Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, Final Destination Bloodlines, The Salt Path and La Cocina are in cinemas and Nonnas is streaming on Netflix.
One can’t help feeling that the title change from Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two to Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a bit like those documents you work on that end up being called “Important Film Review 250519 – FINAL-FINAL this time – no more edits” but still has to get that last sign-off from the boss. The boss in this case being Tom Cruise.
In the opening credits, the film is called “A Tom Cruise Production” and I don’t recall previous episodes being quite so closely aligned to its star. It’s an appropriate credit, though, because the subtext throughout is about how there is no one alive like Cruise and we’re going to prove it to you.
I’ve seen the word Messianic used about the closing chapter of this Mission: Impossible arc. We’re told (often) that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is the only person who can save the world from the rogue A.I. known as The Entity and that we need to trust him – have faith in him – one last time. He even dies and is resurrected.
The problem with putting our faith so squarely in Mr. Cruise is that Hunt is now so far from being a character we can identify with that there’s nothing there for an audience to feel. I appreciated the extraordinary set-pieces and enjoyed the superb craftsmanship, but all that happened for me was that I was entertained. It meant nothing to me. The flat ending – the absence of emotional or celebratory release – didn’t help.
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Another problem the film has in engaging us in anything deeper is that “The Entity” isn’t a character, as such. We have to be told what it wants – over and over again – and that its endgame feels like a 1980s Cold War retread. Nuclear weapons in bunkers, a digitally enhanced global annihilation fantasy.
What The Final Reckoning does exceptionally well – it’s in the franchise’s DNA after all – are ticking clocks and countdowns. Director Christopher McQuarrie and editor Eddie Hamilton ensure that each of those spectacular set-pieces are (literally) gripping – the editor-in-chief and I still hold hands in the movies and it took me a few minutes to get the blood circulating once again when the lights went up.
The staging of multiple action scenes in parallel also works brilliantly well. Shots match from submarine to Arctic cabin and back again, but they also know when we need to linger. Cruise’s battle against the dead Russian submarine that’s determined to thwart his efforts at escape is a superbly realised tour-de-force.
The best thing I can say about Final Destination Bloodlines – this franchise has as confusing an attitude to punctuation as Mission: Impossible and, like many of its characters, is missing a colon – the best thing I can say is that I survived it.
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I’m grateful that the overwhelming presence of horror in cinemas these days is a reliable source of box office – and the horror fans love of lore makes them as close to cinephiles that we have these days – but I do not enjoy them. On Saturday, I found myself checking my watch regularly during Final Destination, wondering whether readers like yourself would forgive me if I left early.
In the end, I stuck it out but I feel like I gained nothing from the exercise apart from a renewed respect for the craft of gory physical puppetry effects and the precision engineering skill on the part of screenwriters Gary Busick and Lori Evans Taylor and co-directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein. A bit like “The Entity” in The Final Reckoning, in Final Destination “Death” is a character who we are told about often – and we become intimately acquainted with their handiwork – but they are an antagonist that no one can engage with meaning there’s no conflict.
Who, then, is the antagonist in The Salt Path? A middle-aged couple lose their home and livelihood as a result of a poorly considered business investment and decide that, in the absence of any better ideas, they will walk the 600-mile South West Coast Path from Somerset to Cornwall and back. Ill-equipped physically and emotionally, they eventually discover that life hasn’t robbed them of all their resilience after all.
Superb performances from Jason Isaacs and, especially, Gillian Anderson are the foundation for a film that should prove popular. I didn’t realise that it was based on a true story until the closing credits and finding that out was icing on the cake. I’m sorry if I’ve spoiled it for you now.
If you’d told me that, of the two restaurant-set films this week, I would be recommending the straight-to-Netflix soft-hearted crowd-pleaser instead of the Golden Bear-nominated black and white drama, I would be as surprised as anyone.
La Cocina is an adaptation of Arnold Wesker’s ground-breaking 1960s play set in the kitchen of a busy restaurant where class and gender divides are palpable and where desperate migrant workers are exploited by the capitalist machine.
Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios brings the story to modern day New York and a restaurant called The Grill. There, dozens of cooks, kitchen-hands and waitstaff toil underground so that tourists and locals can enjoy classic American dishes like pizza, parmigiana and lobsters. As old hand Pedro points out, lobsters used to be peasant food – chicken of the sea – but now it’s only for the well-to-do.
Pedro (Raúl Briones) is losing his mind, though, as promises from his boss to help make him legal go unfulfilled and his American waitress girlfriend Julia (Rooney Mara) doesn’t want to have the baby she is carrying. Over the course of two services – lunch and dinner with an elegiacal break in between – chaos reigns as fragile relationships all over the restaurant noisily collapse.
Ruizpalacios has his heart in the right place – and there are some incredible long-takes here including one that ends with the kitchen flooded with Cherry Coke – but it’s all too much, even the quiet bits. This was the second film of the weekend that I couldn’t wait to end.
In Nonnas, Vince Vaughan plays an Italian-American bus mechanic who wants to open a restaurant in honour of his late mother except that he knows nothing about the hospo business and the secrets of her beloved recipes are a mystery to him.
So he decides to staff his kitchen with real Italian grandmothers who can cook the dishes that have been handed down through the generations. Enter some acting legends who deserve this victory lap even if it’s a long way from their best work. Susan Sarandon, Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire and Brenda Vaccaro all play as broad as you might expect in a film that’s as much an uplifting fantasy as La Cocina is a downbeat one.
The biggest problem here is that there isn’t enough time spent with the food. That should be “Restaurant Movie 101” – linger on the dishes, make us desire them.