Mission: Impossible (1996)

A heist-favouring spy team working for an organization called the IMF (which stands for “Impossible Mission Force”, so not to be confused with the IWF, I assume) under the leadership of Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), is wiped out during an operation in Prague meant to retrieve some kind of ridiculous master list the IMF has of all of their undercover spies. The situation turns out to be at least a double cross. This doesn’t just kill off some of the best actors in the cast, but leaves only one agent alive: a tiny, shouty, perpetually grinning man named Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Or so it seems at first.

This does of course leave Hunt under heavy suspicion from his superiors, and instead of rotting away in a secret prison, our protagonist decides to go on the run and find out who killed his friends while also retrieving the list. He gets help from a surprise survivor of his wiped out team, Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), Phelps’s improbable wife, and a couple of burned, I mean “disavowed”, former IMF agents, Krieger (Jean Reno) and Luther (Ving Rhames). There will be heisting and an astonishing number of double crosses.

Mission: Impossible (which I pretend to take place in universe next to the original series, for reasons obvious to anyone who liked the show and has seen the movie) falls into a weird space in the career of Tom Cruise. While wielding quite a bit of star power, he didn’t have quite as much clout as to be able to bully his directors into an infinite number of close-ups of him looking heroic/constipated, even in a film he produced; though he already was able to play down the importance of every other character in his movies, resulting in a film with Reno, Béart, Rhames, Voight, and Kristin Scott Thomas that finds no space to give any of them an actual substantial scene. Only Vanessa Redgrave seems impervious to this, joyfully chewing the scenery whenever she’s on screen and flirting at Cruise in the exact same predatory manner his heroes would increasingly take on in the coming decades.

Cruise is attempting to make up for the too sharp focus on himself by trying very hard indeed, more often than not falling into a trap that comes up regularly with him during the early decades of his career when he was trying to be a proper actor as well as a movie star – he looks like a guy trying much more than one doing, grimacing and shouting when he doesn’t seem to know how to express human feelings in a more natural manner.

Ironically, the blockbuster bigness of projects like this first Mission: Impossible can’t have helped him either, for this is not a film that lends itself to attempts at being subtle and human; being appropriately big is a skill Cruise really got better in during the years following this. And really, think what you want about the guy, one can’t fault him for being a slacker.

So that leaves Mission: Impossible to be carried by its twisty passages of a curiously predictable script full of set pieces and the great Brian De Palma’s direction alone. Fortunately, De Palma in his thriller director for hire phase is brilliant in his overblown pomposity, clearly loving the technical tricks his budget affords him, finding ways to keep Cruise off-screen at least sometimes by using POV camera, and otherwise applying everything he learned from studying Hitchcock, while also adding his own ability to melodramatically heighten every action by stylish flourishes that would make them ridiculous instead of suspenseful in lesser hands.

Now, many of the set-ups for the film’s central set pieces and the heist scene everybody still seems to remember decades later are patently ridiculous when you think them through, but De Palma’s impeccable staging and timing of thrills cheap and costly makes them utterly convincing while you’re in the moment, which is all that matters in the kind of film that only ever is about its moments of excitement and the thrills that come with that. This is not at all meant as a criticism of big, loud blockbuster movies – I love rather a lot of them, older and very new – but rather an acknowledgement of what they are typically meant to be and do. Mission: Impossible does it rather well indeed, even for someone like me who only ever likes movies starring Tom Cruise despite of him and not because of him.

The Girl in the Fog (2017)

Original title: La ragazza nella nebbia

One December, 23rd, teenager Anna Lou disappears from a secluded little town in the Italian Alps. Big city investigator Vogel (Toni Servillo) is called in to take care of the case. On the outside, Vogel is the picture of a serious, professional and competent policeman, but the direction he takes in his investigation soon makes clear that he sees himself not as a seeker of truth or justice but as the man brought in to give the public what it wants. Truth, justice or the actual well-being of a victim and their family, or the actual guilt of the people he accuses of a crime  hardly even register on his compass. In fact, the film does suggest he’s one of those famous high-functioning sociopaths, though it does so subtly and ambiguously.

So when Vogel latches on on some vague, highly circumstantial evidence pointing in the direction of local school teacher Loris Martini (Alessio Boni), he spends most of his time manipulating the press against the man, and very little on actual investigative work whatsoever. Consequently, the rather complicated truth of the matter is going to elude him for quite some time.

As far as twisty, psychologically motivated crime thrillers go, Donato Carrisi’s film based on his own novel is certainly right up there with the cream of the crop. It’s a film that hardly makes a misstep, easily convincing its audience even of the really much too complicated villainous plan that has way too many moments that’ll only work when total strangers act exactly as the perpetrator wants this will eventually to have been about on the plot-level.

Carrisi achieves this through a calm, focussed presentation that may not be as cold as his protagonists are but lacks any love for melodrama, calmly observing private catastrophes where other films would aim straight for the audience’s adrenal glands, making a deeper emotional impact exactly by not straining so hard for it on a surface level. Even though I am not a fan of the twisty thriller format in general, the director/writer’s calm and sure hand works wonders to convince even of slight implausibilities, mostly because there’s never any doubt the film knows where it wants to go and how to get there; it’s also playing fair with its audience, providing us all the clues we need to understand what’s really going on, but subtly enough to not stick our noses into it.

The film’s rather economical that way too, with scenes often taking on a kind of double-meaning – one looked when looked at straightforwardly, one with a cynical eye – so that even something a simple as a framing device in which Vogel has a little nightly chat with a psychiatrist (Jean Reno) is used for more than just straightforward narrative purposes. At the same time, the plot doesn’t feel overloaded, its intricate construction presented as if all of this were very straightforward and perfectly natural.


On a philosophical level, this is so cynical I’m tempted to call it a neo noir, even though its actual DNA seems closer to contemporary thrillers and – eventually – highly constructed mysteries. It’s not just that every single one of the authority figures (except for the female head of the local police, who doesn’t have much actual authority here, though) in a so-called respectable job in the film turns out to be utterly untrustworthy, at best fixated on giving the public appearance of doing their duty and making money through it, but never interested in what that duty is actually supposed to mean. The The Girl in the Fog clearly argues that this is indeed the way the world works. If there is any kind of crude justice actually happening (the film keeps this act off-screen, of course), it’s not actual justice but only the result of Vogel’s aggrieved vanity.

Three Films Make A Post: FILMED WITH THE NAKED FURY OF FACT!

Warning: this trilogy of crap movies isn’t for the faint of heart!

Dracula 3000 (2004): Not to come over as excessively negative, but this German/South African co-production directed (in a rather generous interpretation of the term) by one Darrell Roodt must be one of the most joylessly bad films ever made. At the very least, it’s one of the most joylessly bad films I have seen in a long career of trying to find the entertainment value in things of generally dubious quality. There’s a theoretically okay enough cheapo cast including Casper van Dien, Tiny Lister and at least two minutes of Udo Kier, but the combination of Roodt’s clueless yet boring direction, the industrial building this was shot in nobody even tried to dress up as space ship interiors, and a script that includes lines like “I wanna watch my anaconda spit all over your snow white ass” and deems them funny come together to produce the perfect piece of shit.

To be avoided at all cost.

L’immortel aka 22 Bullets (2010): I’m more often than not criticizing the films that Luc Besson’s Europacorp crap out for their blatant stupidity but at least, they don’t have pretensions of artistic class and do their best to entertain their audience, quite unlike this particular Europacorp film. Richard Berry’s L’immortel plays out as a painful attempt at cramming as many gangster movie clichés into nearly two hours of running time as possible, filming them in an overbearing way that’s so pseudo-artistic it becomes tackier than anything Olivier Megaton has ever done, and hoping the audience hasn’t seen the dozens of better movies using these clichés to much better effect. Poor Jean Reno does his best as our honourable hero gangster boss (he’s against drugs, saves prostitutes etc) but not even he can save this particular film.

Repo Men (2010): And yet, the Berry film is still more watchable than Miguel Sapochnik’s dystopian SF action comedy monstrosity that takes a perfectly serviceable anti-capitalist idea and turns it into a series of scenes that are by turns unfunny, puzzling in their use for the film, would-be transgressive, or painfully generic. As is the custom for films like it, it also features way too many scenes where it winks into the camera while clapping itself on the shoulder for how clever and subversive it is, never actually finding the time to be clever or subversive.

As an action film, it also suffers more than a little from the fact its hero is the kind of asshole who has no problems with murdering people for money until his head is on the table, and never demonstrates anything even vaguely resembling a change of heart. Which is of course unavoidable in a film whose characters never resemble actual human beings, either.

Ronin (1998)

After the end of the Cold War (and before the War on Terror was invented), quite a few intelligence operatives of various countries found themselves not just out of a job, and certainly without a pension, with skills that don’t sell too great on the normal job market, and morally adrift, lacking a master (be it in form of an abstract ideal) to do terrible things for. Therefore the film’s title.

Ronin concerns itself with a handful of such men – none of whom know each other from before - hired by people who are most certainly Irish and handle them through a woman named Deirdre (Natascha McElhone in one of her good performances) to acquire a traditional McGuffin in form of a silver case the IRA can’t afford to buy by violent means.

The place is Paris, and these men are American Sam (Robert De Niro being low-key at a point in his career when he was usually shouting and mugging), Frenchman Vincent (Jean Reno being Jean Reno, which is not a complaint), German ex-KGB man Gregor (Stellan Skarsgard), driver Larry (Skipp Sudduth) and extremely nervous former British special forces guy Spence (Sean Bean). The group will not only have to solve a difficult task but do it rather more quickly than sensible. Acquiring the case is of course only the first step in the film’s plot, for there are various betrayals waiting for the characters too. It seems some men even lose the most basic of loyalties when they lose the one thing that excused their violent behaviour in the past.

At the end of his career, having gone through the horrors of trying to get some sort of film out of Marlon “Can’t I just mumble a voice over on a shot of total darkness?” Brando and Val “I want a tree house” Kilmer at their peak levels of asshattery (levels so high the human language has no words to describe them), the great John Frankenheimer struck gold with self-assured brilliance twice in a row with this action and spy film that is also a meditation on the meaning of loyalty in a world that isn’t loyal to anyone as well as a film about getting old while the world changes around one (and a year later with Reindeer Games - at least in that film’s director’s cut). Okay, Ronin’s final five minutes are tying things up a bit too pat, smelling of studio interference, but this is not the sort of ending that actually ruins a film; it just robs its metaphorical level of a little precision and focus.

Ronin’s tale of aging men trying to survive the realization that the things that defined them are either not there anymore or might never have been what they thought they were, and now doing the same pretty terrible things (or in certain cases everything) for their basic survival they could once excuse with their Causes certainly suggests parallels to the director himself. I at least can’t shake the impression that there’s a bit of a self portrait of an aging man who is very good at making a certain type of film that isn’t much en vogue anymore here, but that might be the lure of the pat interpretation calling to me like a Polish mermaid in a weird strip club.

In any case, the film isn’t out to apologize every shitty behaviour by its characters – some of them, certainly Sam and Vincent, still cling to certain values and loyalties that protect them from the complete nihilism of some of the other characters here, something that still accepts the possibility of hope and perhaps even still believes in some sort of moral code. There’s a melancholy surrounding these two as well as the younger Deirdre that seems more clear-headed than mere nostalgia. These are people who have done and seen and survived things that have cost them their illusions but who aren’t willing to see everything they ever believed in as illusions.


Because this isn’t an art house movie but a Frankenheimer flick, these more abstract notions are packaged in a series of car chases, shoot-outs and other action sequences made by a master of that sort of thing, still inventive, clearly directed and rather exciting to watch; and because this is a Frankenheimer film, the action scenes here aren’t just meant to be exciting – though they certainly are that – but also reveal things about characters and relationships the dialogue scenes and the procedural scenes before the storm then don’t need to tell us.