Mission: Impossible - Fallout

With a Mission: Impossible movie you know exactly what you're going to get: plot twists a-go-go, some baddie hell-bent on world domination (or destruction) and Tom Cruise performing a series of insanely dangerous stunts as his Ethan Hunt character and the IMF team save the world. You would think that being disavowed by their government yet again would get old but we expect it as part of the franchise's tried-and-true formula. Let's face it these movies are cinematic delivery systems for masterfully orchestrated action sequences with Cruise upping the ante with every subsequent installment. The latest – Fallout (2018) is no different. Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie returns to orchestrate the mayhem once again and improves on his previous outing, the excellent Rogue Nation (2015).

In the wake of Hunt capturing Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) in the previous movie, his fanatical disciples from the Syndicate have regrouped and renamed themselves The Apostles and are hellbent on obtaining three plutonium cores for their latest client, the mysterious John Lark. Hunt and his team are tasked with finding Lark and intercepting his meeting with the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), an arms dealer who is brokering the deal. Naturally, things don’t go as planned and Hunt is forced to free Lane with the help of untrustworthy CIA operative August Walker (Henry Cavill), charged with babysitting the IMF team, but who clearly has his own agenda. The rest of movie plays out in a series of plot twists and double-crosses as the stakes are increasingly raised.

Freed from the shackles of the dour DC Cinematic Universe movies, Henry Cavill gets to play a hulking brute cum antagonist – “the hammer” to Ethan’s “scalpel” as Angela Bassett’s Director of the CIA puts it so succinctly. The actor is clearly having a blast playing an assassin as evident in a fantastically kinetic fight sequence that takes place in a public bathroom as Walker and Ethan square off against a mysterious terrorist. It is a sober reminder of just how stale the speed-up/slow-down action sequences of the superhero movies Cavill has been involved in have become. Here, McQuarrie allows him to cut loose and play a different role, which he dives into with gusto.

McQuarrie manages to give everyone on the team their moment to shine, putting an emphasis on teamwork – something that was missing from some of the previous installments. In particular, it is great to see Ving Rhames given so much to do where in the past it felt like he was marginalized at times. Simon Pegg even gets in on the action, including a crucial part in the movie’s nerve-shredding three-way finale.

If Paula Patton’s tough IMF agent in Ghost Protocol (2011) marked a significant evolution in how female characters went from damsels in distress to throwing down just as hard as the men, then Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust – introduced in Rogue Nation – was even more advanced. Her character is clearly Ethan’s equal and with her own intriguingly enigmatic agenda. This continues in Fallout as initially we aren’t sure just whose side this MI6 agent is on and then once it becomes clear, her dilemma is just as personal as Ethan’s.

Tom Cruise always comes across as an otherworldly presence in interviews with his forced laugh and vague, stock answers that come from playing the fame game for so long, but in the Mission: Impossible movies, in particular this one, he appears completely comfortable as he’s played Ethan for so long that it has become second nature. This familiarity with the character and his relationships with the IMF team has never felt more natural. As a result, we care about what happens to them, which is crucial to Ethan’s central dilemma in Fallout: saving someone he loves versus saving the world. McQuarrie lets us think that we know more about Ethan’s past by the end of the movie without actually telling us anything that new – instead, shedding light on his inner life, which is summed up best towards the end when a battered Ethan is reunited with his team. The emotions that play over Cruise’s face are surprisingly moving.

With Ghost Protocol, Cruise upped his game on the stunt work with every subsequent installment having us wonder, what crazy stunt is he really going to do next? It is a wonderfully analog element in this digital age chock full of CGI heroics that we pretend happened but know in our hearts were created in a computer somewhere. McQuarrie is his partner in crime, using long takes and full body shots to show Cruise really jumping out of a plane at 25,000 feet and flying down the streets of Paris on a motorcycle at insane speeds only to get knocked off and thrown like a rag doll. How long can he keep this up? Who knows but for now it is a lot of fun to watch.

Is this the best Mission: Impossible movie yet as some claim? I don’t know. I have to see it a few more times and let it sink in before I can rank it up against the rest of the series but it is certainly right up there. McQuarrie has pulled off a deft cinematic trick with Fallout by making a standalone sequel. There is just enough exposition dialogue to clue newbies into who everyone is and their relationship to one another while judiciously sprinkling references to previous movies for fans in the know. He also sets up fascinating possibilities for the next Mission: Impossible movie should he choose to accept it.

Jack Reacher

There was a certain amount of trepidation when it was announced that Tom Cruise was cast in the title role of Jack Reacher (2012), an adaptation of the popular series of crime novels by Lee Child. Fans were upset that the movie star did not resemble the character in the least despite getting the author’s blessing. Cruise used his clout to get Christopher McQuarrie out of director’s jail after the critical and commercial failure of his directorial debut with The Way of the Gun (2000) and entrusted him to adapt Child’s 2005 novel One Shot. The end result is a smartly-written, well-acted thriller with lean, visceral action sequences.

A sniper (Jai Courtney) kills five random people outside of a stadium in Pittsburgh. All of the evidence points to disgraced ex-soldier James Barr (Joseph Sikora) and he’s arrested by the police. During questioning he refuses to say anything, only writing on a piece of paper the words, “Get me Jack Reacher.” Before this man can be summoned, Barr is badly beaten into a coma while in custody. Guilty or not, it’s a clear violation of his rights and a lawyer by the name of Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike) decides to defend him.

Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise), a former military police officer now troubleshooting drifter, surfaces and explains to Helen his connection to Barr. She convinces him to do a little digging into the case and it quickly becomes obvious that all the evidence points a little too conveniently towards Barr. Who set him up and why? The deeper Helen and Reacher dig the more danger they find themselves in with an enigmatic man known as the Zec (Werner Herzog) pulling the strings. Initially, Helen tries to convince Reacher to help her with the case while later on the tables are turned as it is he who has to convince her to continue with their investigation.

Tom Cruise is excellent as the mysterious Reacher, playing him with an engaging mix of no-nonsense attitude with occasional flourishes of humor. Reacher is the kind of person that carries himself with confidence that comes from being very good at what he does. On occasions, McQuarrie shows Reacher thinking the case through or quietly sifting through evidence or walking the crime scene. His economy of words mirrors his efficiency as a man of action, knowing the exact moves to put down five attackers without killing them. Cruise may not look like Reacher, as described in Child’s book, but he conveys an unbeatable combination of intelligence and physical prowess.

A pre-Gone Girl (2014) Rosamund Pike is good as a determined attorney that is initially exasperated at Reacher’s knack for getting in trouble, but as their investigation progresses realizes that there is more to this case than meets the eye. Her performance hints at a woman with something to prove – first and foremost to her father (Richard Jenkins), the city’s upstanding District Attorney, and then to her co-workers who think she’s crazy for following a case she can’t possibly win. Helen is a good foil for Reacher, always a step behind him – the Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. Helen has a strong sense of justice – so much so that she takes on a case that her firm doesn’t want and her father tries to dissuade her from pursuing. Unfortunately, in the last third of the film she is reduced to a damsel in distress, a hostage that must be rescued by Reacher.

As he demonstrated with The Way of the Gun, McQuarrie knows how to orchestrate action sequences for maximum effect. He continues to do so with Jack Reacher as evident in the cleanly choreographed action where you know where everyone is and what is going on at all times. McQuarrie has crafted a no frills, no bullshit thriller devoid of narrative fat – it’s an old school crime film as if the filmmaker took an Action Movie 101 course taught by Don Siegel with a minor in car chases taught by John Frankenheimer. Case in point: the wonderfully executed car chase as Reacher pursues the bad guys and is in turn chased by the cops. Even more impressive is that Cruise did all of his own driving! Compared to most contemporary action movies, the editing in Jack Reacher is practically sedate in tempo—or, rather methodical, much like the film’s protagonist. McQuarrie understands that you only need to make an edit when necessary and eschews frenetic hand-held camerawork that is still popular for a much calmer approach that is just as effective if not more so.

I like how McQuarrie subverts some of the Hollywood thriller clichés. Helen and Reacher never become romantically involved and, at one point, she even mistakenly assumes he’s going to kiss her. The first six to seven minutes of the film are dialogue free as the filmmaker utilizes a strong sense of visual storytelling, forcing us to pay attention to what is happening. He also opts to have no to very little music used during the action sequences, which gives them a more visceral impact. Werner Herzog’s bad guy is unrepentant and a survivor with his experiences in the Soviet Gulag shaping his entire worldview. He plays the Zec with an icy quality that is quite unsettling. There’s a corrupt cop, but his reasons for being in league with the bad guys remains deliciously ambiguous and unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

Jack Reacher is stylish and grown-up, assuming that its audience is smart enough to follow Reacher’s investigation in a way that adheres to the usual investigative beats but presented in a slightly unusual way. McQuarrie has written a solid screenplay with snappy, give-and-take dialogue that comes to life when Reacher first meets Helen, her father and the police detective (David Oyelowo) in charge of the investigation. The exchange between them is funny and delivered with crackerjack timing by the actors. There is a wonderful economy of words, like when Reacher recounts Barr’s stint in Iraq. McQuarrie only shows us a glimpse of it and lets Reacher fill in the rest, giving us just enough information to establish Barr’s past and their connection.

In its seemingly random nature, the opening sniper attack echoes the real-life Beltway sniper attacks that took place over three weeks in October 2002 in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. and its patsy shooter with a checkered past anticipates American Sniper (2014) by two years. Both films feature veterans who’ve done questionable things and returned home psychologically scarred, having trouble adjusting to regular life. McQuarrie includes nice details, like when Helen visits with the father of one of the sniper victims and this puts a human face on what were initially anonymous targets. It shows that this rampage has consequences, leaving behind families devastated by the death of their loved ones.

Jack Reacher’s coda is surprisingly moving as McQuarrie quietly makes a poignant statement about the effect of the war in the Middle East has on an individual without being preachy about it. People come back after making life and death decisions on a daily basis and are expected to adjust to “normal” life. Barr is just a guy trying to put his life back together and becomes an unwitting pawn in a scheme that involves making money through elaborate scams. While Reacher busted him for crimes he committed during the war, he fights to clear the man’s name back in the world. Some soldiers return home from war and are forced to the margins of society while others, like Reacher, do so by choice. One must give Cruise credit for using his clout within the industry to get a mid-level budgeted film for grown-ups made at a Hollywood studio – something that is virtually unheard of these days. One hopes that he can do so again for a sequel that this intriguing character deserves.

The Way of the Gun

“People are welcome to hate my film . . . It was never meant to be pleasant. It was never meant to be fun.” – Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie

The Way of the Gun (2000) is a film made out of anger and frustration. After winning an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Usual Suspects (1994), Christopher McQuarrie should have been able to parlay that success into a dream project of his choosing and yet he couldn’t even get arrested while Bryan Singer went on to his own success with the X-Men films. It was actor Benicio del Toro who came to McQuarrie and suggested he write and direct a crime film. The reasoning was that a studio hoping for another potential Usual Suspects would bankroll it. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened but McQuarrie made it on his own terms. The result? A nihilistic action film cum neo-western that is unashamedly at odds with itself. The Way of the Gun straddles the line between the independent and studio worlds. It is easily the best post-modern crime film following in the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994).

The prologue plays out like a preview trailer for the film and features a then-relatively unknown Sarah Silverman as the ultimate foul-mouthed girlfriend with a big mouth and who unleashes a profanity-laced tirade on the film’s protagonists that it would have made Richard Pryor blush. Even though it has nothing to do with the rest of the film, its purpose is to set the tone and establish the two protagonists, Parker (Ryan Phillippe) and Longbaugh (Benicio del Toro), as atypical in that they provoke a fight for no reason, and to let us know that this isn’t going to be your typical action film.

As Parker’s opening monologue states, they live on the margins of society and who “stepped off the path and went looking for the fortune that we knew was looking for us.” He and Longbaugh eke out a minimalist existence with no possessions or creature comforts because, according to Parker, “need is the ultimate monkey.” To get by they sell their blood and sperm, the latter in a very funny scene where the two men are subjected to a series of questions only to give very unconventional answers reminiscent of the clever dialogue in a Tarantino but without the obvious and often jarring popular culture references.

While cooling their heels at the clinic, they catch wind of a woman (Juliette Lewis) being paid one million dollars to have a baby for a rich couple (Scott Wilson and Kristin Lehman) who can’t be bothered to conceive one themselves. So, Parker and Longbaugh decide to kidnap the woman for money in a very unconventional way as they have to get past her two very determined bodyguards (Nicky Katt and Taye Diggs). This results in a shoot-out (in which innocent bystanders are killed in the crossfire) and an unusual car chase that has to be one of the slowest ever put on film.

When the bodyguards fail to protect the pregnant woman, the husband brings in a veteran professional, Joe Sarno (James Caan) and his partner (Geoffrey Lewis) who is introduced playing a bizarre version of Russian roulette (the reasons for which are never explained and left for us to ponder). Caan’s introduction establishes Sarno as the kind of confident criminal that populates Michael Mann’s films – the kind that are ultra-efficient and no-nonsense. You get the feeling that the two bodyguards consider him an over-the-hill geezer who’s out of touch, but Sarno sets them straight: “The only thing you can assume about a broken down old man is that he’s a survivor.”

The Way of the Gun has the requisite action sequences but the way that they are depicted constantly subvert genre conventions. There are no likable characters unless you count James Caan’s quietly confident “adjudicator,” who follows his own personal moral code. As McQuarrie said in an interview, he wasn’t interested in making a film that “you can follow characters who don’t go out of their way to ingratiate themselves to you, who aren’t traditionally sympathetic.” The two protagonists are amoral mercenaries who kidnap a pregnant woman for money. They are, in turn, pursued by two henchmen who are secretly plotting against their employer who has paid the pregnant woman to give him and his self-absorbed trophy wife her baby once it’s born. The employer’s son is a disgraced doctor.

McQuarrie takes the time to reveal the motivation for most of the major players involved. They are complex reasons in comparison to Parker and Longbaugh’s who are just in it for the money until Parker spends too much time with the mother and starts to develop traces of a conscience, conflicting his motivations. And yet whenever this happens, something occurs that snaps him back to the goal at hand: the money.

This film doesn’t care if you like it or not. What spawned such a confrontational attitude in McQuarrie? And what separates The Way of the Gun from other, “talky, violent guys ‘n’ guns” films popular in the 1990s? The answer lies with the aftermath of 1996 Academy Awards. After winning an Oscar, McQuarrie naively thought that he would be able to write his own ticket and “then you slowly start to realize no one in Hollywood is interested in making your film, they’re interested in making their films.” He spent years as a script doctor while trying to get financing together for an epic biopic of Alexander the Great for Warner Brothers. He realized that he had to make a film that was commercially successful if he was going to be treated seriously by Hollywood.

McQuarrie approached 20th Century Fox and told them he would be willing to write and direct a film for any budget that they would be willing to give him so long as he had complete creative control. He remembers that the studio told him “to get fucked. No money. No control. No nothing.” What the studios really wanted was for him to write another Usual Suspects. Angry and frustrated, McQuarrie met Benicio del Toro and producer Ken Kokin (who had also worked on The Usual Suspects) for coffee and the actor convinced the writer to write a crime film on his own terms because he would face the least amount of interference from the studio. However, McQuarrie did not want to be typecast as “a crime guy” but realized that he had nothing to lose. He was, as he puts it, “unemployable and ready to make trouble,” which sounds like the perfect ingredients for a down ‘n’ dirty crime film.

McQuarrie begrudgingly started to write a screenplay and the first thing he did was to write a list of every taboo and “everything I knew a cowardly executive would refuse to accept from a ‘sympathetic’ leading man.” Not surprisingly, he said, “This movie was written from a place of real anger.” The idea for the film came from two sources: Del Toro telling McQuarrie that he had never seen a really interesting kidnapping film and the screenwriter’s wife telling him about an article she had read about an executive with a young wife who hired a surrogate mother so that she could have a child. They even hired bodyguards for the surrogate mother and as soon as McQuarrie heard “bodyguards,” the film came to him. He drew inspiration from films like Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and The Magnificent Seven (1960) because “the camera remains as far back from the action as possible and just captures the drama.”

McQuarrie wrote the first draft in five days. The first ten pages were a prologue, a trailer to another film with Parker and Longbaugh that was to be shot as “slick and hip as possible. Guy Ritchie and Michael Bay but with horrible, unspeakable acts of violence and degradation,” McQuarrie remembers. He realized that this was too extreme and cut it during pre-production. He and Del Toro gave the screenplay to several high-profile actors at the time, all of whom turned them down. Because of the lack of sympathetic characters, McQuarrie didn’t even bother to show the script to any Hollywood studios. Instead, he went to five independent companies and only Artisan Entertainment agreed to make the film.

Artisan resisted the casting of Del Toro because he had an independent film/art house film reputation. The studio wanted Phillippe who had just come off of Cruel Intentions (1999). The young actor wanted to change the direction of his career and, according to McQuarrie, “was besieged with choice offers, and we didn’t want him, but he would not take no for an answer.” The filmmaker met with actor and liked his enthusiasm for the script. Juliette Lewis was McQuarrie’s first choice for Robin, the surrogate mother and wanted her character to tweak the stereotypical view of women in crime films: “The woman is essential to the story and no one wants her around. Everyone wants to be rid of her. She is the complication. She is the conflict.”

The Way of the Gun is the complete antithesis to the crowd-pleasing Usual Suspects with its realistic depiction of violence and how it affects those who inflict it and those who it is inflicted on. In many respects, the film pays homage to the gritty crime films of Sam Peckinpah, like The Getaway (1972) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), especially in the climactic shoot-out in a Mexican brothel but eschewing a flashy, slow-motion bloodbath for a gun battle reminiscent of the bank heist shoot-out in Heat (1995). There’s no stylish editing or jerky, hand-held camerawork. We always know who is where and what is happening. McQuarrie’s film is similar to Peckinpah’s in the types of characters that populate its world and the lack of judgment placed on them. One could easily see Sarno fitting seamlessly into one of Peckinpah’s films. On the surface, McQuarrie’s film appears to be aping Tarantino’s glib, pop culture-saturated dialogue and flashy violence but The Way of the Gun goes deeper, exploring the professional code between criminals like Del Toro and Caan, as well as showing how painful and messy violence really is in a climactic shoot-out that features a graphic childbirth.

Not surprisingly, The Way of the Gun received mixed reviews. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "McQuarrie pulls, pummels and pushes us, makes his characters jump through hoops, and at the end produces carloads of 'bag men' who have no other function than to pop up and be shot at. . .Enough, already.” In his review for the New York Times, Elvis Mitchell wrote, "It's a song you've heard before, but each chord is hit with extraordinary concentration." Andy Seiler praised James Caan's performance in his review for USA Today, "To hear Caan menacingly intone 'I can promise you a day of reckoning you will not live long enough to never forget' is to remember why this man is a star." In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, "Phillippe talks like Brando; Del Toro apes the body language. Nevertheless, James Caan steals the movie as a veteran tough guy, rotating his torso around some unseen truss.”

The film ends on an ambiguous downer – do they die? What happens to the girl’s baby? The answers to these questions are left up to the individual to figure out. McQuarrie isn’t going to provide any easy answers and he’s not going to hold your hand. Why should he? The entire film was an exercise at subverting expectations and genre conventions. Thankfully, McQuarrie doesn’t compromise his intentions one iota – the benefit of making the film independently. He wanted to make a film that was “difficult to watch. I wanted to make a film about violence and criminals that had to be endured rather than something that entertained without consequence.” Whether you like The Way of the Gun or not, there’s no question that he succeeded in what he wanted to do.

SOURCES

Arnold, Gary. "Phillipe Targets Roles with Danger." Washington Post. September 8, 2000.

King, Loren. "McQuarrie Chooses His Usual Suspects." Boston Globe. September 3, 2000.

Konow, David. “The Way of the Screenwriter: An Interview with Christopher McQuarrie.” Creative Screenwriting. September/October 2000.

Malanowski, Jamie. “Making the Movie They Let You Make.” The New York Times. September 3, 2000.

Pulver, Andrew. "It's An Intimate Love Story Between 2 Men, Try Selling That to Warner Bros." The Guardian. November 17, 2000.