own children. The animated version makes Dickens (Kenneth Branagh) telling his youngest son (Roman Griffin Davis) the story of Jesus (Oscar Isaac) a framing device, and then puts the little lad, along with his doughy cat, in the New Testament tableaux as an unseen observer. There it hits all the expected highlights—the nativity, the baptism, the disciples, the loaves and fishes, walking on water, the last supper, the crucifixion, the resurrection. What’s more curious is the balance of what’s left out to what’s included.

Any condensing of these stories is inevitably going to pick and chose points of emphasis that shifts theological implications. For instance, Dickens didn’t have time for the Devil’s temptations in his book, but The King of Kings makes sure we hear about it, along with a flashback to Original Sin in the Garden of Eden. That’s fitting for a telling that’s all about the Power of Belief above all else. It puts weight on Christ the powerful—telling off the devil, expelling demons, raising the dead, and calming stormy seas. Christ the vulnerable, the compassionate, the defender of the meek and impoverished, gets shorter shrift, when it even appears at all. The end result is a movie that says Jesus should be worshiped because of what he can do for you, but doesn’t care too much about what he asks you to do for others. The Sermon on the Mount is glossed over, but skipped entirely are the Parables, and the Blessing of Children, and the Widow’s Mite, and the Woman at the Well, and nearly all moments of Jesus’ teaching that emphasize a need to care for those who’re marginalized or forgotten by societal norms.

The movie’s dry liturgical value, when it isn’t upstaged by the frame story, is clearly slanted in this one obvious direction, worshiping His power, but failing to mention that we should “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and that “the last shall be first,” and what we “have done unto one of the least of these, we have done it unto [Him]”, and that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Even the manger scene opening only has time for the genuflecting Wise Men, and not the shepherds. The ending resurrection has Jesus greet Dickens’ son in the garden instead of Mary. The filmmakers include a lot of the Greatest Hits of Jesus, but take most every opportunity to downplay or diminish women and the poor in them. (There’s time for many minutes devoted to the Dickens chasing that cat, though.) It says a lot about modern mainstream American Christianity to see what concepts are ignored when the idea is to make something broadly appealing and unobjectionable to the masses. I’d say it’s some upside-down accomplishment to make a Christian movie without wrangling with the actual tough questions of the faith, but that’s sadly par for the course.

Where the Boys Are: WARFARE

The soldiers burst into a house and shuffle the civilians to the side. The civilians don’t even become characters. This is a movie about the men with guns. They set up a stakeout shouting jargon and tersely staring down the barrel of their guns. They talk over their radios. They look warily out the windows. They wait. This is Warfare, a movie set in Iraq in 2006. It tells a very small story. There are a handful of military men—boys, really, with fresh faces and dewey eyes and a sense that, if not for their training and ranks, they’d be in the club. The opening scene shows them bopping around to the electronic dance hit “Call On Me,” a very mid-aughts reference. That’s also the only scene of happiness. The rest of the film is about fear and futility. They’re hunkered down in this random home, a place of shattered domesticity. The enemies are encroaching. A trap is set. Suddenly, they’re pinned down, with danger on all sides. A few are wounded, screaming in agonizing pain. Others’ pain is internal, mental. Still others are dead straight away. They all wait as the minutes tick by, with an agonizing wait filled only with fumbling attempts to help each other survive, and with desperate counting down the time elapsing before reinforcements can arrive. This spare, stripped-down war movie is advertised as coming from actual memories of service members who lived through these moments—a few harrowing hours in a larger conflict.

In its telling, it becomes the story of the entire Iraq War in miniature. It begins with invasion easily accomplished, then a difficult stay that grows violent and scary, before ultimately ending with a messy withdrawal leaving all the worse for wear. (The final shots of Iraqis carefully stepping through the debris of their neighborhood are an especially sharp closing note.) The film proceeds in extremely precise moments calibrated for experiential momentum, both the long stretches of procedural waiting, and the sudden thumping terror of gunfire and explosions. The characters are a blur of familiar and unfamiliar faces, and some familiar faces that are barely recognizable in their combat grimace and anonymizing uniforms. Boyish young actors including Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo, and Charles Melton are totally enveloped in their roles. They form a tight unit as characters who fall back on training, with flickers of personality subsumed by the urgent need to do the next right thing. Writer-director Alex Garland, with Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza serving as his co-writer and co-director, has made a technical and even clinical war movie that succeeds in conjuring a hellish look at what the monotonous unpredictability of war does to a body. Garland’s usual interest in the fragility of men and of systems, through movies like Ex Machina and Civil War, here finds another gripping expression. Here’s the story of a whole war in just a few well-observed stretches of chaos rushing in where control falters.

Played Out: A MINECRAFT MOVIE

I was in elementary school when Pokémon: The First Movie was released. It was greeted like Moses returning from the mountaintop on the playground. It was the must-see event of the fall if you were between the ages of 6 and 11. Here was the totemic video game craze of the age at long last on the big screen. That used to be an important sign that your corner of pop cultural awareness had gotten the upgrade in importance. Now it’s just another link in the chain. I remember being a little perplexed by the adults’ reaction to the movie. Why didn’t they agree we needed to be there opening night? And how could the critics syndicated in our local newspaper and on television review programs be so baffled by its premise? The children have to go out into the wilderness to collect the pocket monsters in little laser balls and then have the creatures fight each other to gain points toward evolving them into other iterations of those same critters. What’s not to get? Ah, but of course, I thought as a child then. Now I go into something like A Minecraft Movie and feel a million years old. I get why adults wouldn’t get Pokémon then, because seeing Minecraft threatens to turn me into a humorless scold.

I was a full adult when that video game first booted up and I’ve gained only a passing understanding of its mechanics and lore in the decade-plus since. I thought it was some building game where everything is out of blocks. I’ve been told it’s about creativity or something? Don’t you have to mine for materials and then craft them into buildings or stuff? And there are weird blocky creepers and villagers? Now here’s the movie. It’s a painfully formulaic green-screened fantasy picture with a motley crew of live-action misfits tumbling through a portal and forced to save the animated Minecraft world from an evil pig sorceress who is plotting to shoot a purple beam into the sky. Jack Black stars in a fit of wild-eyed derangement, accompanied by Jason Momoa in a bad Billy “King of Kong” Mitchell wig, Danielle Brooks in a track suit, and a couple kids. They proceed through ostensibly wacky comedy and action in sequences that are basically just levels and puzzles punctuated by exposition. It’s all brightly, flatly lit, totally phony as the characters pose and joke in groaning—or cringe as the kids might say—one-liners.

It’s directed by Jared Hess, he of Napoleon Dynamite, and the whole thing feels like that film’s flat affect, simple blocking, and boundless insincerity yanked into a dull copy of a video game fantasyland. Hess is also surely responsible for its most absurdist touches, like Jennifer Coolidge falling in love with an animated character in an uncomfortable, but brief, couple scenes. The resulting mix is hectic and vulgar and violent—dismembered cartoony zombies lit afire and portly pig henchmen skewered—in a way that’s just barely not PG-13. It oozes irony and innuendo. (A joke about “yearning” to work in “the mines” doesn’t go over as well this week, does it?) And it refuses to do anything seriously other than flatter fans who, in my screening, reacted in cheers to every reference to the games. It’s so empty and awkward and flat, coasting on combative tropes and empty peons to creativity. I felt ancient as I grew discomfited that so many children would be putting this annoyance in their minds.