Renfield (2023)

               Just so we’re clear, I didn’t like the narration in this movie because I never like the narration in any movie.  As examples go it was perfectly fine in and of itself, I don’t mind listening to Nicholas Hoult talk about things.  I just don’t like narration in general.  I don’t want to say something as severe as “narration is never a good idea” because there are plenty of examples where narration improves the movie (‘Sunset Boulevard,’ ‘Wings of Desire,’ etc.), it’s just that all too often it acts as a crutch for the filmmakers.  I have no proof, but I’m going to guess that well over half of the movies that use narration weren’t meant to, they had to fall back on it when they couldn’t make the movie work otherwise.  Be it budget cuts, blown coverage, actor availability for reshoots, something else about the movie went wrong first and, in order to make a cut that’s at least somewhat coherent, sometimes you have to have the main character directly tell the audience what they need to know.  I’m not saying for sure a lot went wrong here, I’m just saying there’s a lot of narration in this movie.

              It’ll be interesting, in the future, to find out for which of Nicholas Hoult’s roles he’s most remembered.  Or if he’s even remembered as a movie star.  During the making and marketing of this movie all the talk was about Nicholas Cage, which is fair enough, his reengagement with the better side of Hollywood has been widely celebrated.  I paid attention because of Hoult.  Like everyone else, I really noticed him in ‘Mad Max: Fury Road,’ although I’d been vaguely aware of him from ‘About a Boy’ and ‘The Weather Man.’  I eventually noticed he was one of the Beasts in the X-Men films and I’ve seen enough random clips of “Skins” that I’m sure I’ve seen his teenaged face but just never grokked it was him.  This movie perked up my ears because I wanted to see what he could do as a film lead, unaware that he’s been that plenty of times before.

              Looking over his filmography, it’s actually kind of impressive how many minor and completely forgettable movies he’s been in.  In my mind he went directly from ‘Mad Max’ through the X-Men movies and “The Menu” and then right to ‘Renfield,’ but he was in four different, fairly unsuccessful movies in 2017 alone.  I completely forgot he’s one of the leads in “The Great.”  In my head he’s such a bigger star than reality shows him to be, although apparently Hollywood agrees with me for some reason and they keep trying to make him happen.  He was supposedly one of the finalists to play James Gunn’s Superman.  He’s in the next Robert Eggers and Clint Eastwood movies, fer chrissakes.  He seems to be one of those likeable-enough actors that always manages to fail upwards, somewhat justified by the handful of pretty great performances he has given.

              Anyway, he’s fine in this.  Also fine is Nicholas Cage, which is only something of a shame.  I’ve seen enough Cage movies to know there’s a sliding scale for rating his performances and it gets awesome at both ends.  Normally a scale would go from good at one end to bad at the other, but for Cage the bad area is dead in the middle.  This represents him doing his version of sleepwalking through a role, which means he simply performs the words and actions written in the script the way the director tells him to.  Cage doesn’t ever get unprofessional, but he frequently does get bored.  On one extreme of the scale we get his masterpiece performances, like in ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ or ‘Pig.’  On the opposite extreme we get his other masterpiece performances, like in ‘Vampire’s Kiss’ or ‘Wild at Heart.’  His performance here is kind of halfway between the bland middle and ‘Mandy’ territory, he’s doing something with his performance, he’s making an effort, but the movie he’s in is too small in its way to handle any kind of massive effort, he’s forced to keep it reined in.

              This movie originated as an idea from Robert Kirkman, he of zombies, who here receives a ‘screen story by’ credit.  The difference between a ‘story by’ credit and a ‘screen story by’ credit, according to guild rules, is that the first is defined as writing "distinct from screenplay and consisting of basic narrative, idea, theme or outline indicating character development and action."  The definition of the second is “If the [credited screen]writer is furnished source material of a story nature but takes from it only a springboard, a characterization, an incident, or some equally limited contribution, creating a substantially new and different story from the source material, the [original] writer may receive ‘Screen Story by’ credit.”  This means that at some point Robert Kirkman pitched an executive on a movie that had Renfield as the protagonist instead of Dracula and then fucked right off.  IMDB also insists that Ava Tramer provided ‘additional material.’  Considering her credits are almost entirely for tv comedies, she was clearly brought in to punch up the script.

              The sole credited screenwriter is Ryan Ridley.  Ridley kicked around the edges of television sci-fi and comedy for a number of years before drifting into the orbit of Dan Harmon, working on the last two seasons of “Community” and the first three seasons of “Rick and Morty.”  This is his first theatrical screenplay.  I’m genuinely unsure how much of this is his fault.

              ‘Renfield’ was directed by Chris McKay, who needs to decide what kind of director he’s going to be.  He got his start on “Robot Chicken,” and so far his movies have lurched from ‘The Lego Batman Movie’ to ‘The Tomorrow War’ to this.  Shades of Julius Avery here, little guy in the process of getting eaten by the studios.  I haven’t seen either of his previous movies but hopefully they were more tonally deft than this one.  The somewhat tortuous development process originally had Dexter Fletcher (‘Rocketman’) tipped to direct, which would have resulted in a very different movie.  Fletcher had to drop out to develop another reboot of “The Saint,” which has yet to materialize.  Maybe the studios have realized that they’d already achieved perfection with Kilmer.

              This movie was apparently part of the troubled tangle of nonsense made up of the various attempts at establishing a Dark Universe for Universal Studios.  Originally announced in 2014 in direct response to Marvel, this planned series of overlapping movies hit its first speedbump when ‘Dracula Untold’ underperformed.  So they decided to pretend that one didn’t count.  Said Dark Universe was then almost entirely killed off with 2017’s Tom Cruise-led ‘The Mummy,’ which also tanked.  Buoyed somewhat by the success of 2020’s ‘The Invisible Man,’ and reportedly partly inspired by the continued success of “What We Do in the Shadows,” ‘Renfield’ finally came together and was released in 2023 to a very muted reaction.  Its stated budget was $65 million and it only brought in roughly $27 million.

              Considering we have credited writers who worked on “Community,” “Rick & Morty,” and “Harley Quinn,” as well as the director of ‘The Lego Batman Movie,’ this should have turned out way darker and funnier than it did.  The major problem with this movie, which in general does kind of work in a minimally acceptable kind of way, is that it starts with such a fundamentally morally compromised protagonist that you have to grapple with a basic problem: as charming as Nicholas Hoult can be doing another variation on Hugh Grant’s screen persona from the 90’s, he’s playing a character who’s been involved in thousands if not tens of thousands of murders in the past hundred years.  You either take that at least a little seriously or you blow up the rest of the movie to such cartoonish proportions that it starts to make sense in context.  If you leave it mostly unaddressed it’s going to sit in the back of the audience’s mind, eating away at any enjoyment the rest of the movie earns.

              The basic concept here is that it’s an alternate universe continuation of the 1931 Bela Lugosi-led ‘Dracula.’  Instead of Dracula killing Renfield and then dying to Van Helsing’s stake, the two of them survived and have just continued on to the present day.  If you’re going to have a movie set contemporaneously you do need to decide which version of Dracula and Renfield you’re going to use, so as far as that goes this choice is fine, even interesting.  I do wonder if it was this decision that drew Cage’s interest, because he’s talked up his love of classic vampire portrayals while doing press, or if he suggested it as a condition of his participation.  This conceit doesn’t do much for Hoult, nobody remembers Renfield from the original, which is just as well because there he’s played by an American.  The Renfield in the 1931 version takes a lot of the plot from Johnathan Harker, oddly enough.  He’s the lawyer with the family who sells Dracula his house.  This background informs Cage’s Dracula much more, as he takes Lugosi’s performance and portrayal as a jumping-off point.  Hoult has exactly one scene where he briefly admits he willingly abandoned his entire family to become Dracula’s thrall, then it’s never brought up again.

              As shown in the movie Renfield and Dracula have spent the intervening decades continually moving around, alternately committing atrocities and then fighting or fleeing vampire hunters.  After defeating the latest and apparently last group of those, Dracula is injured again and needs to rebuild his power until his next unhinged feast, a cycle that Renfield has finally grown tired of.  After stashing Dracula in an abandoned hospital, he finds himself attending an emotional support meeting for people in codependent relationships.  He discovered the group after following a potential victim to it, and he finds the stories of the other attendees mirror his own situation.  He starts to take steps to liberate himself from Dracula’s control, who eventually notices and decides to take revenge for the perceived betrayal.  Eventually, with the help of a new friend, he confronts and kills Dracula and the movie ends as he looks forward to his new life.

              There’s a whole lot of other plot shoved in there, but at base this is what the movie is about: Renfield extricating himself from Dracula’s thralldom.  The mechanics of this influence aren’t super well-established.  Dracula doesn’t have direct control over Renfield’s physical actions, but he can invade his mind and know his thoughts.  As in every adaptation, Renfield eats bugs, except here they give him a super-hero like power up.  The movie eventually establishes that this is something that happens for all of Dracula’s familiars, which means several more of those show up at the end of the movie so Hoult can have some fight scenes to wrap up the film.

              To state it very plainly, as established in this movie Renfield is almost as morally culpable for all of Dracula’s murders as Dracula himself.  Dracula spends the first forty minutes of the film confined to an abandoned hospital, depending on Renfield to bring him victims.  Eventually Dracula is attacked by a group of mobsters (lot of plot shoved in) and as they fight we see literal piles of corpses scattered around, all victims brought there by our protagonist.  Renfield occasionally narrates to the audience about trying to bring only bad people to Dracula, recently making a practice of tracking down and abducting only the abusive people in the lives of the members of his support group.  Which is pretty horrifying.  He’s also shown, on camera, only slightly reluctant to snatch an entire busload of cheerleaders.  He’s only stopped from doing so by the sudden coincidental arrival of the police.

              This, by itself, is not a dealbreaker.  I watched too many seasons of ‘Dexter’ to get all upset about a serial killer protagonist.  But for us to buy Renfield as even slightly sympathetic, the movie needs to do one of three things: establish that Renfield was under Dracula’s direct control and thus not morally culpable for the murders, establish that Renfield has had a moment of clarity and bitterly rejects the cowardice that caused his actions and now seeks to atone, or establish that the world of the movie is so morally chaotic that his actions don’t stand out as particularly evil by comparison.

              The first is just boring.  The second is a drama.  The third is either a comedy or an action movie.  This movie attempts to swing between the second and third and doesn’t do either one of them particularly well.  It’s like ‘Bad Boys II’ without the courage to embrace what it is. 

Beyond the names above the title, most of the budget of this movie must have gone to the special effects.  Lots of blood and body parts in this movie, and most of them are played for laughs.  At one point Renfield is in a restaurant when it’s attacked by mobsters.  During the ensuing fight he takes a serving tray and lops off both of an attacker’s arms.  A couple of minutes later, after the brawl, his budding romantic interest asks him, “Did I watch you cut a guy’s arms off with a decorative service platter?” and when he admits he did she replies, “It was awesome.”  Why this is symptomatic of the death of comedy is a subject for another time, but it’s important to note that this is the meet-cute for the romantic comedy chunk of the movie.  This is how we’re introduced to what is supposed to be the new central relationship in Renfield’s life, the one that will eventually lead him to defeat Dracula and free himself. 

It almost works.  The preceding action scene is straight out of ‘Deadpool,’ all superpowers, slow-motions shots, and startling bursts of fairly realistic gore.  The violence is over the top enough and the subsequent reactions are muted enough that, together with some other exaggerated parts of this film, they might have gotten us to the point where handwaving away thousands of deaths over decades could have been a relatively small ask.  Both Renfield and the cop, named Rebecca and played by Awkwafina, who is fine, were busy freaking out during the gunfight and so immediately afterwards are filled with adrenaline and slowly starting to remember all of the weird stuff they just saw each other do.  Rebecca expresses admiration for how well he handled himself, and Renfield tells her how much he admired earlier how she stood up to the head of the mobsters, Tedward Lobo.

              Which is why this all ends up not working, because of that preceding scene when she stood up to the mobster.  Ted Lobo is played by Ben Schwartz as a variation on every character he’s ever played (I’m being harsh, he’s one of the best parts of the movie).  In that scene Rebecca has a gun to her face as he taunts her about the way her father died.  This scene is played completely straight and ends with Rebecca facing death with tears in her eyes.  Then Renfield finally catches that fly he’s been chasing and the tone flips to action shenanigans, and then we get that rom-com bullshit dialogue from above.

              As an aside, the character journey for Ted Lobo is pretty great if they actually meant to do it this way.  He starts out as a comedy mobster terrible at crimes and prone to panic.  Then it’s pushed too far and he’s so obviously inept yet inexplicably powerful in this demonstrably violent gang that it goes past funny into distracting.  Then after it’s revealed he’s the mob boss’s son and the entire police department is farcically corrupt it kind of makes sense.  He’s shown as utterly craven before Dracula, and then when he becomes his familiar he gets drunk with actual power for the first time in his life and starts killing at the drop of a hat.  We as the audience also buy that he’s suddenly dangerous because we all know that kind of weasel and what they do with even a little bit of authority.  Throughout the movie his domination by his mother is directly paralleled by Dracula’s hold on Renfield, and his utter glee at accepting service to Dracula directly clashes with Renfield’s fight to gain his independence.  I didn’t think I’d buy Ben Schwartz as kind of intimidating but he pulled it off.

              The best note I scribbled while I was watching this was ‘The emotions don’t read.’  Which means that I can tell what the characters are supposed to be thinking and feeling because these are good actors with competent direction, but they don’t resonate as genuine.  I find Chris Pratt inexplicably annoying but when Starlord screamed at the apparent death of Rocket Raccoon, I bought it.  When Gerard Butler had to take some time after that protracted fight scene in ‘Plane,’ I was with him.  Hell, I bought the grudging respect between Fathers Amorth and Esquibel in that nonsense movie, I am a soft touch for these things.  But because ‘Renfield’ shifted so jarringly between tones and without tracing linear emotional progressions I never really followed characters’ emotions or motivations from scene to scene.  Here an example: Renfield tells Rebecca he thinks she’s a hero, something that means a lot to her.  After plot has happened and Rebecca has arrested Renfield for murder, she’s confronted by the entire corrupt police force and offered a bribe.  The camera lets us know that she resists temptation and stays honest only because she sees Renfield looking at her in admiration.

              Which doesn’t work.  At all.  In this moment, Rebecca is still feeling betrayed and horrified after learning that Renfield is a murderer.  Renfield just witnessed Dracula slaughter all of his friends and got arrested by the woman he has feelings for.  He is not going to look admiringly at her in the middle of a standoff, and she is not going to draw strength from the gaze of someone she thinks is a mass-murderer.  You can see the movie shoving the pieces together, you know what it’s trying to do, what shape it’s trying to make, but the pieces just don’t fit together and it shows.  For a movie that claims to be about personal fulfillment and acceptance, it just slaps whatever emotions into whichever scenes depending on the needs of the plot.

Notice how much I haven’t written about Dracula?  Or about what actually happens in the film?  That’s because it’s yet another vampire crime movie.  Do I have to point out the narrative advantages of having a relatively endless pool of victims for Dracula and foes for Renfield?  Especially gangsters, who are officially marked by movie tradition as not really people, so we don’t have to care when they die.  Several times during the movie the characters end up on or around head-high rounded mounds of corpses.  It’s played for both laughs and scares, and it works exactly zero times for either.  I think the movie recognized the need to build up an amoral world in which to smuggle Renfield’s forgiveness, I just don’t think it succeeded.

At around the half-hour mark, after Renfield has become entangled with mobsters but before that’s had a chance to catch up with him, Dracula announces he’s going to use his powers to take over the world.  Cage’s Dracula kind of flits between being vaguely stupid, waspish, and genuinely intimidating.  It must’ve been fun to play, but here it just means that Dracula says he’s going to conquer the world without even a hint as to how.  It then kind of fades away while the plot moves on and the movie hopes we forget about it.

Eventually the vampire and the mobsters plots collide, Dracula learns that Renfield is trying to live a life apart from him, and without missing a beat he offers his services to the drug traffickers.  This might only be part of his efforts to get revenge on Renfield, but maybe it’s also a part of that whole world-conquering thing?  It’s left frustratingly vague.  At a certain point it becomes clear that the only thing Dracula cares about is fucking with Renfield.  Why he cares so much, however, isn’t clear.  He’s shown easily making several more familiars, there’s no hint that Renfield is special in any way, I can see how after a hundred years you get used to a guy, but this does seem like a lot of effort when you could just snap his neck.  There are any number of reasons they could’ve used, like Dracula realizing he’d grown fond of Renfield and thus was trying to destroy that part of himself, or he’d been wandering for so long he’d shed everything but his pride and to be betrayed after so long hurt him more than any shaft of sunlight, they could’ve made this work.  Instead he just sees a photo of Renfield enjoying himself and he decides to swear eternal vengeance.

I dug around in the movie so much because it’s frustratingly hard to pin down exactly what went wrong.  It’s not like the movie’s a failure, it does work as a narrative, it fulfills the basic function of a storytelling machine.  The jokes are either funny to you or they’re not.  For me too much of this falls into that category of jokes that make calling attention to themselves as jokes part of the joke, which I find insufferable.  The performances are fine, Cage is having fun, Hoult is just doing Hugh Grant but it’s a good Hugh Grant, Ben Schwartz sleazes up surprisingly well, and everyone else in the cast is perfectly adequate.  The emotional beats just didn’t work for me.  Renfield being such a sunny innocent after a hundred years of murder struck me as wrong from the jump and it never quite came together.  You can’t have a stammering guy who brings flowers to a police station just a few scenes after we saw him take out chloroform and a rag as he followed a group of teenage girls and expect the audience to follow that emotional throughline.  If this was a CW show, sure, this could work over the course of three seasons (or a tight four-episode arc on “Vampire Diaries”), but if you try to do it in an hour and a half it’s asking too much of the audience with too little justification.  When you lose the emotional connection to your characters, unless you’re in an out and out farce you lose a lot of what makes a movie compelling.  Without that center all you’re left with are some competent fight scenes, some fairly intelligent and amusing conversations, and some performances that were all right.  It’s the kind of movie that the nation as a whole decided to just catch on streaming, and unfortunately I can’t say they were wrong.

Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 1 (2023)

              As anyone paying attention is already aware, Tom Cruise is probably a terrible person.  His entire career depends on that “probably.”  The occasional re-eruption of the ‘problematic artist’ debate will always rub up against him because of his ties to the cult of Scientology, but since there’s been no actual confirmed malfeasance on his part, even from those high-profile celebrities who have exited the Church, he’s never really been central to the debate.  Everyone can agree he’s super creepy and probably genuinely insane, and his proximity to the center of Scientology means he’s at least aware of the terrible, terrible things it does (just look up Sea Org to start down that rabbit hole), but no one has any actual dirt on him.

              The reason I bring this up is that if you want to examine contemporary film auteurs you absolutely have to include Tom Cruise in that discussion.  We tend to focus that conversation on directors, maybe sometimes writers, but he makes a convincing case that some producers need to be included as well.  He’s taken the playbook codified by Warren Beatty and, in typical Tom Cruise fashion, gone absolutely crazy with it.  His producing filmography has been in in almost absolute lockstep with his acting filmography since 2006.  While a producer credit can vary wildly in terms of what it actually means from actor to actor, the really big stars almost always get it thrown in these days as a kind of perk, a movie starring Tom Cruise is absolutely a Tom Cruise production.  Notable flops like ‘The Mummy’ are the exception that proves the rule.  He was not a producer on that one and you can absolutely count on him never making that mistake again.  I doubt he will ever be involved in a franchise that he is not in complete control of going forward.

              Film sequels have always been around, but it wasn’t until the 80’s and the influx of venture capital that they became ubiquitous.  This is hardly new information, it was even noted at the time, but it’s interesting to see what’s been happening relatively recently with long-form film series.  Previously the provenance of endless horror sequels, interesting things have been happening with blockbuster franchises once they get up around entry five or six.  By which I principally mean the Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious franchises, although you also have weird outliers like ‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’ and the upcoming John Wick spin offs.  An argument could be made that the Marvel movies are basically all quasi-sequels.  They even turned Daniel Craig’s Bond movies into direct successors to each other, heretofore unthinkable.  Maybe ‘Avatar’ will eventually get there as well. 

              This also continues the recent trend of part ones (parts one?).  Just this year we’ve had ‘Across the Spider-Verse,’ which I had problems with, and ‘Fast X,’ which I increasingly feel the need to also examine.  In 2021 ‘Dune: Part 1’ did this as well so it’s not brand new (as an aside I haven’t seen that one yet for pandemic reasons, here’s hoping for an Imax re-release before part 2).  Audiences seem to be accepting them all right, which is a trend I find unsettling.  The only one with a proper cliffhanger ending was ‘Fast X,’ the rest just kind of … stopped happening.

              I was slow to get into the ‘Mission: Impossible’ franchise (Missions: Impossible?).  I saw part 2 in the theatre because of the involvement of John Woo, was relatively underwhelmed, and didn’t start paying attention to them again until around part 5, and that was only due to the increased prominence of Simon Pegg.  I still haven’t seen part 1, which after this movie is frankly shameful, but I’ve caught up on the rest.  I think everyone can now agree that the most important movie of all of them, and the one that cemented the identity of the franchise, was part 4.  That solidified the key components of the movies going forwards: it surrounded Ethan Hunt with a team that followed him from film to film (beyond just Ving Rhames), did away with the notion that Hunt has any kind of interior life worth examining, and made the centerpiece of the movie an insane physical stunt actually performed by Tom Cruise.   The subsequent sequels are variations on this formula, culminating, I would argue, with part 6, ‘Mission Impossible: Fallout.’ 

              Since I’m not sure where else to cram this in, I’d like to argue that part 6’s opening weekend of $61,236,534 ($74,405,801.72 adjusted for inflation) beat the $54,688,347 opening of part 7 due almost entirely to that moment in the trailer when Henry Cavill cocks his arms like they’re guns.  Man, that was a good trailer.

              It’s become increasingly obvious that these movies are setpieces strung together by the barest whisps of plot.  To their credit both Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie have been very open about the fact that they come up with the action sequences first and then reverse engineer the story.  When done well one can reinforce the other, or at the very least not get in each other’s way.  Oddly enough, one of the strengths of this movie ends up conflicting with this approach, in that for possibly the first time a Mission: Impossible movie actually has a thesis: the digital is inherently the enemy of the analogue.

              This is basically an abstraction of the conflict in the previous movie between Cruise’s Hunt and Cavill’s Walker.  Parts 4 through 6 form a loose sub-trilogy within the overall series, which makes sense considering that part 4 was when McQuarrie entered the series as one of the writers.  For whatever reason, possibly Cruise’s insistence on being the center of the franchise, none of the films before part 6 have had particularly memorable villains, despite casting's best efforts.  They’ve had such heavyweights as John Voigt, Phillip Seymore Hoffman, Michael Nyqvist, and Sean Harris (best Ian Curtis ever), but to me none of them hold a candle to Cavill’s Walker because he’s set up as an explicit contrast to Cruise’s Hunt.  He’s physically much bigger, blunter, more prone to violence, and openly insults the devious methods that Hunt’s IMF uses from movie to movie.  He’s directly set up as an attack on the entire ethos of the Mission: Impossible movies and the borderline goofy logic they use, so it’s very satisfying when he ends up with a helicopter hook to the forehead.  Both he and The Syndicate he works for are dark reflections of Hunt and The IMF as a whole, and seeing them go to war over morals, goals, and methods worked very well.

              In this movie the antagonist is an unseen AI referred to as The Entity.  It’s embodied by its henchman Gabriel but too removed from any active conflict to really come across as a true foil to the good guys.  Gabriel is played by Esai Morales, who is good in the part but who always seems to be slightly distracted and waiting to be told what to do by the likely digital voice whispering in his ear.  This works well thematically but translates to the character being slightly uninteresting on screen.  We don’t even witness him ‘killing’ Ilsa Faust, who I don’t believe is really dead anyways.  They shove in some ‘flashbacks’ showing how he was involved in something bad in Hunt’s past, and it’s such a manufactured connection that I genuinely didn’t care. 

              Having this central thesis is one of the movie’s core strengths because it dovetails so well with the paratextual theme of the series as a whole and its insistence on practical stunts and actual locations.  It also represents the quasi-existential threat AI now poses to the film industry in particular and art in general.  Not that actual art is in much danger, just the ability of artists to make a living by creating it.  No one is going to read an AI-written novel any time soon and gain anything genuinely meaningful from it.  It’s very possible, however, that someone like James Patterson will sign his name over to a bot, feed it the five hundred novels already ghost-written under his name, and then we’ll have endless books churned out by “James Patterson” for the next fifty years.  I just fell into a small rabbit hole reacquainting myself with the Doc Savage novels and the works of ‘Kenneth Robeson,’ a pen name for a handful of writers that turned out almost two hundred novels over a couple of decades, and machine learning just automates the entire process.  That’s the actual danger of this machine learning garbage, that it has the potential to turn out so much slop so quickly and so cheaply that it will simply flood the market and collapse the entire thing.

              So for the first time this 27-year-old franchise actually finds itself very culturally relevant, which means that when it fails to seriously interrogate the issue of AI and instead uses it as an excuse to string together a set of admittedly breath-taking feats of filmmaking, there’s a disconnect.  Instead of waiting to see what Tom Cruise was about to do with that motorcycle I kinda wanted a scene where he, Benji, and Luther sit down and have a serious discussion on how this kind of technology could impact their version of spycraft.  I never cared about whatever MacGuffin Dougray Scott had in part 2, but Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 1 made the rookie mistake of having a premise I actually found interesting.

              During this latest round of publicity much has been made of Tom Cruise’s love of movies and his absolute drive to save the industry, particularly movie theaters, and at least in this I absolutely believe in his sincerity.  Very little is known about his personal life, Cruise having learned his lesson from Oprah’s couch about ever letting anyone so much as glimpse the real him.  What little we do know involves how much of his life is absorbed in watching, making, and thinking about movies.  There are now stories about his attempts to modify the SAG-AFTRA strike terms to allow stars to participate in publicity for their upcoming movies, explicitly in an attempt to save theaters.  I have to think that his antipathy to the extension of computer technology from mere special effects into even more sectors of the industry influenced the decision to make it the bad guy of his most central movie series, the films that will forever define his legacy.  He’ll be remembered for many other roles, obviously, but anyone doing any kind of overview of Cruise’s career will absolutely be forced to grapple with this franchise, and he seems to be making the culmination of the series a firm stance against the increasingly destructive effects of the digital on art.

              It’s a stance I agree with, but I’m not sure that the narrative of a Mission: Impossible movie is the right place to explore that threat.  Much is made in the movie about the claim that this will ‘redefine’ right and wrong for hundreds of years of come, which is an odd framing of the actual threat of supposed AI, but I guess that’s how you make it the bad guy of a spy movie.  The film has to jump through a bunch of hoops to prove both that The Entity is dangerous and difficult to fight.  The most effective moments, for me, were when it was altering data in real time to erase people from surveillance or impersonate people during communications.  That’s a more concrete showcase of its danger, but it doesn’t directly translate into existential threat, for me.

              There’s also my continued annoyance at the proliferation of these ‘Part 1’ movies.  ‘Dune’ kind of gets a pass in that it’s an adaptation of existing material, but did we really need 141 minutes to get Dom and Dom Jr. to the bottom of that about-to-explode dam?  At the end of this movie all that’s really been accomplished is that Hunt and his team have obtained a fancy couple of keys, learned roughly what it unlocks, and pissed off a whole bunch of people.  A lot of fun was had along the way, and I’ll always gladly accept more Team IMF on the screen (including Henry Czerny, who is a whole lot of the reason I now really want to see part 1), and I’m not remotely arguing that this was a bad movie, it’s just firmly in the middle of the pack as far as my enjoyment of Mission: Impossible movies go.  There’s not that ‘fuck yeah!’ moment like Walker’s death in part 6 or Ethen spitting out “Mission accomplished!” in part 4.

              I tell something of a lie, there was one moment that absolutely landed for the audience I watched it with: the beat after Hunt and Grace go tumbling down some stairs in their tiny car and somehow end in the opposite seats from where they started, to their visible bewilderment.  That scene absolutely killed.

              I’m starting to wonder if I’m just turning grumpier as I get older, or if I’m starting to get somewhat jaded by special effects extravaganzas.  The only big-budget movie I’ve genuinely enjoyed with almost no reservations this year was ‘Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3,’ and that’s due almost entirely to the writing and acting.  The visuals were there, and in as much as they made me forget that several of the characters were fully CGI they did their job, but that’s not what I was focused on.  I haven’t seen the latest Indiana Jones movie yet, nor have I participated in the Barbenheimer phenomenon, and maybe low expectations for the former and the near-universal ecstasy at the latter will change my mind, but I’m starting to wonder how many more empty calories I’m willing to pay full box-office prices for when I keep feeling left vaguely unsatisfied at the end.

Plane (2023)

               I resisted the charms of Gerard Butler for as long as I could, but I think I’m finally a fan.  The clincher was reading up on the production of this movie and finding out that Butler himself was the one who insisted that the movie be called ‘Plane.’  The only reason I took notice of this movie at all was because of the post-ironic online buzz about that one-word title.  The actual movie is, for most of its runtime, a great deal better than that one word implies, although it does fully justify such a schlocky title by the end.

Plain.

              My first note when watching the movie was a happy little sentence celebrating that Butler got to use his actual Scottish accent.  It’s likely a coincidence that the original 2016 pitch was from fellow Scot Charles Cumming.  Cumming has been writing spy novels since 2001 and this is his first produced screenplay.  His original version was then worked on by J. P. Davis, who’s had a sporadic career bouncing between acting and writing.  After getting noticed with his first movie, ‘Fighting Tommy Riley’ in 2004, Davis wrote the 2007 Mathew Modine romantic comedy ‘The Neighbor’ and the 2022 Chris Pine action movie ‘The Contractor,’ which I was completely unaware existed.  If I had to guess, and I do because I don’t know the answer, I suspect the original screenplay ended in less of a batshit way and Davis was hired to put it over the top.

              Director Jean-François Richet was previously unknown to me, but I liked a lot of his work here.  He did the 2005 ‘Assault on Precinct 13’ remake, which I’ve heard mixed things about, a number of French films, and a 2016 Mel Gibson vehicle called ‘Blood Father.’  I think we have ourselves a professional director for hire, which has its own kind of integrity.  With the exception of that third act and one action scene, his directorial style throughout is understated and unobtrusive.  He does a good job of establishing spaces and character relations, he uses close-ups judiciously (and correctly), he does some subtle stuff with dolly shots and framing to tell stories within scenes, it’s decent work.

              But this movie belongs to Butler, who increasingly is the only guy out there making these kinds of films.  Genre fare with budgets under $50 million should be the absolute backbone of every major studio.  Blumhouse and A24 have rapidly built entire empires out of these kinds of movies, and the executives at the other companies seem to finally be paying attention.  There are the huge tentpole releases, the piles of cheap slush that make up the VOD and streaming channels, and in between there’s this gaping hole where an entire industry should be.

              In just the last five years Butler has acted in ten movies.  Excluding the Netflix original (for which I don’t have financials), the average budget across those movies is $42.2 million with box office returns of $100.5 million.  Take out the third ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ movie and it’s still a respectable $31.4 million budget to $47.3 million box office ratio.  That is a track record of profitability.  Every flop like ‘Kandahar’ gets offset by an unexpected success like ‘Den of Thieves.’  This is how you build a brand.  Gerard Butler has been in some huge movies, some of them good (‘300,’ the aforementioned ‘Dragon’ movies), many bad (… I mean just so many), but for the past decade or so he seems to have found his groove as a mid-budget Action Dad, with movies like the ‘Fallen’ films, ‘Greenland,’ and especially ‘Copshop.’  A lot of actors want to be the biggest stars in the world, with fancy premieres and worldwide publicity tours, but some actors just want to work.  Attaching the name Gerard Butler to a project gets movies made because his face on the poster reliably puts butts in seats.

              I spent most of the runtime of this movie being pleasantly surprised.  The entire first act is a textbook example of how to establish characters and tone.  Nothing this movie does is original, it’s all variations on tropes, but it does them well.  We meet Butler’s character, Captain Torrance, as he’s rushing to board his plane.  We hurriedly establish that it’s New Year’s Eve and he wants to make it back in time to see his daughter, who actually wants to see him.  The first ten minutes or so introduces us to the rest of the crew, emphasizes a few key passengers, and establishes that they’ll be transporting a recovered fugitive for part of the flight.  What’s key here is that all of this is done fluidly and naturally.  One of the flight attendants knows Torrance and is happy to be flying with him again, which lets the audience know that he’s an all right guy.  He’s friendly and professional with everyone and reacts reasonably to being informed about the fugitive.  Before the turbulence starts about twelve minutes in we have everything we need to know for the rest of the movie.

              The movie is very carefully constructed in a way I appreciated.  We know going in that is a movie about a plane crash, so I was looking forward to seeing how they were going to justify the crash and have it not be the captain’s fault.  Turns out I was right to clock the stuffy bureaucrat earlier who overrode Torrance’s concerns about a storm because they get struck by a bolt of lightning, frying the electronics.  Torrance wasn’t even in the cockpit when it happened, he was in the back checking on the passengers (an IMDB trivia note is very angry about how inaccurate this is).  This means that when he heroically lands the plane at the end of the first act we don’t have to have that offset in any way by it being caused by anything he did.

              What’s interesting about the middle of this movie is how non-schlocky it is.  The questionable realism of a plane ever successfully pulling off an emergency landing with no electrical system on a dirt road aside, everything in this next stretch is carefully non-melodramatic.  A couple of the passengers are loud assholes, but that’s how they were introduced at the beginning and they never do more than complain.  For the most part the crew and passengers are reasonable and level-headed.  The fugitive, the cop accompanying him having died in the crash, simply waits in handcuffs for the captain to decide what to do with him.  He’s surprised when Torrance decides to take him along when he goes to look for help, but he’s entirely agreeable.

              Considering we were almost 45 minutes into the movie at this point and we hadn’t had a single massive gunfight, I had to start reconsidering what kind of movie this was.  What rocked me back on my heels was a simple moment at minute 33:50, when Torrance goes back on the plane one last time before heading off to look for help.  He carefully takes a blanket off of the dead flight attendant and is visibly devastated.  The camera allows him to take a few shaky moments before he gathers himself and he starts to put the corpses in body bags.  All that was necessary, from a plot perspective, was the captain getting access to the dead cop’s gun and files, but this movie took a couple of moments to underline what we knew about Torrance: he’s a good man who’s not used to this kind of thing but he’s doing his best and powering through.  He’s concerned about others and determined to keep his passengers safe.  The movie didn’t have to do that but it chose to.  That’s not a schlocky choice.

              It’s important for us to believe that Torrance is the kind of person who automatically feels responsible for the safety of his passengers because otherwise a lot of his actions don’t make a whole lot of sense.  He’s not in charge in any legal sense, the only reason the crew and passengers defer to him on the ground is either they haven’t stopped to think or, and this is what the movie is persuading us is going on, he’s just a natural leader and they can tell he’s going to do his best for them.

              Torrance and the fugitive warily team up and make their way to try to contact the airline.  The fugitive is a former member of the French Foreign Legion named Louis Gaspare who explains his murder charge as simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He’s played by Mike Colter, who is most famous as Luke Cage but who I know as Lemond Bishop from “The Good Wife.”  He could have easily played his character as brooding and angry, looming on the periphery the entire time until it’s suddenly revealed he’s actually a good guy, but instead Colter plays him as carefully neutral.  He’s not aggressive with anyone (except for one of the asshole passengers who suddenly films him, which fair enough) but nor is he friendly.  He’s matter-of-fact at all times and never turns into a friend to Torrance.  He’s very professional about taking lives, is always clear he does not intend to be rescued along with the others, and ends the movie stealing the cash reserve of the mercenaries hired to rescue them.  He’s a cool, professional foil to Torrance’s heart-on-his-sleeve captain.  Gaspare is the one always talking him out of stupid plans or sacrificing himself.  It’s a nice double-act, and it’ll be interesting how they recreate it without Butler for the already announced spin-off movie, ‘Ship.’  Not a joke.

              Before we get to the third act … thing, I should mention the one-take action scene that’s the centerpiece of the movie.  Gaspare has ditched Torrance in the middle of the woods.  The captain has found an abandoned building and miraculously managed to get a phone line working.  He’s in the middle of giving his daughter their location information when one of the local criminals attacks him.  From minute 45:54 to 52:04, well over six minutes, we have an apparently unbroken shot as the two of them struggle and manhandle their way across a room.  It’s sloppy and upsetting as they grapple, and when Torrance eventually breaks the other man’s neck and heaves his body off of him the camera just watches his face gasp and contort for a a full fifteen seconds.  Meanwhile the soundtrack is a faint hint of strings and a faint heartbeat that increases in both volume and temp during the scene.  It’s pretty neat.

              The movie lost me at exactly 1:24:28, when Torrance announces that, in order to escape the mob of criminals chasing after them, he’s going to fly them off of the island with the downed plane.  The movie did a decent job of setting up over the course of act two, establishing that they’d repaired the electrical system so that’s fine so far as it goes, but the rest of it had been hanging together just fine until this nonsense.  Mind you, I’m grading on quite a curve here considering how artificial this basic setup is.  As they heroically start up the plane, the various mercenaries managing to make it on board and Gaspare grabbing the money and running, I was all set to write this movie off as an interesting failure, until the movie won me right back at 1:33:42.  This is when Torrance, with the aid of Gaspare, manages to kill the main villain from the rest of the movie by hitting him with the plane’s landing gear.  Guy was about to shoot them with a rocket launcher, it was a real close call.  First the movie nosedived into boring schlock but then it went so far down it came back out the other side as fun schlock.  I still would have preferred a more realistic ending, but I’ll take fun nonsense with characters I like.

              And I think that’s the surprising takeaway from this: I really liked Gerard Butler in this.  Looking back on his filmography, it’s only now dawning on me that this is the first actual movie I’ve watched that he’s starred in.  Other than the ‘Dragon’ movies, I’ve never sat down and watched one of his films before.  I’ve seen clips of plenty of them, maybe shuffled past a few of them back when I still had cable, I’ve seen his face so much for so long that I guess I just assumed I’d seen him in something by this point.  The movie uses this likability, of course, there’s the reason he’s the lead, and it lets it do some clever things.  Going into this movie we know that Torrance and Gaspare are going to team up, it’s the hook, so when it’s time for that part of the movie to start it has Butler’s character proactively decide to team up with him.  In too many other movies they would have had to waste time finding some contrived way to finagle them together, instead Torrance just decides the two of them are going to team up.  For an audience member this does two things: we’re slightly surprised and delighted to have our expectations exceeded, and we then transfer that surge of good feeling onto the character that caused that emotion.  It’s a feedback loop of likability: we liked him in the first place, then his actions reinforce it, rinse and repeat.  Plenty of better-trained fighters are decent actors but don’t have nearly as big or consistent a career as Butler, and I think it’s due to that inherent likability.  They squandered it for a while on romantic comedies, but I think everyone is happy now that he’s settled into his Action Dad years.