MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION

(Christopher McQuarrie, 2015)

I love how much of a cinematic classicist McQuarrie evidently is - the coherent way he puts together action scenes, low on cuts but high on nicely-blocked and framed compositions; his use of anamorphic cameras; his partnership with composer Joe Kraemer, whose score here is a beautifully inventive and evocative treatment of contemporary 1960s scores; the way he makes references to classic Hollywood movies (Rebecca Ferguson, who does bear some resemblance to Ingrid Bergman, here plays a character called Ilsa, and is encountered at one point in Casablanca), in this film obviously playing with nourish motifs and ideas including that of the femme fatale; and his ability to stick to some basic principles of action and character even in the midst of a chaotic modern blockbuster like this one.
If each instalment in the Misson Impossible franchise so far has been dominated by it's directors style, well then McQuarrie's classical storytelling allows him to pay a sort of tribute to the series as a whole, with scenes in London (DePalma), the Middle East (Bird), a motorcycle chase (Woo) and Cruise's Hunt set on saving a woman he clearly has strong feelings for (Abrams). The plot finds Hunt on the run (again) as he tries to track down the head of the Syndicate (Sean Harris, lending just a fragment of his creepy intensity to an underwritten part), an "anti-IMF" made up of supposedly deceased foreign agents.
Hunt is aided by his old pal Benjy (Simon Pegg, decent comic relief and given a bit more to do this time), new boss Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and even older laptop-toting buddy Luther (Ving Rhames). The new blood is British agent Ilsa (Ferguson,  beyond the set-pieces, easily the best reason to see the film), who McQuarrie uses as a recurrent force for plot progression - she drives events, while Hunt is constantly playing catch-up, trying to figure out exactly what is going on. The classiness of the cast helps keep all the exposition and character beats a pleasure to watch, and, as a screenwriter, McQuarrie retains the ability to come up with the odd zinger. But mainly he is concerned here with ways to keep his leading man active.
This is Cruise at his best as a physical performer - jumping, hanging, sprinting, swimming, punching and kicking, he is a hyperactive force of nature who hurls himself through a series of gruelling, often-hilarious set-pieces with vigour, selling us the plot as he does so.
That plot bears the obvious scars of late rewrites and reshoots, especially in the third act, but the energy and efficient style on show means it is always nicely escapist fun.

THE WORLD'S END

(Edgar Wright, 2013)

As befits the final film in the "Cornetto" trilogy, The World's End is a genre mash-up with a thematic focus on friendship and extended adolescence. Just like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, its distinctively English comic approach to genre works brilliantly throughout. But it adds a little something - it is darker, deeper, more resonant and moving.

Written by leads Simon Pegg and Nick Frost alongside director Edgar Wright, the story follows five late thirtysomething friends from the Southern English town of Newton Haven as they return home for another go at the "Golden Mile", the legendary pub crawl they last attempted as teenagers. The whole thing is the idea of Gary King (Pegg, better than he has ever been), who still dresses, talks and thinks as he did back then. He rounds up the old gang, all of them having moved on with their lives - Oliver (Martin Freeman) a slick estate agent, Peter (Eddie Marsan) a car salesman, Stephen (Paddy Considine) a building contractor and Andy (Frost) a solicitor. They are reluctant, but out of a mixture of sentimental nostalgia and pity for Gary, they agree to return. Old tensions rise to the surface during their  awkward crawl, however, before everything gets a lot weirder - Newton Haven seems to have undergone some sort of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers type of episode, and soon the five are fighting and running for their lives.

With an entire cast populated with excellent British comic actors, The World's End is strongly characterised throughout; this is crucial when the comedy subsides somewhat in the last act and the science fiction comes to the forefront. The five principals create a nice and believable group dynamic, each tension sensitively traced and nuanced, their shared memories perfectly judged in their mix of self-mythologising and rueful embarrassment. 

But this is never a drama - it is always funny. There is a level of satire here, in the portrayal of a globalised world (cleverly referenced in the climax), loads of running gags and some brilliantly witty dialogue. The climax comes down to a very Douglas Adams argument between drunken men and a logical alien, and Wright knows how to put together an impressive action sequence on a relatively modest budget. Perhaps the only real disappointment here is that his direction feels somewhat muted after the tour-de-force of Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, but his storytelling is as seamless and powerfully simple as ever.

And any minor complaints should be balanced against how much more emotional and painful this film feels than the other "Cornetto" instalments. Gary King is a great comic creation, but there is a genuine melancholy to him too, and the other four "Musketeers" bring this out with delicacy and even some universality. The ending is dark too, but it feels earned and right somehow, without ever sacrificing laughs.

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

(JJ Abrams, 2013)

Strange that after expending so much energy to create an entirely different (but consistent in continuity terms) branch in time for his reboot of Star Trek, Abrams goes straight back to the well here, lifting scenes, situations and characters directly from the greatest of the original run of Star Trek films, Nicholas Meyer's 1982 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
And early on, you almost believe he might pull it off. This film is so confident and bold from the off, dropping right into the action as Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Ships Doctor "Bones" McCoy (Karl Urban) flee an alien race during an attempt to save their nascent species from destruction by an active volcano. Kirk and Bones are such strong, archetypal figures that no introduction is necessary - this does feel like an episode in a long-running series at that point. The other familiar characters are all introduced in the same scene; science officer Mr Spock (Zachary Quinto), who is ying to Kirk's yang, communications officer Lt Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg), alongside the more thankless Misters Sulu (John Cho) and Chekhov (Anton Yelchin). Also introduced is Abrams' breathless, epic approach to action scenes, all spectacle, lens flares (more on those in a moment) and ceaseless movement, interrupted by the occasional awed shot of something massive (usually in this film an enormous spacecraft).
Then the plot kicks in; a Federation agent named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch, utterly stealing the film) appears to be waging a one man terrorist campaign against the Federation itself. After losing his mentor Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood) in one of Harrison's attacks, Kirk and the Enterprise are dispatched to the Klingon homeworld to hunt him down. Only everything is much more complicated than it at first appears, and even Harrison has more to him than is obvious on the surface...
Welded to all of this is a learn-and-grow character arc for Kirk which never really makes much sense for the character or the film. Pine is good - his Kirk honours William Shatner but is very much his own take - but the film doesn't need this story of his realisation of what it takes to be a leader, and the final act sequence between Kirk and Spock, nodding shamelessly towards the far superior scene in Wrath of Khan, is a curiously hollow moment. Wrath of Khan has 20 years of weight pressing upon the relationship of its Kirk and Spock, and the fact that the actors were ageing gave it an undeniable resonance this film cannot hope to replicate. Instead the explicit invitation to compare Star Trek Into Darkness with that older film does Abrams' film few favours.
That is not to say its a complete disaster. The cast are all good, nailing their roles in a few instants. The action rolls along in a pleasurable surge of incident and colour. Abrams' style is mixed; sometimes beautifully concise, others shockingly ugly. His use of lens flares remains a problem, but he can tell a story, and he puts his budgets up on the screen. Its just a bit of a shame he squandered this much of a budget on this story, already so well told once before...

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL

(Brad Bird, 2011)

Director Brad Bird has such a sparkling track record in animation - The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille is some run of work - and such a good reputation as the sort of artist who makes commercial, popular films which are also personal, that it wasn't all that great a surprise when Tom Cruise chose him to helm the fourth installment in his Mission Impossible series. And Bird does well here. While this may be his worst film as Director, it rivals Brian DePalma's original as the best in this series, a crisply directed, vigourous collection of sensational action sequences which gives the audience little time to consider its many flaws and implausibilities.
Chief among those flaws are the almost lazy story: IMF Agent Ethan Hunt and his disavowed team - an IMF for the austerity era - must stop a crazed extremist from starting a nuclear war. To do this they bounce across the globe; from Moscow to Dubai to Mumbai, and take him on in a series of fight scenes, attempted heists and chases. Most notable are Cruise's scaling the outside of The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, captured in a clutch of dizzying crane and helicopter shots by Bird. That scene is followed by a sharply edited, brutal fight scene which morphs into a car chase in a sandstorm. The villain is a little generic - he features rarely in the narrative, in fact - and most of the character material comes between the IMF team, where Jeremy Renner and Paula Patton are both slightly wasted despite emotional baggage in their back-stories, and Simon Pegg gets all the laughs.
Cruise is fine, and Robert Elwits photography, together with Michael Giacchino's score and the beautiful, atmospheric locations, ensure that it's aways a sensually pleasurable experience.

PAUL

(Greg Mottola, 2011)

Cruder and broader than either of the other Simon Pegg and Nick Frost collaborations (Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, both, tellingly, co-written and directed by Edgar Wright, whose visual wit and lightness of touch are sorely missed here, competent though Mottola is), this explicitly combines elements of various genres, from the character dynamics of a buddy movie, some Kevin Smith style geek comedy, Spielbergian alien encounters, and X-Files agents, with car chases, gunfights and fist fights all played mainly for laughs. The tone is odd; perhaps because the narrative throws in some fish out of water comedy as two British geeks complain about American tea and justify the fact that British police arent armed as they are terrorised by various Yank stereotypes, their very presence providing some "comedy of embarrassment" along the way.
As such it's a mixed bag, some of it very funny (Kirsten Wiig's Fundamentalist Christian discovering swearing and doing it wrong), some of it not (far too many smug geek references), but it's breezy enough and sporadically charming.
Neither Pegg nor Frost registers all that strongly, their characters slightly generic and drab, and both utterly blown away by the CGI alien of the title, nicely voiced by Seth Rogen, whose way with sarcasm and irony are well-utilised. The alien gets all of the best lines, and is by far the films most charismatic performer.