Accept It:MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — DEAD RECKONING PART ONE

I tend to love when a long-running franchise finds its melancholy, and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is no exception. The Tom Cruise action series has been reliably exciting, allowing his star persona to hone and sharpen along with his super-spy Ethan Hunt. They’ve fused as a man of singular focus and determination, willing to throw himself—literally his whole body—into pulling off incredible stunts. Hunt does it to save the world. Cruise does it to save the big screen blockbuster. Well done, both. The last few Missions Impossible, under the guidance of writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, have been sharply cobbled together with an excellent sense of escalating stakes, clever crescendos of momentum, and suitably coherent spectacular action—always with a sense of peril from a convincing over-the-top realism. These are top tier entertainments. The great success of Dead Reckoning Part One is that it doesn’t lose those attributes, and, in fact, by stretching out over three hours of rising action (this is only the first of a promised two-parter, after all) allows it to grow more complicated, and more emotionally engaged. The story is another MacGuffin hunt—two halves of a key that’ll unlock a missing server that holds the brains of a rogue military-grade artificial intelligence—but by pacing itself, it allows for that sadness to creep in. McQuarrie and Cruise have made Hunt a man driven by a desire to avoid loss—not just global, but personal—and here’s a movie that doubles and triples and quadruples down on that prospect.

It considers the effects of being a man for whom the impossible is pulled off in wild stunts of teamwork and the effects such constant danger and close calls have on himself and his only friends—those who work with him. Cruise has always played characters who think they can outrun the gravity of a situation’s reality. (Look no further than Top Gun: Maverick, in which that urge is proven correct.) Impossible has always been a series playing with the potential to flail in the face of danger—remember him dangling over the alarmed floor in the first one. This latest Mission runs toward and with that gravity. Its melancholy is a fine new flavoring that finally taps a rich vein at which the previous pictures have merely glinted. But this is still, as one might expect from these pictures, a rip-roaring adventure with some of the best action thrills anywhere, photographed cleanly and clearly, edited with energy and style, and keeping every aspect in vivid focus without losing the thread. Each sequence—from a sandstorm firefight to airport sleuthing, a car chase through Rome, and combat on a runway train that builds to Buster Keaton levels of astonishing chain reactions—are cleverly stacked with multiple variables, complications, and suspense elements—pursuers, ticking bombs, causes and effects—that make for delightfully complicated thrills.

For however heavy the undertow, the movie stays light on its feet, playful, and propulsive. The action is staged for impact of objects in dizzying motion that balance on a mix of danger and delight. Picture a tiny car tumbling down a massive stone staircase, causing its handcuffed passenger and driver to switch places, all while a massive Hummer smashes down after them. And yet it’s that underlying sadness that lets such giddiness play against a somber backbeat that finds these characters in an almost existential crisis when confronting their latest foe. (No wonder there’s no conclusion.) When a charming new character (Hayley Atwell) is given the choice to join the team for this mission, it’s presented with a somber touch. She needs to know the consequences. This earned level of sadness gives the hugely entertaining movie a genuine whiff of finality. In these endless franchise plays crowding our multiplexes, a few are starting to find satisfying stakes can be found by intimating an actual end is looming. All the pleasures of the momentum machine herein feel all the more weighted toward danger, and make the complications all the more delightfully compounded.

Ella Good Tale: CINDERELLA

You know the Cinderella story. Everyone does. Across centuries and cultures, it has existed in hundreds of versions, perhaps none more famous than Disney’s 1950 animated musical. That iteration, of the magic words “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” and the helpful talking mice, is lodged in the public imagination as something of the definitive squeaky-clean, paper-thin telling of the orphaned girl mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters, prepped for a ball by her fairy godmother, and eventually married happily ever after to a prince. It’s familiar. But now Disney’s made a lush live-action adaptation of the story. They’ve resisted the temptations to either exactly duplicate their iconic earlier work or load it up with postmodern winks. In the process, they’ve created a movie of strong and simple sincerity, earnest in its conviction that Cinderella has been a tale good enough to stand on its own for so long, there’s no need to mess with it now.

We meet Ella (Lily James), whose memories of her long-dead mother (Hayley Atwell) and recently dead father (Ben Chaplin) are all she has to sustain her in her present circumstances. Her wicked stepmother (Cate Blanchett) keeps her as a servant, hardly worth regarding on anything like an equal level with two blathering stepsisters (Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera). Ella isn’t even allowed to go to the ball where the handsome prince (Richard Madden) will pick his bride. With some help from the fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter), she’s sure to make it there anyway. The set-up is classically familiar, and elegantly efficient. In this telling, the story is content to be a lovely experience of comfortable rhythms.

The result is a movie that’s never a surprise, but always gloriously old-fashioned. Cinderella is in style and form a throwback, serious about the human emotions flickering in a thin archetypal tale, but light on its feet when it comes to incorporating shimmering, glittering widescreen wonders. The occasional CGI assist aside, it could be the best live action fairy tale of 1962. It’s a softly sturdy CinemaScope spectacle, beautifully appointed and handsomely photographed, Dante Ferretti’s lush pseudo-historical storybook production design flowing in warm colors and fine fabrics. Director Kenneth Branagh marries the pop sensibilities of his Thor with the grandeur of his Shakespeare adaptations, finding a comfortable space of serious lightness. He treats each expected development with sentimentality and gravitas, lightly confident in the story’s ability to operate effectively.

And indeed it does. The frame is filled with gorgeous gowns, lovely waltzing, and a smooth tone of pomp and pageantry. I’ve never much cared for the love story, but the film sells it as a fantastical escape from a horrible circumstance, a dramatic reward of riches for one who so patiently and kindly deserves happiness. I found myself transported into the uncomplicated fantasy of it all, dodgy (mercifully speechless) CG animals and all. In the midst of the usual plot beats and the terrific design, the screenplay by Chris Weitz (About a Boy) provides some degree of shading to the characters’ standard types. The film fleshes in some additional motivations. The prince finally seems not just a handsome man in tight pants, but an actual character too, and a nice, humble, emotional one at that. But the film achieves its most humane nuance simply by bringing in reliably excellent character actors like Derek Jacobi, Stellan Skarsgård, and Nonso Anozie to elevate small but crucial roles.

Best is Blanchett who plays the stepmother in a wonderfully regal Joan Crawford-esque performance halfway between Mildred Pierce and Lady Macbeth. The script provides sympathy for her evil, an understanding of how her heart has hardened that makes her less a pure villain and more a pitiable person lashing out in pain and jealousy. That Ella is able to meet this nastiness with sadness, but ultimately grace and compassion is part of her eventual happily-ever-after. It’s because she’s not a shameless schemer or a callous revenge-seeker that we can appreciate this gentle fantasy. I most liked this sumptuous version for pivoting the theme away from True Love wish fulfillment and towards an emphasis on the importance of kindness and forgiveness. That’s nice. Here there are no songs and no subversion, just a straightforward, irony free, gauzy retelling of this fairy tale at its most family friendly and least overtly sexist. It’s inessential, but sweet.

Note: Disney has paired Cinderella with Frozen Fever, a new short film sequel to their mega-popular – and pretty good – Ice Queen musical you’re still humming. It’s a harmless handful of minutes, with a so-so new song and an inconsequential fresh magical wrinkle. It’s mostly useless. Regardless of their recently announced intention for a feature-length Frozen sequel, this short is dull enough to make me wonder if, creatively at least, the company should just let it…oh, you know.

S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Up: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

What keeps the movies in Marvel’s Avengers multi-franchise franchise somewhat fresh is the way each film exists in a different setting and plays variations on different genres. They’re all shot in a bright house style, the tone always serious enough to generate suspense, but light enough to accommodate bantering between chummy characters. In other words, going into one of these movies you know exactly what you’re going to get, but not necessarily the way you’ll get it. Captain America: The First Avenger was a B-movie World War II picture with snarling Nazis, martyred scientists, and brave soldiers, with a square-jawed superpowered all-American hero in the center. Now its sequel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, finds the star spangled man dropped into a paranoid conspiracy actioner, danger from unexpected sources at every turn.

In this new film, the Captain is still the same old patriotic freedom fighter he always was. Captain America may not be the role Chris Evans was born to play, but, between his capacity for unsentimental earnestness and obvious classically handsome features, it’s certainly the superhero role he was born to play. After being frozen in a block of ice for 70 years, thawed out, welcomed into SHIELD (the fictional Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division), and sent out to fight off an alien invasion with the help of Thor, Iron Man, and the Hulk, he’s finding himself borderline disillusioned. He asks Director Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) why the intelligence community is ramping up pervasive worldwide surveillance, building a massive apparatus to predict trouble and arrange preemptive strikes. Fury wearily tells him the world has grown dangerous, and they must be prepared for anything. Cold comfort, that.

The film smartly pivots from stars-and-stripes propaganda to clammy paranoia. In the first action scene Captain America and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) free hostages on a freighter in a fanfare of military might. But it’s not long before a high-ranking SHIELD official is gunned down by an assassin, men in suits force good spies on dubious missions, and Fury whispers to the Captain a stern warning:  “no one can be trusted.” It’s a surprisingly sharp – and totally on-the-nose – commentary on contemporary concerns over NSA surveillance and intelligence agency overreach. Though, shadowy governmental conspiracies aren’t exactly only current. Robert Redford, with a history of appearing in paranoid thrillers from Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men to Sneakers and Spy Game, appears as a suit, exuding gravitas in a fun echo of the genre’s past.

What follows is a tangle of twists and turns punctuated with exciting, lengthy action sequences all around Washington D.C. as loyal SHIELD agents reveal dark intent and showy conspiracies are yanked into the light. The blows land harder for the film’s mercilessness when it comes to mortally wounding characters and institutions you’d think the Marvel Cinematic Universe would want to keep around. The script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely moves quickly and coherently, dragging in familiar franchise faces (Sebastian Stan, Cobie Smulders, Hayley Atwell, and Jenny Agutter) while smoothly integrating new characters into the action. I particularly enjoyed Anthony Mackie as a former soldier who finds new reason to fight when Captain America calls upon him and quickly establishes an easy, warm friendship between them. It’s nice the movie takes time between the explosions and chaos to make new friends and keep the old, interested in some small way in relationships and how they play out through slam-bang rat-a-tat movement.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo, sitcom veterans who, Community paintball episodes aside, make a big action debut here, filming the action in a clean and comprehensible style. The early boat-set sequence includes plenty of shots that refreshingly reveal the entire action head-to-toe, sometimes for seconds at a time. In later car chases, gun battles, fisticuffs, and aerial commotions, they cut rather deftly between perspectives and don’t let chaotic close-up inserts confuse too badly. The majority of the action – a one-against-ten fistfight in an elevator, a man in a winged jetpack outsmarting heat-seeking missiles – is cleverly staged. It’s all so engaging and enjoyable that it’s a bit of a let down to admit it’s also all a tad exhausting in the end. It’s exciting and it wore me out. After over two hours with often pervasive rounds of gunfire – minions just shoot and shoot and shoot, the body count looming large – it grows wearying. By the time the movie is well into its big blowout finale, twists and surprises largely in its rearview, I was ready for the punching and shooting to reach their inevitable end. It’s fun, but I had my fill.

Still, reliable and dependable, this Marvel universe of interlocking franchises has dropped another quality product off of the assembly line. At worst, these films can feel slight and predictable, pinned in by the corporate dictates of the overarching narrative. Much as I’ve enjoyed all of these movies to some extent or another, I’m interested, but not overly invested in the big picture. In individual films, moments of straight-faced near-campiness (anything Asgardian in the Thor movies), side pleasures (the first Captain America’s unexpected and delightful musical number), and funny supporting performances (Tom Hiddleston, Sam Rockwell, Kat Dennings, Tommy Lee Jones), stick with me the most. So it is to the filmmakers’ credit that in Captain America: The Winter Soldier they shake things up, providing all the expected thrills and smiles along with a welcome modicum of complexity to the characters' primary-colors comic book world as it crumbles around them in entertaining explosiveness.

Hope and Glory: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER

Captain America: The First Avenger is the purest distillation of the serial adventure narrative aesthetic since Raiders of the Lost Ark introduced us to Indiana Jones (an adventure this new film obliquely references). To say Captain America isn’t as good as Raiders is merely saying that it isn’t the best action movie ever made. That’s hardly too big a strike against it, is it? This is a pulpy men-on-a-mission World War II picture with a big splashy dose of period detail and winking homage to every little bit of its genre roots. There’s always another cliffhanger around the corner, sometimes literally, right up into the end credits and beyond and through it all storms Captain America who, far from being yet another indistinguishable smirk in tights, is actually built upon a full-fledged character worth caring about. This, my friends, is the fully satisfying pure dose of superheroic adrenaline that I’ve been craving all summer.

Before we even get to Captain America, and all the explosive pyrotechnics that follow, first we must meet Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a puny guy with a good heart, who desperately wants to join the United States Army. It’s 1942, you see, and Nazis are marching across Europe. (There’s conflict in Asia as well of course, but the movie doesn’t have time to fight on two fronts). While thousands of Americans are doing their part, Rogers is forced to sit on the sidelines, placed there by his size, his asthma, and his basic lack of muscle and toughness. He’s filled with a sense of justice and civic duty that is unable to find full expression, but only until a kind military scientist (Stanley Tucci) takes pity on him and allows him entry into a special training camp that is looking for the right man on which to try out a new program.

Under the direction of this scientist, as well as hotshot engineer Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), a lovely British intelligence officer (Hayley Atwell), and a craggy general (Tommy Lee Jones), Rogers is dosed with a specially formulated serum that adds musculature and stamina, lifting away his physical weakness, creating a “super solider” out of him. He’s even better than expected, which is good because the Nazi “deep science division” led by the villainous Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving) is on the march, having discovered a glowing cube of some import in a remote Norwegian village and developed it into a kind of supercharged energy weapon.

Rather than allowing all this to become overly somber, silly, or convoluted, the three most common errors in so many recent movies of this kind, Captain America barrels forward with a ceaseless sincerity and energy from moment to moment. It’s tremendously exciting with great bits of character and comedy for seasoning. But rather than mercilessly grinding its way through a chaos of effects and computerized daffiness, this is a film with shape and emotion, a sense of set up and payoff and of fully realized characters in a fully realized world. Each action beat feels like a part of the plot in important ways, but even when the Captain isn’t flinging himself and his men through combat, the movie is still hugely entertaining.

Take, for instance, a detour on the way to the front lines that finds the U.S. government parading Captain America across the country promoting war bonds that’s a sequence of color and music that’s both a critique of propaganda and essential character building. Rather than flinging the audience straight into the action, the film has introduced us to scrawny Rogers, moved him through science fiction hocus pocus into a superhero and then takes its time in allowing the character to explore his new persona. The best origin story films, like Richard Donner’s Superman, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-man, allow the character to feel his way towards the iconography, the outsized iconic persona we all have in our heads on our way into the theater. And you certainly don’t get much more iconic than the star-spangled Captain America who famously punched Adolf Hitler on the cover of his very first comic book in 1941, an image that gets a nice little reference here.

With a character so tied to the World War II iconography of the culture’s imagination, it makes perfect sense for the narrative to reflect the adventure serials of the day. But in its colorful Cinemascope presentation it also feels visually similar to the retroactive glorification of the conflict that occurred in the widescreen war flicks of the 50’s and 60’s. All of this retro style and content is filtered through a sleeker, more modern effects machine and then steeped in timeless sturdy craftsmanship. Here is a film with clean, uncomplicated visual comprehensibility put to use telling a fully realized story with characters charmingly acted that go through emotional arcs and events that add up into a fulfilling climax. It’s popcorn pleasure of a high quality.

Director Joe Johnston, a solid if often unremarkable filmmaker, has been in this territory before with his 1991 retro actioner The Rocketeer, a fun flop that has a small and reasonable cult following. He bests his work there creating, I dare say, the best film of his career by far. It’s all of a piece, fitting perfectly between two genres, suiting each just fine. It’s both a crackling period piece action film that smartly shies away from mindless jingoism and the most fully engaging character-driven stand-alone puzzle piece in the larger superhero universe that Marvel has been building with their other features like Iron Man and Thor. But that’s just added bonus to the simple fact that Captain America is flat out the most fun I’ve had with a big budget studio adventure in a very long time.