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.

APOCALYPSE; MEOW

Opening:

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga--In the unlikely event that I'm ever asked to take the "Colbert Questionert" on Late Night, my answer to the question "Favorite Action Movie?" will be George Miller's 1981 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. It would probably be on the list of my twenty or thirty favorite movies, all-time. So any later chapter in George Miller's postapocalyptic Down Under car chase franchise has a lot to live up to.

This fifth entry is a prequel, offering backstory on the one-armed warrior played by Charlize Theron in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. Turns out that Furiosa was abducted, as a child, from a "place of abundance" into the Wasteland, a vast desert region inhabited by gnarly motorcycle-borne pirates shuttling between three horribly symbiotic fiefdoms: The Citadel, Gas Town and The Bullet Farm.

The Citadel, a water source, is presided over by the masked warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and filled with his bald, pale, mindlessly loyal followers the War Boys, who recall the acolytes of Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian. Gas Town refines the fuel that the Wasteland's countless motor vehicles burn; The Bullet Farm provides the munitions.

Furiosa is dragged into this miserable world as a girl (Alyla Browne) and ends up in the clutches of the gabby nomadic biker chieftain Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), who more than earns her grudge against him. Over the more than two-hour run of the movie, the grown-up version of Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) is carried along through Miller's lengthy showcase chases and battle scenes, which have the feel of movements in a symphony.

I saw this film in IMAX, with a large screening audience, and what I noticed is that every time one of Miller's mad, headlong, thundering action sequences wound down, the crowd was left quiet, mesmerized. The term "gripping" gets thrown out a lot in describing movies, but Furiosa truly grips. I liked but didn't love Fury Road; this one still falls shy of Road Warrior for me, but it's a majestic piece of filmmaking nonetheless.

There's no director quite like Miller. His action scenes are staged with an epic sweep but also with a macabre slapstick intricacy. His view of humanity seems deeply jaundiced; he's forever showing us people taking cruelty and indifference to their fellow humans to horrifying extremes, yet he does it with a casual humor, as if to say, of course we're capable of this.

Yet somehow this bleak outlook doesn't come across like cheap, sophomoric cynicism, and it isn't depressing. Partly this is because he always shows us decent human values struggling to hold on in this world, but it's also because the generous-hearted Miller imbues his characters, even the deplorable ones, with so much personality and grotesque glamour.

Taylor-Joy, with the jolting anger that takes over her almost inhumanly urchin face, fits the role perfectly. As her love interest, driver Praetorian Jack, handsome Tom Burke has a valiant and sympathetic appeal. But it's Hemsworth, his eyes wounded and his tone aggrieved every time somebody has the temerity to resist him, who really engages with the audience. The final clash between Dementus and Furiosa, featuring some of the best dialogue from the script (by Miller and Nico Lathouris), gets at the impulse to avenge with a subtlety that few action movies attempt. 

There can be little doubt that Miller's films have contributed to the dangerous illusion that many people, especially young men, seem to hold: that the collapse of civilization would be cool and liberating and fun. He should probably be censured for this, but it sure makes his movies exhilarating.

The Garfield Movie--Another origin story; this computer-animated yarn starts by tracing the humble beginnings of the indolent, lasagna-loving housecat from the calculatingly marketed comic strip by Jim Davis. Turns out that as a kitten, Garfield, voiced here by Chris Pratt, was left in an alley by his feral father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) and met his devoted human Jon (Nicholas Hoult) when he saw him through the window of an Italian restaurant. His overeating is a psychological overcompensation for early want.

The rest of The Garfield Movie concerns our hero and his exuberant canine pal Odie getting abducted by the cronies of the Persian cat Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), who has a grudge against Vic. Somehow it all leads to an attempt to steal milk from a commercial dairy, and an alliance with a glowering, lovelorn bull (Ving Rhames, who's pretty funny).

Admirable as Pratt is as an easygoing onscreen star, his voice struck me as a bit generic for this character, after being performed in earlier iterations by such distinctive voices as Bill Murray and Lorenzo Music. But he's not bad, and the movie has imagination and a snappy, propulsive comic precision, not to mention a catchy theme song by Jon Batiste. It's inconsequential but slickly-made fun, and when it was over, I'll admit I went out for lasagna.

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.