THERE AIN'T NO CURE FOR THE SUMMERTIME CRUISE

Opening this weekend:

Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning--It's pointless to complain that the action sequences in this movie are preposterous. They are, of course, but if they weren't, the audience would presumably feel cheated. It's what this franchise is about--wildly exaggerating the stamina, adroitness and durability of which humans are capable.

Or, rather, of which one particular, superior human is capable: Tom Cruise, as hero Ethan Hunt. Toward the end, Ethan crawls around outside the cockpits of two different biplanes--changing planes in mid-flight!--to grapple with the bad guy (Esai Morales). It's one of the more spectacular airplane stunt sequences since the finale of 1977's Capricorn One, but it makes the Marvel movies seem like gritty realism by comparison.

Mind you, by this time we've already seen Ethan enter a wrecked Russian sub at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean to retrieve some gizmo; he needs it stop a rogue AI program from launching a nuclear holocaust, so no pressure. He then rises to the surface without a wetsuit.

And it isn't just his physical prowess, of which, at 62, Cruise can be justly proud. Ethan is also morally superior. Canoodling with his leading lady (Hayley Atwell) in the decompression chamber after his arctic dip, he asks what human could be trusted with the power to control the world's nuclear arsenals, and the wide-eyed, worshipful woman unhesitatingly suggests that he's just the right guy. Ethan demurs, all modesty.

It's been a while since a star has treated himself to quite this shameless a Stations of the Cross tour. The opening credits announce this eighth film in the series as "A TOM CRUISE PRODUCTION," and the producer certainly shows reverence for his leading man.

But as usual when he plays one of his hyperconfident man of action roles--he can be excellent when he plays desperate, out of his depth pipsqueaks, as in Rain Man or A Few Good Men--at some level I can't take Cruise seriously, despite his obvious great capabilities. He's youthful in the wrong sense onscreen; other stars, say, Henry Fonda or James Stewart, had a boyishness which they never lost, even as they added the gravitas of maturity. But try as he might, Cruise always comes across like a kid dressed up in his dad's clothes.

To be fair, this movie and its predecessors aren't really any sillier than most episodes of Bruce Geller's Murphy's-Law-defying TV series (CBS; 1966-1973). But that show played it cool and laconic, with long, dialogue-free sequences of sneaky spy mischief, sustained by quiet, tense, repetitive musical cues and almost no backstory. The movies are loaded with heaving psychodrama and bombastic music and extended fight and chase scenes, often featuring Cruise doing his adorable little stiff-armed, wind-up-toy run, right up the middle of a conveniently empty road.

It's certainly fair to complain that Final Reckoning, which clocks in just a little shy of three hours, is way too long and drawn out. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie from a script he wrote with Erik Jendresen, the movie is exceedingly well-made on a scene-by-scene basis. But cumulatively, it's too much, and with its heavy, Gotterdammerung atmosphere and plot elements that recall movies like Fail Safe and War Games, it's a little lacking in humor, too.

There is excellent acting here. Angela Bassett brings a moving authority to the role of an intelligent, decent, responsible President of the United States. The French actress Pom Klementieff is amusing as an assassin turned ally; Katy O'Brian from Love Lies Bleeding makes an impression as a Navy diver, and vets like Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Janet McTeer, Rolf Saxon and Nick Offerman, among others, are always welcome.

But the audience is probably most grateful of all to Simon Pegg, who works hard to lighten things up. And Lucy Tulugarjuk, even though her lines are in an Inuit language, connects with the audience pretty much every time they cut to her.

One last snarky shot at a fellow sexagenarian who is possibly holding up better than I am: For all the care lavished on the film in general and the star in particular, Cruise's hair somehow got away from the filmmakers here. It's long, and it seems limp and spiritless; at times it gives him almost a Shemp Howard look. When he's struggling to hang on to the airplane and his face and hair are rippling in the wind, it offers the only other significant laughs in Final Reckoning, albeit likely not on purpose.

OPPY DAYS

Opening in theaters this weekend; on Prime Video November 23...

Robots have been a mainstay in movies for most of the past century, and one of the recurrent themes of such tales is the question of whether they are conscious entities, with personality and agency. Good Night Oppy is the first film I know of on this subject that isn't science fiction.

This documentary chronicles the careers of Opportunity and Spirit, two robotic Mars Rovers launched by NASA in 2003 to explore the Martian surface in search of evidence that there was once water, and thus possibly life, on the Red Planet. The project followed a couple of embarrassing and expensive NASA failures, the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1998, both of which were ignominiously lost, in one mortifying case through human error caused by confusion between American measurement and the metric system.

Spirit and Opportunity, by contrast, were overachievers. Brilliantly designed and engineered, both remained operational for many years longer than their projected mission duration of 90 "sols" (Martian days) and added greatly to human understanding of Martian geology and natural history.

But impressive and interesting as their discoveries were, this isn't really what Good Night Oppy is about. The dramatic core of the film is about the degree to which the scientists and engineers who built the robots, and who supervised their activities from the Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, anthropomorphized their creations, attributed personalities to them, worried and fretted about them and ultimately mourned them.

Directed by Ryan White and gravely narrated by Angela Bassett, the film alternates convincing simulations of the endearing robots on the Martian surface, created at Industrial Light & Magic, with actual footage of their controllers monitoring and guiding them back at JPL. We watch the beautiful nerds age with them, frowning at their struggles and grinning at their triumphs like soccer moms.

One of the designers notes that the robot he worked on was "just a box of wires" but admits that she took on a human persona for him. Another notes that the supposedly identical rovers had distinct personalities; that Spirit was "troublesome" while Opportunity was "Little Miss Perfect." One of the project leaders says that to compare their relationship to parenting would be to "trivialize parenthood," but there's no doubt that the relationship these people feel toward Spirit and "Oppy" is parental.

There was something highly satisfying about watching a bunch of top-flight scientific minds enter matter-of-factly into thoroughly sentimental projection. After a while it's hard not to wonder if it is projection, or perhaps a sensitivity to the beginnings of a rudimentary sentience; to wonder if, at some level, human beings are not ourselves just boxes of wires that somehow attained self-awareness.

It should be noted that the filmmakers do nothing to discourage this idea; they don't explain, for instance, that the rather Harold-Pinter-ish plainsong sentences from the rovers were human translations of transmitted data, not verbatim statements. Even so, the effect of the film was, for me, not only thought-provoking but deeply emotional.

The soundtrack is also worth mentioning; it draws on the wake-up songs that were played at Mission Control at the beginning of the robot's shifts. Selections range from "Roam" by the B-52s to "S.O.S." by ABBA, and they all seem to take on deeper meanings in context. It would make a pretty good mix-tape album.

TOM MACHINE

A few days belated...

Mission: Impossible: Fallout--Secret agent Tom Cruise is given a retro-looking recorder informing him of his mission, which seems, quite frankly, impossible. The recording then self-destructs after five seconds. When the opening credits start on this sixth installment in the action series, they're accompanied by the image of a burning fuse and a montage of quick glimpses from the film we're about to see, edited to Lalo Schifrin's familiar theme music.

These nods to the format of Bruce Geller's classic TV show, which ran on CBS from 1966 to 1973, are very welcome. We get more: Improbably lifelike latex masks, for instance. Best of all, when Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg are transporting a captive villain through the sewers of Paris, we hear that insistent background music from the show: the snare drum, and that repeated phrase of "Da-DA-dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum-DAAAAA...[pause]...Da-da-da-da-DAAAA..."

But of course, these are just trappings. The hugely successful Mission: Impossible flicks long since abandoned the atmosphere of the old show, with its long, suspenseful sequences of minimal dialogue as the then-high-tech spies engineered massively convoluted, Murphy's-Law-defying scams to trick evil despots or gangsters. We very rarely learned anything about the personal lives of the "IMF Team," much less about the shadowy intelligence agency for which they worked. And there was rarely any sustained action.

The movies, by contrast, are all about the tortured personal lives of the characters, especially Cruise's Ethan Hunt. And they're built from one wildly overscaled action sequence to the next. They aren't a bit more ludicrous than the old show's theatrics, they're just ludicrous in a very different way.

Fallout has Cruise and a colleague skydiving right into Paris to infiltrate a soiree at the Grand Palais--one of the more flamboyant approaches to crashing a party we've seen in a while. Within minutes we get a savage martial arts brawl in a pristine men's room, not long after that we get a motorcycle chase around the Arc de Triomphe, and then it's off to London for a foot chase through St. Paul's, and so on. It all has something to do with stolen plutonium and a scheme by an old enemy of Ethan's to create an apocalyptic disaster.

And on its own terms, the movie, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie of The Usual Suspects, is relentlessly watchable. Cruise, absurdly boyish for a man in his mid-fifties, reportedly did much of his own stunt work, and it certainly looks like he did. I generally find it hard to take him seriously in hyper-competent man of action roles, but that's not a defect in a silly action fantasy like this, and there's no doubt that he has the energy and professionalism to carry a movie on this scale.

He's ably supported by Rhames and Pegg, along with juicy, hammy turns by Alec Baldwin, Angela Bassett, Vanessa Kirby and Sean Harris as the obsessed heavy. Henry Cavill, who makes a somewhat bland Superman for my taste, shows unexpected intensity and sexiness here as an arrogant CIA man assigned to keep an eye on Ethan. 

My one complaint about Fallout--again, on its own terms--is the same complaint I've tediously made about one big blockbuster after another over the last decade or so: It's too long, by twenty minutes to a half hour. It ends with an extremely protracted, crosscut scene involving different sets of characters trying to avert disaster. It's amusing in itself, but after well over two hours of shootings and beatings and knifings and crashes, we're so worn down we may want them to give up.

But that, of course, would be impossible.

THE HUMAN ABSTAIN

Opening this week:

Chi-Raq—The title refers to Chicago, the streets of which are more lethal these days for young black men than Iraq. It also refers to the rapper and gang leader (Nick Cannon) whose girlfriend Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) is at the center of Spike Lee’s modern-dress retelling of Aristophanes, much of it played out in rhyming dialogue. Lysistrata leads the girlfriends of rival gangs on Chicago’s south side in a sex strike until the shooting stops.

The middle-aged women in the neighborhood eventually join in, demanding activism from the miserable middle-aged men. Eventually the strikers seize a National Guard armory, and the forces of the Mayor (D. B. Sweeney) and the Police Commissioner (Harry Lennix) lay siege to them there, planning “Operation Hot and Bothered,” in which the ladies are bombarded, Noriega-style, with romantic slow jams.

Farcical as this strand is, Lee and his co-writer Kevin Willmott (of C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America) point to the anti-war sex strike started by Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee in 2003 to show that there are real-life precedents for this sort of action. They also make clear that the object of the protest is no joke: The film includes horrifying violence, including the death of a child from a stray bullet.

I had missed Spike Lee’s last few movies, and Chi-Raq reminded me of how funny he can be. While its free-form structure recalls Lee’s early School Daze (1988), what surprised me is how genuinely Greek it is. It’s a fairly insane movie, but all its messy craziness—the broad characterizations, dirty jokes and slapstick thrown up alongside angry, deadly-serious didactic rants and debates, the meandering plot, the digressions—is at least equally true of Aristophanes.

As always with Lee’s films, much of the energy comes from the acting. Standouts here include veterans like Angela Bassett as the wise lady across the street, Wesley Snipes, giggling like Muttley, as the rival gang leader Cyclops, a raspy-voiced John Cusack as an enraged priest and Samuel L. Jackson, unleashing his peerless verbal exuberance on rhymed couplets of choral commentary.

Vivid as these performers are, however, the glue that holds Chi-Raq together—just barely—is the likable and luscious Lysistrata of Teyonah Parris. She and her fellow strikers certainly make setting down the guns seem worthwhile.