Friday reviews for 14 July 2023

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and Coco Reo Māori in theatres plus Wham! on Netflix

The latest epis­ode in the Tom Cruise and Cristopher McQuarrie preposter-thon that is Mission: Impossible knows how to please the fans.

It has a suit­ably epic run­ning time (163 minutes) that allows room for some exten­ded action set-pieces (air­ports, car chases, trains), plenty of globe­trot­ting (Qatar, Rome, Venice and Norway pre­tend­ing to be Austria), doesn’t skimp on those exten­ded expos­i­tion scenes that give the view­er a breath­er, and – unlike Across the Spider-verse – actu­ally spends the last few minutes set­ting up the next film in the series rather than just com­ing to a halt.

The vil­lain of the piece is a sen­tient arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence known as ‘The Entity’, a com­puter pro­gram so power­ful if can pre­dict and then con­trol the future. The Impossible Missions Force (not the International Monetary Fund, is that the first time that gag has been used in this fran­chise?) has to find a key which will unlock the Entity’s source code and des­troy it, at the same time as every gov­ern­ment in the world is try­ing to take con­trol of it.

A com­puter pro­gram isn’t in itself ter­ribly cine­mat­ic so the Entity has a human rep­res­ent­at­ive (Esai Morales) who just hap­pens to have a bit of his­tory with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt.

This raises the emo­tion­al stakes for Hunt, who has to recon­cile him­self to the fact that, des­pite all the tri­umphant mis­sions, he has failed to keep the most import­ant people in his life alive and that those losses are the price that he – and every­one else – pays for the work that they are in.

I hope that this theme gets a rich­er pay­off in the second film because it’s a suit­ably heavy­weight real­isa­tion after so many films and Mission: Impossible – Dead Recloning Part One only scratches the sur­face of it before hurt­ling towards anoth­er death-defying stunt for Mr. Cruise.

I con­fess to being a bit dis­en­gaged with this one – per­haps the lack of emo­tion­al stakes men­tioned above – and I can pre­dict that I will be twice as enter­tained by the inev­it­able Christopher McQuarrie com­ment­ary track on the home video. If you ever get a chance to listen to one of those, or an appear­ance on a pod­cast some­where, do so as he is a very astute and amus­ing com­ment­at­or on his own films.

Coco Reo Māori is the first of these col­lab­or­a­tions between Disney and Matewa Media that I have seen and I was pleas­antly sur­prised at how suc­cess­ful it is. The cast­ing is spec­tac­u­larly good, espe­cially young Mānuhera Mānihera as Miguel, but it’s the cul­tur­al align­ment that worked best for me – cul­tures that believe inher­ently that loved ones that have passed are still with us as long as we don’t for­get them.

Coco is about a young kid with dreams of music thwarted by an inex­plic­able fam­ily pro­hib­i­tion on that sort of thing. On the Day of the Dead, when fam­il­ies gath­er to remem­ber all those who came before, he is magic­ally trans­por­ted to the Land of the Dead where he thinks he has dis­covered the fam­ily secret but it all turns out to be a lot more com­plic­ated than that.

The screen­ing I shared on Thursday was full of a big group of young kohanga reo kids and their mind­ers and it was a thrill to be around an occa­sion that so clearly exem­pli­fies what makes this coun­try dif­fer­ent. There was so much pop­corn and Coke for the lit­tlies that they needed a shop­ping trol­ley to bring it all in to the cinema. A joy­ous, sugar-fuelled occasion.

Coco made me cry the first time I saw it and it did so again, des­pite the lack of English sub­titles for the reo. I’m not just giv­ing this a good review because they gave me a free ice cream when they dis­covered they’d over ordered for the kids but that cer­tainly did not hurt.

Wham! on Netflix was a very pleas­ant sur­prise. In some ways, you could argue that Chris Smith’s doc­u­ment­ary is very like the band’s music – pleas­ant and inof­fens­ive on the sur­face but hid­ing some insight­ful moments, and then get­ting more and more mean­ing­ful as it goes on.

At first, I thought it was simply going to be a reputation-restorer for the mem­ber of the duo who is still with us, Andrew Ridgeley, who was rap­idly eclipsed in the tal­ent depart­ment by the icon George Michael.

Like Ernie Wise to Michael’s Eric Morecambe, the per­ceived wis­dom from a dis­tance was that he basic­ally coat-tailed his way to fame and for­tune thanks to a geni­us best friend.

Well, the film makes abund­antly clear that without Ridgeley there would have been no George Michael. Not only was the whole idea of a band Ridgeley’s idea but his sunny optim­ism was the per­fect foil for Michael’s closeted anxi­ety and Ridgeley’s one-day-at-a-time enjoy-every-moment philo­sophy bal­anced Michael’s com­pet­it­ive and more cal­cu­lat­ing nature.

Despite the loss of George Michael in 2016, his voice and views are well rep­res­en­ted here, both band­mates still being seen as equal part­ners in an enter­prise that changed pop forever.

This edi­tion of the Friday review is com­ing out on a pub­lic hol­i­day here in Aotearoa and, in future, I’m prob­ably not going to post on what would nor­mally be a day off. But as we are just get­ting star­ted, and Mission: Impossible is about to get swamped by Barbie and Oppenheimer, I thought I would make an exception.