What would be REALLY great would be if they renamed the entire franchise and made a REAL Mission: Impossible film, where Jim Phelps is the GOOD guy (like he is in real life).
I’ve been sick of JJ Abrams for a long time. The new Star Trek movies were largely shitty, his Star Wars movies are not good… when did he last make a REALLY GREAT film? His movies look excellent; he can direct action as well as anyone alive. The stories blow.
But MI films are about watching fun action setpieces and beautiful ladies and great locations and wondering why Tom Cruise is still so handsome even though he’s like 90. James Bond movies are mostly stupid too, but that isn’t the point.
It remains the case that MI2 is atrocious. It was redeemed by MI3, a solid action movie with a chillingly sociopathic villain.
I don’t remember MI2 at all. But I do think the most recent one (with Henry Cavill) was AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL. It got fairly decent reviews, but it just took the setpieces-and-unearned-plot-twists-wired-together formula to a ridiculous degree. I didn’t care at all. On the other hand, the one directed by Brad Bird a few years back (with the skyscraper) I remember being damn fun. There’s a razor’s edge of fun-action-plot-supporting-set-pieces that’s probably much harder to hit than people appreciate.
He has never made “a REALLY GREAT film”. He made a decent Spielberg homage with Super 8, and everything he has directed since, and nearly everything he has produced has been dreck, desecration, and purloinery. (An exception could be made for 10 Cloverfield Lane but given that Abrams is one of eight producing credits on the film, I’m guessing his ‘creative’ input was minimal.) His idea of plotting is to throw one of his patent “mystery boxes” out on screen and then just spin a bunch of plot threads without any intent of actually resolving them. He’s a chess player with one opening, a middlegame that consists of just randomly attacking pieces, and no endgame strategy whatsoever.
Stranger
You guys know what a cargo cult is? It’s the apocrypical Pacific Islanders who saw planes bring in various goods, and decided to build their own “airport” out of coconut leaves and bamboo in the hope of summoning their own airplanes. Well, J.J. Abrams is a cargo cult director. He places a whole bunch of story elements from other movies out on the ground, without understanding what they are and how they work, and hopes that they’ll somehow create an actual film. It doesn’t usually turn out that great.
He hasn’t really written that many movies, just:
Joy Ride
MI3
Super 8
Star Wars 7 and 9
This is exactly what Abrams does. He sees things in films that are interesting or appealing and throws them in the blender with a dash of novel character conflict and a surfeit of lens flares, and sets it to “Liquify”. It is as if someone who revered David Mamet decided to write plays where the characters just repeat themselves three times; it sort of vaguely resembles Mamet for the first couple of scenes and then every characters just sounds like they have Tourette syndrome.
Star Trek Into Darkness is a perfect example of this; he takes the Khan character (while denying that Benedict Cumberbatch is Khan) and inserts him into the film but with absolutely none of the context of Wrath of Khan, which was all about the aging Kirk, regrets for mistakes and choices, and the neglect of Kirk to follow up on the events of “Space Seed”. Spock’s ultimate sacrifice is effectively presaged (“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,”) and affects Kirk in a way that feels like the cost all of his failures have come due. Abrams appropriates not only the character but this gut-wrenching scene except “subverting” it by having Kirk sacrifice himself, which makes no sense whatsoever and regardless is undone literally five minutes later with Khan’s “superblood” resurrecting him, so the entire plot action is totally meaningless even within this film.
If Abrams remade The Empire Strikes Back he would have Luke cut off Vader’s hand only to pull out a spare hand from C3PO and solder it back on in the next scene, and Han Solo would smash his way out of his carbonite preservation and beat Boba Fett senseless and then somehow jump from his ship to the pursuing Millennium Falcon while doing a double backflip. Even by the standards of “popcorn movies” his films are dumb. I hate those Transformers movies that are basically a bunch of random electronics thrown into a BlendTec blender and put on high, and yet those things are Citizen Kane in comparison to what J.J. Abrams puts out.
Stranger
Stranger needs to put out a regular stream of content of “If ____ was written and directed by JJ”. It helps me appreciate Empire to see how dumb it could have been
I would love to see a Mission Impossible movie that is actually like the TV show, with Phelps and his crew as con artists who bamboozle their targets with elaborate charades. David Mamet could write the script.
Of course, that will never happen as long as Tom Cruise is alive and ambulatory.
The REAL sociopath is Ethan Frome (or whatever the fuck is name is) for framing Jim Phelps like that.
I remember enjoying it in the theatre and then trying to figure out if it made any sense for days afterwards. (Spoiler: not really)
I’d rather have that than MI2, which was mostly straightforward but crappy. And I liked Henry Cavill better than Philip Seymour Hoffman in MI3.