Tag Archives: Henry Cavill

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Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

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If you’re a connoisseur of modern helicopter cinema, then Mission: Impossible – Fallout is the event of the season. Not since Black Hawk Down has the Neo-Copterism movement asserted such a well-defined visual aesthetic, such elevated narrative and tonal language, such awesome fucking explosions. Everything a refined and learned copterhead cinephile could possibly desire finds fresh life here. There is an absurdist, Lynchian quality infused into the rhythmic weaving of two whirlybirds; there are rarefied, Brechtian attributes present in those characters left on the ground. There is a continuation of the leitmotif established in the first Mission: Impossible‘s chopper-chase finale. When read through the lens of the tenets of cinéma vérité, Fallout delivers a powerful indictment of those who don’t actually know how to fly such a machine. And, in a move sure to receive recognition come awards season, auteur director Christopher McQuarrie playfully inverts the male gaze by literally flipping Tom Cruise upside down in a helicopter.

…whoops. Sorry, folks. Had my Snobometer set to High. Still, the fact remains that if there’s any Mission: Impossible movie able to withstand a level of actual criticism, it’s probably Fallout. Here, for the first time, Ethan Hunt is challenged to question whether he should choose to accept every mission that comes his way; maybe those self-destructing messages are actually destructive to Ethan’s self. That’s already a higher-level starting point for this character than any of the previous five films cared to put forth, content instead with wall-to-wall action and death-defying stuntwork.

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Face Off: Hercules (1997) and Superman I/II (1978/80)

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Motion State Face Offs pit two films, franchises, or television series against each another for no reason other than because we can.

As the leading voice in movie reviews, we at Motion State Review judge films based on a wide variety of factors — dialogue, acting, cinematography, whether or not Nic Cage is in it, etc. But perhaps the most important quality a movie can have, in this contributor’s humble opinion, is originality. Sometimes, we do not recognize a movie’s level of originality unless it is noticeably unoriginal (Avatar rehashing Pocahontas, to name one; seriously they are the same movie). Other times, you can see a movie a dozen times before realizing that maybe you have seen the same exact thing somewhere else. Such was the case as when I traveled to Athens and watched the Disney movie Hercules for the first time in several years, because a true movie critic travels thousands of miles just to watch an animated movie that takes place there. I expected to get a heavy dose of nostalgia while watching; instead I got a heavy dose of…Superman?

In the same way that Avatar and Pocahontas are similar enough that any high school teacher would claim plagiarism, so, too, I found, were Hercules and the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies. Heck, they’re about one Superman solo song away from being the same movie (which would be awesome in the next Man of Steel flick, as long as Henry Cavill’s singing voice is as fantastic as his acting). But, let’s make one thing clear about who’s stealing from whom: the myth of Hercules came just slightly (a few thousand years) before the character of Superman was invented.

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Man of Steel (2013)

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Okay: let’s get linear.

The critical conversation surrounding Man of Steel has always been only moderately interesting at best, founded largely on qualms with Superman’s less-than-super demeanor and with the Metropolis-leveling final act of the film. There are no shortage of detractors who do their detracting based solely on Zack Snyder’s position in the director’s chair, which, okay, fine. I saw Sucker Punch in theaters. I hear you.

But that’s neither here nor there. Of all the labels to slap on Man of Steel — laudations and/or criticisms — the one we’re concerned with today is that of Most Non-Linear Time-Jumpy Superman Movie Ever Made. Yes, a high achievement, to be sure.

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The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

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It’s fairly easy to spot a Guy Ritchie flick, and in his most recent movie The Man from U.N.C.L.E. a few of his trademark flourishes find their best use yet. Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer fill the suits first worn by Robert Vaughn and David McCallum in the ’60s television show and globetrot around the Mediterranean attempting to out-spy one another. There are three or four plots going on at once — one’s a crusade to stop a maniacal heiress from obtaining a nuclear weapon, one’s a love story, one’s a hopeful reunification of father and daughter —and so Ritchie’s penchant for hand-holding and retreading ground we’ve already covered is actually quite useful at times.

Mostly, though, the moderately bogged-down plot is just kind of there; the style, the mood, the unending suaveness of the two leads — that’s really what counts in Ritchie’s Man from U.N.C.L.E. There are some slick sequences that don’t make you forget the plot but make you simply not care about it, sequences that lose you, purposefully and gleefully, in the zippy catchiness of it all. There are some slow bits and, again, the retreading of information gets tedious as it does in other habitual instances throughout Ritchie’s filmography. But mostly this movie is all about the flow, and even if the scene-by-scene progression isn’t flawless the pacing within the scenes themselves is fantastic.

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