Tramell Tilman – Movie Musings

Charming and likeable Marvel action film with a genuine heart at its centre

Director: Destin Daniel Cretton

Cast: Tom Holland (Peter Parker/Spider-Man), Zendaya (MJ), Sadie Sink (Jean Grey), Jacob Batalon (Ned Leeds), Jon Bernthal (Frank Castle/Punisher), Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova/Black Widow), Tramell Tillman (Bill Metzger), Marisa Tomei (May Parker), Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner/Hulk), Michael Mando (Marc Gargan/Scorpion), Naomi Watts (EV), Oliva Booth-Ford (Sara Grey)

It’s been four years since Spider-Man: No Way Home and they’ve been tough for Peter Parker (Tom Holland). After the entire world were magically forced to forget him (in order, of course, to save the multiverse!), Parker has spent those years dedicated to the idea that with ‘great power comes great responsibility’. While also obsessively maintaining his anonymity to avoid anyone being put at risk by knowing him, his only contact with former girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) via cyber-stalking. He’s terribly lonely beneath his wise-cracking cheeriness. Peter’s life starts to shake up when his spider powers begin to alarmingly mutate and grow in strength just as a mysterious antagonist (Sadie Sink) with the power to control minds and an agenda against the government Department of Damage Control pops up.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in many ways a very hard reset of the MCU’s Spider-Man. Before this, the friendly-neighbourhood spider-man was awash with friends who knew exactly who he was. He lived in comfort and had the backing of Tony Stark’s unlimited cheque book. Brand New Day takes him closer to the classic image: low on resources, lives in a beat-up apartment, fights crime on the streets of New York, has no friends and relies on his own ingenuity to build his equipment. It really is a Brand New Day.

It also gives a great opportunity for Tom Holland to flex his muscles (in more ways than one). Holland is as witty, charming, sweet and decent as ever, but his new isolated Spider-man is sadder, more maladjusted and awkward and (above all) deeply and desperately lonely. He talks endlessly to an AI companion, chats with friendly professionalism to cops he works with, dodges any chit-chat from his neighbours and seems to do nothing but fight crime. Holland is really good at showing the fractured, desperate loneliness Peter is feeling under his enthusiasm. These feelings come pouring out of him as he sits endlessly re-watching Ned’s Instagram live-streams or assures anyone who asks that he’s absolutely fine.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is also very endearing because Holland and Zendaya are extremely likeable, very talented actors you easily invest in. It’s very hard in Brand New Day not to want Peter to tell MJ everything and for her memories to come flooding back, especially because Zendaya is very good at subtly implying MJ ‘knows’ something is missing in her life but can’t put her finger on it. Not surprisingly they have fabulous chemistry. When the film finally does bring them together, Holland’s sudden pained emotion followed his buttoned-up attempt to hide what he’s feeling is genuinely affecting, as is Zendaya’s polite, honest but uncertain responses.

The compellingly personal story between these highly likeable characters – who we have already followed across three movies – powers the movie’s emotional high spots. As does the equally affecting friendship between Peter and Ned. Perhaps’s Brand New Day’s best sequence just involves the three of these characters and a Lego set, a little touch of normality and simple joy that feels particularly affecting considering how much we’ve seen Peter’s loneliness. (It’s also rather nice that Brand New Day implies at points that the bonds of lifetime friendship may be the strongest love there is).

Brand New Day has a lovely beating heart, which means you can let go the fact it’s probably too long and some of its twists and turns are probably neither twisty or turny (in particular, one character is so clearly not what they seem you’ll be hard pressed not to mutter “that’s the villain” the second they appear). Daniel Dustin Cretton directs with zip, even if he fast cuts some of the action so quickly it actually makes it harder to appreciate the loving work that has clearly gone into the fight choreography.

However, like many of the best MCU films, the antagonist (I choose my words carefully) works because they are a neat commentary on the hero. While Peter – who even when visiting Florence Pugh’s Black Widow in a bath house still wears his facemask – lives in isolation repressing his feelings, Sadie Sink’s mind-controlling mystery character is revealed to be desperately searching for a lost loved one. While Peter feels terrified and stressed by his powers – his head throbbing with his super-senses and disgusted by his new found web-shooting skills – Sink revels in her growing strength. And, unlike Peter burying himself in duty, she is willing to put others at risk to heal herself.

Some of Brand New Day’s best sequences are set around Sink’s ability to ‘jump’ her mind from body-to-body within a 30-foot radius. A huge team of actors and dedicated choreographers play the dozens of people inhabited by Sink’s character, and the body language and physicality of these actors is so expertly done you always know, at any point, exactly who is being controlled in any crowd. Combine that with the jerky movements of people’s bodies as Sink’s mind ‘jumps’ in and out of them, and you’ve got some striking soft-psychological horror (especially as the ‘possessed’ have no memory of their actions) that reminded me of devil-possession drama Fallen.

Sadie Sink is very good as this mysterious character (although her name is now public knowledge), full of pain, loss and anger, desperately chasing a clue whose mysterious nature when revealed is chillingly effective. Brand New Day is also supported with a host of fine MCU cameos, especially Jon Bernthal’s Punisher a gruff, sweary, ends-justify-means contrast to Parker (especially as it hilariously points up Parker’s family-friendly refusal to say any naughty words) who, like our hero, is bottles up his loneliness under a moody exterior that doesn’t invite any questions.

Brand New Day really works however, because in Holland and Zendaya it has two very talented actors, playing hugely likeable characters, going through dilemmas that are very relatable, even if one of them can shoot webs from his wrists. It’s that heart which makes Brand New Day so enjoyable. The stakes are winningly personal, which carries so much more impact than special effects laden nonsense. It’s even brave enough to make its final confrontation three people talking. And you get Spider-Man fighting Ninjas. What’s not to like?

Cruise’s final mission is really a tribute to the star himself and his never-ending force of will

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Cast: Tom Cruise (Ethan Hunt), Hayley Atwell (Grace), Ving Rhames (Luther Stickell), Simon Pegg (Benji Dunn), Esai Morales (Gabriel), Pom Klementieff (Paris), Henry Czerny (Eugene Kittridge), Angela Bassett (President Erika Sloane), Holt McCallany (Serling Bernstein), Janet McTeer (Secretary Walters), Nick Offerman (General Sidney), Hannah Waddingham (Rear Admiral Neely), Tramell Tillman (Captain Bledsoe), Shea Whigham (Briggs), Greg Tarzan Davies (Theo Degas), Charles Parnell (Richards), Mark Gatiss (Angstrom), Rolf Saxon (William Donloe), Lucy Tulugarjuk (Tapeesa)

Almost thirty years after the first film trotted into the cinema, Tom Cruise signs off (he claims) his franchise of death-defying stunts with a final entry that dials the global threat up so far you can almost hear the desperate whirring as the doomsday clock tries to keep up. Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is big in every single way, packed with set-pieces, dense procedural plot mechanics that require reams of exposition, global annihilation round every corner and at the centre the towering, chosen-one aura of Ethan Hunt himself, the only man who can save the world.

The Final Reckoning takes off a few weeks after the now-rechristened Dead Reckoning (after it under-performed they didn’t want to scare people off with a Part 2 subtitle). AI demigod The Entity is hellbent on gaining control of the world’s nuclear arsenals so that, having presumably binged Terminator, it can SkyNet-like wipe out humanity. Ethan (Tom Cruise) is on the run, but he has a plan. Dig out the sunken Russian sub where the Entity was ‘born’, fish out its source code, hook it up to an Entity-killing virus and trap the AI would-be-overlord in what’s essentially a glowing USB drive. This mission will involve lots of running, fighting, defusing of nukes, diving to the bottom of the ocean, jumping between bi-planes mid-flight… he might as well chuck the kitchen sink as well.

Mission: Impossible: Final Reckoning has plenty of fun, even if it is hellishly overlong. It’s the sort of crowd-pleaser that gets people clapping at the end (as several people in my packed-out screening did). When the stunts come, they’re hugely well-staged. As always the Tom Cruise USP is front-and-centre: if you see him do it, he did it. Yes, Tom really did jump out of a naval helicopter into the raging Atlantic. Yes, that really is Tom, climbing over a speeding bi-plane thousands of feet-up with only a pair of goggles to keep him safe. It’s no-coincidence the villain is an AI who creates an artificial digital reality. The Mission: Impossible films are all about it keeping it solidly real.

But, once the initial adrenaline rush subsides, I’m wondering if its pumped-up thrills are going to be a bit more wearing second-time around. What struck me about The Final Reckoning is, that for all the huge amount of stuff going on, there is precious little heart in it. More than any other M:I film since the little-loved M:I:2 (practically the only film in the franchise not to get a shout-out here), the act of saving-the-world here is a job for one never-wrong superhuman. Cruise does almost everything, his team’s main role being getting into the right place to send him a message or wire up a computer. On top of that, the best of the series set-pieces had flashes of Ethan’s stress, fear and sense of ‘I cant believe I have to do this’ humour – all of that is mostly missing here.

The Final Reckoning loses a lot of the heart of what made the earlier films so rewarding. It loses the moments of friendship or sparky interplay between the team. Cruise and Pegg, the series main comic relief, share almost no scenes together. Klementoff and Davies do virtually nothing as new team members, other than shoot guns and get captured. Cruise shares more time with Atwell, but the bizarre is-it-a-romance-or-not between them is as oddly undefined as Ethan’s relationship with Rebecca Ferguson’s Elsa was (in fact it makes you realise the most sexual thing Ethan has done since film three is hold someone’s hand). Cruise is so often on solo missions, that the film could probably have dispensed with the team altogether with only a small plot impact.

The film only affords to slow down to give Ving Rhames (the only other guy to appear in every film) a moment of genuine emotion – though special mention must go to Rolf Saxon and Lucy Tulugarjuk who from small moments craft characters I genuinely grew attached to and worried about. Otherwise, the bonds of friendship that powered the franchises most successful non-stunt moments are absent. In fact, also missing are the heist caper set-pieces – even the famous face-masks are only employed very briefly.

The Final Reckoning dials the stakes up so much, they are effectively meaningless. In previous films, high-stakes were mixed with personal ones: we were always more invested in whether Ethan save his friends rather than the word. The film also struggles without a real antagonist. Its nominal human opponent, Esai Morales’ Gabriel, little more than a smirk and an obstacle. Shorn of the most-interesting element of his character – his fanatical loyalty to his AI master – Gabriel is neither particularly interesting or a threat. In its vast runtime, Final Reckoning has no time to actually explore what the personal link between Ethan and Gabriel actually was, making you wonder why on earth they bothered to put it in both films in the first place.

It’s not helped by the fact that the film is so constantly in motion, that virtually every single scene of dialogue is about communicating what’s going to happen next. There are constantly (admittedly skilfully batted around) conversations explaining why Ethan has to go there, get this, bring it here, do this to it, put it in that all within a ridiculously small window of time. Sometimes, to shake it up, we cut across to the US bunker where a gang of over-qualified actors (Bassett, Offerman, McCallany, McTeer and Gatiss) similarly explain what the Entity is doing to each other. (Although, like Rhames, Bassett gets the most interesting stuff to actually act as a President facing a Fail Safe like terrible choice).

What you realise is that The Final Reckoning is pretty confident that what really pulls the audience in is Tom Cruise doing crazy stunts, so that’s what it gives us. In fact, rather than a tribute to the series (despite closing plot points from Missions 1 and 3) what the film really feels like is a tribute to Cruise, the last man-standing among the old-fashioned superstars. Most of the dialogue puffs up Cruise’s Ethan into Godlike status (it’s not quite “living manifestation of destiny” like Rogue Nation put it, but close). Cruise carries out two extended fight scenes in his pants (though if I looked like that at 61 so would I). No other actors intrude on his stunts or messianic sense of purpose.

Which is amazingly done of course. Literally no-one does it better than Cruise. The fact that the movie feels like Cruise effectively shot most of it alone with just the crew, means it almost doesn’t matter that its plot is merely to link together set-pieces. And if someone deserves a victory lap – which is what this is – then that guy is Cruise. I’d have wanted more of the fun, humour and warmth that made most of the other films such massively rewarding hits. But The Final Reckoning gives more of what the series does that no other series does. And I guess that’s a fitting finale.