The Dead Pool

Harry’s Game

The Dead Pool
Directed by Buddy Van Horn
USA 1988
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers. 

I first saw the movie The Dead Pool on its original cinema release in the UK in 1989, slightly behind the US theatrical release. I really liked the Dirty Harry films by this point but... I really hated this one... at the time. I thought the robot car bomb chase was stupid (while now, when we’re living in an age of killer drones... well, it just seems quaint) and I thought the background of the horror movie production setting was too theatrical and colourful... which admittedly it is but, I’m way more forgiving now, it would seem.

Revisiting the movie, well I actually really enjoyed it this time around and, although it’s still my least favourite of Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Dirty Harry Callahan movies, I think it’s not actually letting the spirit of the other movies down... it’s just how it seemed to me at the time of its release.

Following on from the most boring opening title credits of any of the movies in the franchise, we get a story where Callahan is actually being lionised by the press for what is seen as a heroic deed. Running with it, the San Fransisco Police Department, who are unused to having Callahan being received in a positive light, want Harry to cooperate with the press, this time in the form of lovely lady journalist Samantha Walker, played here by the great Patricia Clarkson. She has good chemistry with Eastwood in this and, I think this may be the first time I saw her in anything. 

However, she picked a bad time to be associating with Harry Callahan because various killers of a jailed mob boss are after his blood and, on top of that, the latest case revolving around a horror film production, with a truly unlikeable incarnation of Liam Neeson as the young, luvvie director, involves a dead pool with Harry’s name on it.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of a dead pool, lots of places have them (or at least had them back in the day). You would basically bet on which celebrity would be the first to die and, after a number of years, if your one came up next, you would win the pool of cash for the bet. In this one, a killer close to the production of the film is mowing his way through the list in order to frame the director and it’s Callahan’s job to find him. 

Once again we have a fast paced story with a number of action scenes and also some great police procedural stuff thrown into the mix... and Harry ‘gets the gal’ too, by the end of the movie (I was betting that both her and Harry’s new partner, played by Evan C. Kim, wouldn’t make it to the closing credits alive). It’s also got a less bold but still nicely put together score by the franchise’s regular composer Lalo Schifrin, with a few nice call backs to a couple of his themes from the first movie (reviewed here). 

Oh, and one James Carrey... that’s Jim Carrey to you and I... plays one of the early victims, a rock star whose death is made to look like a drug overdose by the killer, who completely fails at that cover up too. Another thing worth noticing is that the movie critic who is stabbed to death by the killer is made up to look like legendary film critic Pauline Kael (who was quite critical of the first movie in the franchise). 

And that’s all I’ve got on The Dead Pool, I think. It looks nice enough but the cinematography and set dressing makes it feel more dated and mired in the 1980s, unlike the other four which seem to be somewhat timeless. I thought it was fine though and I’m certainly more into it than I was as a 21 year old, that’s for sure. It’s as shame this was the final one but at least Callahan walks off at the end with Patricia Clarkson, so it’s nice to think that was a long and happy partnership for the characters in their fictional life beyond the screen. Not as much of a dud as I’d originally thought and Mr. Eastwood does a fine job with it.

Magnum Force

Soul Reaver

Magnum Force
Directed by Ted Post
USA 1973
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoiler.

For the second Dirty Harry movie, Ted Post took over direction although, it’s been said more than once that things on set were bad between him and Eastwood and, allegedly, Eastwood ended up directing a fair amount of the picture himself. I’m assuming there may be some truth to that and Eastwood certainly had proven himself a good director already, with his masterpiece Play Misty For Me (reviewed here). 

Magnum Force takes an idea for one of the rejected scripts for the original Dirty Harry (which I reviewed here) about a rogue team of killer cops, meting out their own lethal brand of justice, when the bad guys get away or are allowed to walk due to  the stupidity of the legal system. This was inspired by the Brazilian death squads that were in the news at the time. 

There was a good reason why Eastwood particularly wanted to bring this story idea to the screen. The huge positive reaction to the first movie was more than tempered by an outcry that his central character was some kind of vigilante, taking the law into his own hands. While this isn’t actually true if you pay attention on that first movie, that was how the film was being perceived and criticised by some and so Eastwood liked the idea of Harry Callahan using the system he hates so much to align himself against a group of conspirators within the same department he works for. And the guy who co-wrote the screenplay was... John Milius (future director of Conan The Barbarian, reviewed here).

Now anyone who’s seen Milius talk in an interview will know the director is not shy about his love of heavy artillery and war and this certainly comes to the fore in the film, with a lot of talk about the various guns the police are using and the way Harry matches up the shells from the bodies at the crime scene with one he manages to ‘stage vanish’ during a shooting competition. 

And it’s especially prevalent in the opening credits, where Lalo Schifrin’s excellent score (probably his best of the four of the five films he provided for the series) plays out against a hand holding a Magnum pistol in profile against a vivid red background... which looks especially good on Blu Ray. Then as the credits end, there’s Clint Eastwood’s voice performing a heavily truncated voice over of his famous “do you feel lucky” speech as the gun is turned towards the audience and fired at them, presumably a nod by Milius to a similar moment in the 1903 silent film The Great Train Robbery, which scared audiences so much at the time. 

We then move onto the story and we have the relatively recently deceased David Soul playing one of the four cops who are going around executing criminals. It’s said... and this is almost certainly true... that he was spotted to play Hutch in Starsky And Hutch (which debuted on TV in 1975) because of this film. We also have Hal Holbrook (who many readers may best remember as the priest in John Carpenter’s The Fog, reviewed here) as an obstacle of a superior officer who is also embroiled in what’s going on... you’ll probably figure out his part in all this before it gets revealed on screen.

No mention is made of Harry Callahan’s end scene in Dirty Harry, where he throws away his badge and walks away from policing. I guess he must have changed his mind. Mention is made of his partner in that film retiring but this is the first film where his partner gets killed... quite possibly because of him, or at least, because of what he finds out. 

It’s not a particularly action packed film but it is nicely put together and the pace never really feels slow. As a kid I always liked this one the least (until The Dead Pool came out) but these days I actually quite like it. Again, it benefits hugely from being able to watch it in its original aspect ratio, as opposed to the pan and scan versions we would have seen on TV in the late 1970s. It’s also very much a seventies film in that little details of shots which are aesthetically pleasing are dwelled on, even though they don’t contribute to the unfolding of the story in any major way. So, for instance, there’s a wonderful shot of one of the killer’s police boots splashing through a wet puddle, followed by a shot highlighting the wet footprints of those boots on some steps. It’s a pleasure to watch things like this which are just catching little elements of life, rather than having to have everything leading into something else in the story, to be honest. 

Harry’s catchphrase in this movie is “A man has to know his limitations” but I can’t remember if this made it into any of the other movies. Certainly, although Schifrin’s score is excellent and using a more frenetic melodic palette, the orchestration is the same and, although there’s not a lot of it in the movie, Harry’s theme does make the occasional appearance in at least one scene (I think it’s only one scene actually but, it’s certainly there).

The final showdown between Harry and the motorcycle cops is lengthy but doesn't really feel particularly climactic. The bikers seem to go down too easily (these days they’d get up for another few rounds of fighting) and David Soul’s villain especially, left to last (well, almost last... but again, that gets into spoiler territory), literally just drives his bike off a ship into some water and, well, the fall supposedly kills him. That’s probably true to life but, yeah, you wouldn’t get away with that in Hollywoodland these days, that’s for sure.

The film is pretty good though. Certainly bleak but also with a certain charm and Eastwood in particular is very good as the lead here. And Schifrin’s score really picks up the pace and follows through, creating tension in shots which might not work if it wasn’t for his persistent half jazz, half suspense stylings. Magnum Force further cements Eastwood’s international superstar status and it’s revisiting films like this that reminds me why he has that reputation. I’m looking forward now to revisiting the third one in the series next, as that one was always my favourite (even without Schifrin on scoring duties). 

Dirty Harry

Punk, rocked!

Dirty Harry
USA 1971 Directed by Don Siegel
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Dirty Harry and the homicidal maniac. Harry’s the one with the badge.
Poster Tagline.

You don't assign him to murder cases - you just turn him loose.
Alternate Poster Tagline.

Well okay then. I’ve not seen Dirty Harry in about 40 years so it was due time for a revisit, I think. I’m a little more impressed with it now than I was when I first saw it in the late 1970s/early 80s on television but, I liked it enough to see all the sequels at the time (catching the last two of the five on their first run cinema releases). This one’s directed by classic Hollywood director Don Siegel (who I will always remember best for the original 1950s version of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers... reviewed here) and stars Clint Eastwood as the titular Inspector Harry Callahan... who these days, in real life, probably wouldn’t be on a police force for very long (although, since writing this and seeing what’s going on with ICE in the US of late... maybe he would).

With the background turmoil of a load of assassinations, the Miranda rights, the Vietnam war and a general feeling of overall descent in the USA... Dirty Harry came out just at the right time. The character was, perhaps, not necessarily an antidote to the political turmoil of the times but certainly someone who highlighted the increasing sense of futility the general public were feeling at the time. At least that’s what I think and I certainly suspect that would account for the high box office take on this one. 

Harry is a judge, jury and executioner who is much more concerned with cutting through the red tape and upholding justice, rather than doggedly following the law (which anyone who has done any time on jury service, would recognise are two entirely different things). Clint Eastwood does really well in this one and deserves the iconic status that this film cemented for him in American cinema (following the equally iconic portrayals of his spaghetti western characters for director Sergio Leone in the 1960s). Dirty Harry, like most detective and crime stories, transplants the lone hero figure associated with the mythic American western and continues to lionise this style of character at a time which was ripe to challenge authority in an urban setting. To say the film and lead character was influential is perhaps, an understatement. Not just in films either. The comic book character Judge Dredd, for example, would surely not exist in the form he first appeared in without the legacy of Dirty Harry... just as Johnny Alpha, aka Strontium Dog, would not have existed without the influence of those Leone westerns.

The film looks great, too. Starting off with a series of scroll downs on a memorial stone to represent the San Francisco police who have given their lives in the line of duty, the film quickly establishes the villain, the Scorpio killer (inspired by the real life Zodiac killer), played by Andrew Robinson (who Star Trek fans will be know for his regular role of Garrick in Deep Space Nine, of course). We get the sniper rifle panning around the urban jungle where he shoots a woman swimming in a roof top pool, Lalo Shifrin’s landmark score already doing some heavy lifting in establishing an off-kilter theme to represent the twisted mind of the killer. When Harry goes to investigate, through the opening credits, there are some really nice, unusual angles as we watch Clint Eastwood’s character climb a cooling tower to figure out where the shot came from. Seeing it in its intended wide screen aspect ratio, which I probably wouldn’t have when it was first screened on TV, the film’s beautiful shot design and fluid camera movement is really effective.

This continues throughout the course of the film as Clint’s gum chewing hero goes about his business. The director also pitches different textures against each other in aesthetically pleasing ways, such as when half of the screen is the front of a building with nothing going on, while the other half is Clint walking away from the character, up an alleyway in long shot. It’s good stuff. 

There are also some nice instances of visual shorthand in the movie, cleverly built to tell a piece of story with no dialogue or further clarification needed, such as when a shot of a cigarette falling into a pile outside a car door shows us instantly that the driver has been sitting in the car, with the motor running, for a substantial amount of time. There are a few regrettable moments where, for instance, various people are standing still in the street to watch the shooting of the film, which the director presumably hopes the audience won’t notice but, even so, it’s a tremendously good looking movie and, seeing it in its original aspect ratio really helps it. 

It’s become a cliche now but, this may well have been one of the first movies to feature a character running around from phone booth to phone booth in a city, reacting to the demands of the killer... although I suspect this was a phenomenon on TV before this. It’s well done though, with the majority of the sequence utilising no music until, in a nice piece of soundtrack spotting, Schifrin’s powerful score kicks in for the climax of that particular sequence. And even the ending of the film, where Harry repeats his famous “Did he fire five shots or six?” speech, has a final result which mirrors the corpse in the water at the aftermath of the first bullet shot fired at the start of the picture. 

At the end of the film, Harry mimics Gary Cooper at the end of High Noon (reviewed by me here) by throwing away his cop badge into the same river as the bad guy he’s just dispatched and turning his back on authority for good. One wonders, if the studio would have known the film would be so popular as to require a sequel which kinda ignores this final act, whether that sequence would have stayed in. Several actors including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra turned down the main lead on this one and, one also wonders if they would have, if they’d known how much the film would capture the zeitgeist of the times, declined the role as they did. Certainly, John Wayne obviously regretted it, compensating by making his own versions of the urban western with McQ and Brannigan. 

This film didn’t put Clint Eastwood on the map, he was there already but, it certainly cemented his reputation as a number one box office draw and, honestly, I’m really looking forward to revisiting the other four movies in this series, which I got for my birthday* in the Blu Ray box set Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry Collection so, yeah, more to come here. 

*over a year ago now, since time of writing.

Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1

Ai Ai Oh

Mission Impossible -
Dead Reckoning Part 1
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
USA  2023 Paramount Pictures
UK cinema release print

This was okay.

Having said that, I’m really not sure why Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1 has had such strong word of mouth... the reviews I’ve been half hearing lifted my expectations to a point where I was possibly going to be a little disappointed with whatever I saw at the cinema last night, perhaps. Okay, so my history with the Mission Impossible film franchise (which you can read in its entirety via reviews accessed from the index link top right... just scroll on down past the book section and into the film section) is such that I thought the first one was so so and that, after that, each successive film kept getting better and better, up to and including the fifth in the sequence, Rogue Nation, which I personally think is the best of these movies to date. The sixth one was okay but I think was nowhere really near it in terms of the art and craft of the former and, I think, that holds for this one too, which seems to be not quite as good as the previous movie in the series also.

Still, it’s quite good and holds the interest all the way through. It’s a nice piece of espionage entertainment and the cast and crew still do a great job with it. This one continues with most of the regulars in place... so we have the core team now pretty much being Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Rebecca Ferguson. There are a few others returning too, in the form of Vanessa Kirby as the arms dealer The White Widow and, for the first time since the first movie, Henry Czerny as Kittridge. 

 We also have a ‘new to the franchise’, joint leading lady in the form of the great Hayley Atwell as professional thief Grace. I loved Atwell as Agent Peggy Carter in the various Marvel movies and TV show and she’s a good fit with Cruise for this film for sure.

Another stand out new character in this one is a female assassin called Paris (named after one of the original TV show characters) played by Pom Klementieff (who plays Mantis in the Marvel movies). She’s got a lot of screen presence in this and is a lethal proposition in any fight... she also has her own kind of shorthand mini arc in this and... well, not saying anything more about her other than she’s a good character.

The plot of the film in terms of the global threat the team has to face in this one does feel like the stakes are upped once again. It’s a newly self aware artificial intelligence (so we’re told) known as The Entity, with a human assistant from out of Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) past in the form of human villain Gabriel (Esai Morales). The Entity is a big problem because it sets everyone (every nation and power) against each other when it needs to and can be in the room listening to you all the time, because it’s in everything digital. Which is why, halfway through the film in a sequence where one of my favourite characters gets killed (nope, I’m not saying which one... there are more than a few deaths in this movie), the crew find out that their tech can’t be trusted to be working with them and, at one point, their espionage toys are taken away from them completely. So yeah, they’re alone and in the cold with everyone after them because, of all the interested parties who have a stake in finding the AI, which involves gaining possession of two halves of a key which will unlock something which nobody seems to quite know about yet... Ethan Hunt and his friends are the only ones who want to destroy it and not try and control it for world domination. So, yeah, it’s the rest of the intelligence bureaus in the world against them, not to mention the AI, which seems to be manipulating them at every turn.

The film has some good practical stunts (always a bonus and I wish Tom Cruise would just slow down a bit before he kills himself... he’s a good actor and doesn’t deserve to die for a movie) and some lengthy action set pieces. I did find a lot of those pieces kinda dull to be honest but, not so dull that it wasn’t entertaining enough in its combined onslaught that I ever got bored, to be sure. Lorne Balfe’s score, again incorporating Lalo Schifrin’s iconic themes, is pretty nicely done but, again, I don’t think it’s the best in the series. Of all the composers who have worked on these films over the years... Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, Michael Giacchino, Lorne Balfe... I think it’s Joe Kraemer’s score for Rogue Nation which is the most satisfying of the bunch. This one is pretty cool though and I’m looking forward to purchasing La La Land’s CD release of this and giving it a spin when funds allow.

Other than that, not much more to say about Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1... it’s a nice enough movie for lovers of the series and, as you’d expect, it kinda leaves things up in the air with all the threats still out there. Although it does have a stop and take a breath resolution of sorts at the end, to wrap things up and get things ready for part two next year. I guess it’s a cinematic rendezvous I’ll definitely have to keep with the caveat that Cruise has said that the conclusion will be his final part in the franchise. So expect more regular character deaths and mayhem would be my guess.

Mission Impossible - Fallout

A Running Cruise

Mission Impossible - Fallout
2018 USA Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
UK cinema release print.

So here we go again. The sixth entry into the big budget, big screen versions of the popular Mission Impossible TV show is with us and, once again, the trailer managed to drag me in using the cunning ruse of a running Cruise doing lots of action stuff against a coolish sounding score. Which always works on me, to be honest.

For a few years now, I have observed that each one of these films released always seems to be even better than the previous movie in the series and this culminated in my favourite of these fizzy, spy action confections from the Mission Impossible team, Rogue Nation. I have to say that, while Mission Impossible Fallout carries on the same story, set a couple of years later, this one doesn’t actually get nearly as good as that previous installment. Although it’s still a pretty cool movie and certainly as good as the third and maybe fourth movies. Nothing to rival that wonderfully spy-hard cool opera house sequence in Rogue Nation though, alas.

The plot set up is that, with the captured Solomon Lane (played once again by Sean Harris) in the hands of various governments, the remnants of his terrorist group The Syndicate, calling themselves The Disciples, are being held together by a mystery man known only as John Lark. Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt whose mission, should he choose to accept it, is to get back a load of stolen plutonium from The Disciples and, presumably, find out who John Lark is and shut The Disciples down before they blow various countries up etc and destabilise the world as we know it.

So, yeah, business as usual and Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Alec Baldwin from previous films in the franchise are there to help him do it. Unfortunately, Jeremy Renner doesn’t return here as he was busy shooting the sequel to next year’s follow up to Avengers - Infinity War (reviewed here) but instead we have a new character played by the current Man Of Steel himself, Henry Cavill. Of course, Cavill is no stranger to the spy game as he played an interesting variant of Napoleon Solo in the recent The Man From U.N.C.L.E movie (reviewed here) and, sure enough, he does a pretty good job here as the ‘blunt hammer’ of a character he is initially introduced as. Also back in the mix, we have the very welcome return of Rebecca Ferguson as the double agent Ilsa Faust from the last movie and an interesting turn from actress Vanessa Kirby playing a character called White Widow. There’s also another, very special returning character... but I’ll get to her in a minute.

So the film is full of the usual action sequences and I was absolutely horrified as to how much of the stunts Cruise gets to do here. Sure, we all know the story of how he injured his ankle jumping between two buildings and, yes, you can totally see that shot in the final cut and feel the pain of the star as he does things to his ankle that  he’s not supposed to. What really worried me, though, is that he’s also flying helicopters quite dangerously by himself, riding motorbikes against traffic and even performing a free fall rescue operation and halo jump (for which he trained for about a year) and, wow, I’m so amazed this guy is a) able to get insured on set/location in any country other than Hong Kong and b) hasn’t accidentally killed himself making one of these things yet. This guy is certainly dedicated to his craft, though, so despite heavy qualms about his personal beliefs off of the set, you have to give this guy a lot of respect for these kinds of shenanigans. Not to mention he’s also a pretty great actor with a very likeable on-screen presence (and I know from a first hand story on a bus ride from one of his old costumers that he’s a pretty nice guy to be around on set with too).

The film is a blast if you like stunts and action sequences as they are all done with the usual slick, professionalism that this kind of high profile Hollywood blockbuster usually achieves but my biggest problem is that... okay, it’s good but there are absolutely no real surprises in it. There’s a so called twist in this and there are also a fair few scenes set up to fool the opposition and, for effect, the audience at the same time but, honestly, if you’ve seen just a few of these films then you’ll see all this stuff coming a mile off... not to mention the ‘not so well hidden’ true identity of John Lark. That one’s kinda obvious. So the lack of ‘I never saw that coming’ really does bring the film down a level, I think.

That being said, it’s still a blast and it also sees the return of Michelle Monaghan in a quite respectfully highlighted role in the last big section of the film, reprising her character from the third and fourth films and finally tying up that ‘big loose thread’ from the third one which people like me have been so worried about since that installment. Things seem definitely finished up with that character and Ethan Hunt in this one but they don’t do this in the obvious way and it’s not what you’re thinking... perhaps the only half surprise in the movie is the restraint by the writer/director not to do the obvious thing with her character... which is kinda nice.

And of course we have the all important score by a composer I quite like this time around, Lorne Balfe. Now, as much as I would have preferred the director retained the services of composer Joe Kraemer, as his score for Rogue Nation was possibly the best of the big screen franchise scores, Lorne Balfe does an excellent job here, as I knew he would. I really have to listen to the CD when it comes out (with extra music not on the stupid electronic release I’m told... Woohoo!) to get a more accurate impression from the score as it gets covered up by various explosive actiony noises here but from what I can hear of it, it’s not too shabby. He didn’t, from what I could make out, use Lalo Schifrin’s classic title melody as much as some of his predecessors (although The Syndicate theme also seems to be back here too) but when he does use elements of it he makes them count and I am looking forward to hearing this one away from the movie (I thought his score for the reboot of The Sweeney was superb).

And that’s about all I have to say about this one. If you are a fan of these films then you will already know what to expect and you’ll probably have a good time with this one. If you are more casual in your Mission Impossible viewing habits, however, then I would say you would be doing yourself an injustice if you didn’t watch Rogue Nation before watching Mission Impossible Fallout, to be fair, so you can get a sense of the recent history of the series. Definitely one to watch, though, when you’ve seen the others... should you choose to accept that mission.

Mission Impossible at NUTS4R2
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to click on one of the titles below to take you to my review.

Mission Impossible
Mission Impossible 2
Mission Impossible 3
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol 
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation 
Mission Impossible: Fallout

Mission Impossible - Rogue Nation

Mission In Action

Mission Impossible - Rogue Nation
2015 USA
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
UK cinema release print.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to review this fine movie without using the phrases, “pulse pounding”, “high octane” or “rollercoaster ride” because they’re such clichés, even though these specific phrases are more than true descriptions of a film which delivers on all those counts.

Mission accepted.

So here we are again. Regular readers of this blog will possibly remember that it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I first saw the movie incarnations of the Mission Impossible films. I reviewed them all, right here on this blog, and if it wasn’t for my dad finally talking me around to watching them with him (he loves them) then I wouldn’t be reviewing this one now. As it is, I would have been missing out on something pretty damn special in terms of this being a Hollywood blockbuster which more than exceeds any of my expectations of it and also, to boot, my first Mission Impossible movie seen at the cinema.

Now, it’s really not a film that I was expecting to be that good, in all honesty but, now I’ve looked the movie up on the IMDB, it comes as no real surprise to me because the director of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Christopher McQuarrie, also directed one of my favourite films to star Tom Cruise in recent years, Jack Reacher (reviewed here) and was partially responsible for the screenplay of another, Edge Of Tomorrow (reviewed here). To say he does a good job on this one, seriously, is a big understatement. It’s rare I like big budget summer movies quite this much but this one is so well put together and it’s written in such a way that, right from the second sequence in the movie, you really want Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hawke character, and the rest of the Mission Impossible team for that matter, to sort out the bad guys by whatever means necessary.

The movie starts off with a very big scene which is the main set piece used in the promotional trailer and in some of the movie posters. If, like me, you thought the film was going to gradually lead up to the sequence where we see Tom Cruise hanging from the side of a plane, think again... this sequence is just the pre-credits tease, just whetting the appetite for the real main course. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t just go from action piece to action piece without much attention to the plot... although there are a few “chain sequences” of pulse pou-... errr.... I mean, of fast paced action which will have your heartbeat racing in an enthusiastic celebration of aggressive rhythm, there is also a lot of cool espionage type storyline, well fleshed out characters, loads of old faces in the form of Ethan’s associated played by Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames, plus a  couple of new characters played by Alec Baldwin, as the film’s chief ‘good antagonist’, the villanous Sean Harris and a new female double, triple or possibly even quadruple agent named Ilsa, played stylishly by the amazing Rebecca Ferguson, who seems to be playing the role as if Ingrid Bergman was engaging in athletic fisticuffs before being handed a bunch of firearms to play with. Absolutely amazing.

The film, after the pre-credits sequence and a brilliant opening title design appropriate to the franchise, then gets absolutely brilliant with the traditional “your mission if you choose to accept it” scene... and this is where the movie took me totally by surprise which, regular readers of this column will know, is not an easy thing. It also sets up the leading villain, Sean Harris’ character Soloman Lane as the guy to hate and in this movie, he plays the head of a loosely built organisation know only as The Syndicate, who were apparently a major recurring enemy in the original Mission Impossible TV series.

After the initial set up which sees the Impossible Mission team disbanded and Ethan a fugitive from his own people, it’s up for him and his friends to outwit both Lane and the CIA to try and stop the syndicate, which involves numerous encounters with the beautiful and deadly Ilsa, a typical infiltration caper, a not so subtle or surprising scene where one of the gang gets to wear a mask (why do they put those in still... it’s always so obvious who is posing as who way before the reveal) and tons of action but, it has to be said, well choreographed, beautifully edited and not inappropriate action to the plot... I’m glad to say.

And there are some beautiful moments in the movie, to be sure. A sequence in an opera house where Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg are trying to figure out what’s going on before becoming embroiled in a movie moment not totally unlike the one in either of Hitchcock’s versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much is truly entertaining and nicely handled with some fantastic cinematography taking full advantage of the multiple vertical shapes in the interiors of the locations which are used to isolate and highlight characters within smaller compartments, chopped up from the full width of the frame. It’s really nicely put together and, since it’s such a fast moving and suspenseful sequence, something you really have to take your hat off to... if you happen to be wearing one. There’s a similar nice use of verticals used near the end of the film in a two hander sequence between Ilsa and a villanous henchman known as The Bone Doctor which, in all honesty, reminded me of scene in the cathedral/church in the 1963 James Bond movie From Russia With Love (reviewed here) and, happily, it’s no less satisfying.

There’s also a wonderfully long segment of film where we get the typical Mission Impossible infiltration caper... one which will, if you’re anything like me, have you holding your breath as much as the characters involved in this particular sequence, followed by a high oct-... err... petrol injected car chase and then, furthermore, followed by a spectacular motorcycle chase... all one after the other and punctuated by comical highlights and dialogue revelations in just the right mix that it all works and leaves you breathless when the sequence is done.

Added to this, we have the first Mission Impossible score by composer Joe Kraemer, who also scored the same director’s Jack Reacher. What can I say? Much as I loved all the scores for the franchise by Hollywood giants Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer and Michael Giacchino... Kramer’s score, for me, is by far the greatest of the Mission Impossible soundtracks so far and I’m really looking forward to that CD turning up in the post in a few weeks time. He really nails how to both use and then integrate Lalo Schifrin’s famous original TV theme for the show without using it as just a crutch for his own, truly awesome solutions to the scoring on this movie. Now, I have to say, when the film reached Morroco, the composer used a big melody which sounded extremely similar, to these old ears, to a sub theme used in Jerry Goldsmith’s score for The Mummy. Now maybe it’s a musical cliché based on a specific quirk of the locale in which this part of the movie is set... I only mention the similarity, nothing more. However, Kramer really knows how to work it into the music and he uses it in a few moments in the movie, most astonishingly in a sequence where the big sweeping melody is suddenly used as the base line to support a different musical solution a little later in the story.... which really blew me away, I can tell you. Can’t wait to listen to it away from the context of its functional use.

And that’s about it, I think. The cast are all absolutely great with Simon Pegg’s character really getting a much more prominent role here and with the always excellent Jeremy Renner seeming, perhaps, a little underused but certainly doing some great supporting work here. Rhames is grand, Ferguson is sublime, Harris and Baldwin are both really on the money and... well I’ve always liked Cruise as an actor. Not necessarily the roles he sometimes chooses but he always does a great job in whatever film he’s in and, as with many other roles, he makes you believe he’s capable of what his character is supposed to be able to do here. Added into this we have some really nice writing, great comic moments and some action sequences that make this a real rolllerco-... err... the movie equivalent of one of those big rides on tracks you see at theme parks... so that’s all good. If you’re a fan of the franchise then you will surely love this latest installment and, if not, it’s a great jumping on point to start off from, although knowing who the regular good guy characters are in this will take away a little of the intrigue of the earlier films if you watch them out of order. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation is real good time at the movies, though, and I really would be happy for them to do another one at some point soon. This review will self destruct in five seconds.



Mission Impossible at NUTS4R2
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to click on one of the titles below to take you to my review.

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Vixens Of Kung Fu

Below The Black Belt

Vixens Of Kung Fu
US 1975
Directed by Lin Cho Chiang 
Vinegar Syndrome 
DVD Region 1

When I started this blog almost five years ago, I certainly wasn’t expecting, or even entertaining the notion of, reviewing hard core pornography. I’ve got nothing against pornography, at all, but I just don’t think it would make an interesting thing to review and it’s not the kind of material I would want to be synonymous with the NUTS4R2 identity, if truth be told.

That being said, I have no compunction about reviewing the odd (hopefully very odd) exploitation movies, grindhouse movies and long standing readers will note that I have a fair mix of different kinds of reviews on this site. When I ordered this film, The Vixens Of Kung Fu, it was because I’d seen the movie poster via someone on Twitter and it promised a film full of naked ladies in kung fu battles... which I thought would very much be a movie I’d want to shout out to people via this site. I didn’t realise, even when I started watching this movie, that it was actually a mid-1970s hard core porn film, probably shown at a fairly specific set of adult cinemas and drive-ins in the US at the time... presumably garnished with an oriental flavour due to the popularity of the David Carradine TV show Kung Fu at the time. It does, however, have some really stupid and noteworthy (of sorts) things happening in it so I’ve elected to include a review here because, as of yet, I’ve got nothing else like this one on this site. Whether I review the companion movie on the double bill DVD, Oriental Blue, or even bother to watch that one... is up in the air at this time.

So I started watching this thing and the film starts with... well, some really nice and colourful photography, actually, as a figure wanders through rural landscapes midst some really terrible, cheesy ‘Japanese/Eastern philosophy narration nonsense’ of the kind only a Western scriptwriter could have come up with... although the idea that this film has a script really doesn’t hold up much as it even fails to provide coherent linking material between what is, honestly, just a load of sleazy hard core sex scenes.

A woman in a forest is accosted by three, badly dubbed gentlemen (at least, I hope that’s not their real voices because, honestly, this is worse than the voices on a cartoon) who then proceed to shoot the woman with their “anaesthetic gun” (which looks like a regular revolver because, who can afford special effects on this budget?) and then rape her semi-conscious body. When the three individuals in question stripped down to nothing and got their throbbing weapons of choice out, I got my first hint at why I hadn’t been able to find an entry on this film in the IMDB*... although I did find it later on a very different kind of movie database, which is not the kind I would usually find myself frequenting. In order to convince us the “anaesthetic gun” is actually a believable tranquiliser, instead of a lethal killing machine, the soundtrack plays a sleepy harp arpeggio as the woman collapses. We are then treated to what amounts to an extended rape scene as the three men make use of her unconscious body in a very graphic manner, starting off with some jaunty banjo music to presumably align them with a hillbilly mentality of some kind, and then continuing with some kind of comedy soundtrack playing in the background. It’s really sleazy and I nearly turned it off right there (believe me, there’s a lot more competently made and imaginative porn out there than this sad debacle) but I really wanted to see the naked kung fu.

After the men have their way with the sleeping lady and then flee (leaving the movie for good, asides from a few seconds of flashback at a later point), we have a scene where another lady, Cunchon, is training her naked followers (there’s about five of them, all women) in the ancient art of kung fu... although, as we will see as the film progresses, this is not any form of kung fu you’ve ever seen before. Cunchon briefly turns into a bird, with the miracle of cutting from one shot to another, and then finds the girl from the forest naked on a beach. How she got from the forest to the beach is anyone’s guess and, frankly, not something the script writers, if there were any on this movie, saw fit to address.

Cunchon takes her new disciple under her wing, so to speak, and, giving her a naked massage with added and inappropriate breast sucking, she asks the forest lady for her story. Forest gal answers that she’s a prostitute, and then we get treated to various lengthy sequences of her “on the job” in flashback. Yes, this is a classy film alright.

After these sex flashbacks have played out, she then tells her new samaritan about her rape in the forest.. which of course leads to them having full on lesbian comfort sex. And, like all the other sex in this movie, it’s terribly boring 1970s quantity not quality sex which held my interest so little that I was able to keep taking my eyes off the screen and type notes into my iPhone as it played out. It was getting kind of boring but...all was not lost in terms of the possibility of some bizarreness... even if I had to sit through a sex scene with a terrible pseudo-oriental song playing in the background. Even though they are in a hot, forest and beach combined location (somehow), the gals manage to have sex on a polar bear rug. I guess that would lend some legitimacy to the term rug munching but, seriously, a polar bear rug?

After this, Cunchon teaches her pupils the mysteries of kung fu. Which means we have an extended sequence of naked ladies sitting cross legged and breathing heavily while the camera concentrates on the philosophical aspects of the scene against the semi-oriental soundtrack... and then the various ladies’ vaginas start smoking... presumably to signify their climb to enlightenment and their burgeoning ‘kung fu powers’. See, I knew there would be a reason why I should carry on watching this movie... bizarre smoking vaginas. There’s a phrase you don’t expect to write every day. Or maybe it was supposed to be steam. It definitely looked like these ladies would be coming to a boil at some point soon.

The voice-over narrative then tells us that... “Cunchon trained her women, physically, spiritually and sexually...” which means we get to see a red head and brunette having a playful and lengthy lesbian encounter in the forest, for some reason. Honestly, though, a lot of the time the music in this movie sounds like it comes from a sleazy porn movie of some kind. Oh... right. Well I guess that’s appropriate to the genre then.

It's at this point that a wandering monk turns up and the two girls beat him at kung fu and take him prisoner. Now, hold on, because when I say kung fu, I’m using that as shorthand to try and describe what’s really going on here... which seem to be fast cuts of the various people appearing, disappearing and then reappearing in space in various poses without actually connecting with each other, let alone actually sharing the same shot, until one of them is lying on the floor. It doesn’t even once try to be realistic and... well I guess a case could be made that it’s artistic expression if you wanted to have a go... but either way, it’s hilarious.

Once the wandering monk has been captured, due to the girls’ proficiency at exploiting blatantly ‘WTF camerawork’, they have him naked in their outdoor training area while their leader tells them to devour him. Apparently, though, devouring him just means they all have group sex with him for ages. While this was as unbelievably boring and surprisingly even less than entertaining than the other assorted sex scenes which comprise the movie, it did have one thing of note in it, when I realised that the movie makers had needle dropped parts of Lalo Schifrin’s Enter The Dragon score over both this, and a later sequence. Apparently, after the sex, the ladies are supposed to destroy the monk but, somehow, he manages to be out and about of his own free will again after this sequence. So... you know... could have done with some scripting here, methinks.

So the monk wants to get some kind of revenge and he seeks the teachings of another kung fu mistresss, who teaches him the art of... kung fu masturbation, by the looks of things. I don’t see it as something you’d need a black belt in myself but, you know, I’m sure there are hidden health benefits tied up in ancient, oriental philosophy of which I was previously unaware. The man is further trained by running along a beach while letting his modesty hang in the wind, with weights dangling from it. Presumably this helps him maintain his strength when he most needs it? Meanwhile, we have lots of shots of forest gal and her new leader also running along a beach... although this does nothing to compensate for not really being able to tell what the heck is going on from scene to scene. More continuity required, guys and gals.

And then, I guess, there’s the big showdown... between the monk and the lady from the forest.... who presumably have nothing to do with each other in the plot at all but, hey who cares, let’s pitch them against each other anyway, right? So lots of posturing and limbering up between the two is caught on camera until, just when you think the scene is going to explode into an orgy of naked kung fu fighting, the lady in question suddenly tumbles head over heels towards the man and... starts licking away at his specially trained kung fu weapon. And... we’re in another sex scene. Some kind of bizarre showdown sex scene, it seems, where the camera stock was so expensive, in relation to the budget, that when a wasp tries to enter the fun as the lady in question is sucking down on the monks own personal nunchakus, her squeals are left in as she bats the said wasp away and out of the shot. This is quality film making, ladies and gentlemen.

Now I don’t like to give out spoilers without any warning but, seriously, this is a porn movie... as it turns out. So I was bemused by the ending where the lady collapses, presumably dead, as the monk ejaculates a strong spray of blood and then also keels over, presumably dead. And that’s pretty much it, I’m afraid... the end. I’ve watched a sleazy and, more upsettingly, unentertaining porn movie with nothing much to show for it other than some crazy cutting, some hastily needle-dropped Lalo Schifrin scoring and a bunch of smoking vaginas... which, to be fair, was the bit that made me sit up most and pay attention. I’d like to recommend this film to those of my readers with a fun spirit and a love of exploitation but, seriously, I can’t find much to redeem this. It would be true to say that this movie did not live up to the promise of the title and the way in which that title might be fulfilled in my minds eye, I’m afraid. Stay away from this one, would be my advice, it’s just not worth it.

*Please note: Since I wrote the first draft of this review, 
there's now a listing for this movie on the IMDB, for some reason.

Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Ghosting The Machine

Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol 
2011 USA/United Arab Emirate/ Czech Republic
Directed by Brad Bird
Paramount DVD Region 2

Warning: Spoiler protocol enabled.

Well this is interesting. I’ve only ever seen one other Brad Bird movie (which also happened to have an excellent Michael Giachinno score) and that was The Incredibles. Turns out, the fourth in the Mission Impossible franchise is actually his first stab at directing a “live action” movie and I have to say that I found this one to be the most entertaining in the series so far. Maybe it’s because espionage movies like these and others like the Bond movies are all just big live action cartoons anyway that makes Bird a natural for this kind of assignment. Or maybe I’m being a little less charitable than I could be and should just swallow the fact that Bird can obviously direct live action fine and does the animated stuff because that’s what he’s more interested in. Either way, this one is certainly the best of a sometimes lukewarm bunch of movies so I’m glad this guy stepped up to the bat.

Starting off with a jailbreak sequence as two agents, including Simon Pegg in a much less annoying incarnation of the character he played in the previous movie, get Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character out of a prison... but with him obstructing their plans just a little because he won’t go without bringing someone  else out with him... the opening titles jump start from Cruise telling Paula Patton’s Agent Carter to “light the fuse”. After a rousing titles sequence wherein we see key scenes from this film picked out and excerpted as part of the design, we go into standard Mission Impossible territory with a caper to get inside the Kremlin but, the team is piggy-backed by someone else after the same thing as they are and Ethan and his team are basically framed for blowing up the aforementioned building.

So the team is disavowed and gone ‘rogue’ (yet again... they’re always going off to do their own thing, it seems to me) and it’s up to Cruise, Pegg, Patton and their new bestest buddy, the always excellent Jeremy Renner, to stop the bad guys from nuking the world.

This film has a lot going for it. Simon Pegg loses his fake American accent (for some unexplained reason) and provides some excellent comic relief while still being a very credible part of the team. Renner and Patton are very good support and Renner even takes over from Cruise and does the ‘iconic’ dangling into space moment in this entry... seriously though, do we really need these sequences? And Michael Nyqvist, the original Mikael Blomkvist in the Swedish adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (reviewed here), The Girl Who Played With Fire (reviewed here) and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest (reviewed here) makes for a credible and pleasantly non-theatrical bad guy, for a change. This is all good stuff.

As is the nice gadgetry and little quirky things that Bird and co have put in for this little outing. The movable video corridor that Cruise and Pegg use to infiltrate part of the Kremlin, for example, is absolutely brilliant, funny and recalls the days when Wiley Coyote would order a new gadget from the Acme Company to help him try and catch Road Runner. Given Bird’s track record with animated storytelling, I’m wondering if he had some major input into that part of the writing.

Also cool was Cruise’s return to a public telephone to give his mission briefing a little helping thump to self destruct and a scene where the mask making equipment goes completely wrong and the team has to improvise. It’s all pretty good stuff.

More importantly, for the first time in a Mission Impossible film that I can see... you don’t know what’s going to happen way in advance of it happening. It doesn’t rely on a “oh, it was you all along” series of twists, which are usually easy to figure out because the studios get nervous about the audience and telegraph them too quickly, and instead we are left with a storyline where everything is up front and laid out with no surprises.

Having said that, however, there were two little things I did see coming a long way off... they were Ving Rhames and Michelle Monaghan and, I’m afraid, I was kinda expecting them to show up at some point. Rhames due solely to his past association with the film series in that he is now, along with Cruise, the only person to have appeared in all four films in the franchise to date.

With Monaghan’s character, Ethan Hunt’s wife, she is referred to all the way through the film as either having left him or having died. The fact that the writers didn’t just come up with a way to leave behind such an important narrative point very early on in the picture in a very clear manner practically writes up in mile high letters that she will be appearing at some point in the movie... I just don’t know where they’ll go with this character if they make a fifth one. Would be silly to leave her behind I think... especially since Monaghan is such a good actress and star personality.

Giacchino’s score is good too... and not just because this one is especially rich in reorchestrations of Schifrin’s original theme (which it is, the most Schifrin heavy score of all four movies I think). Proving himself one of the most versatile composers working in Hollywoodland right now, while still being humble enough to amalgamate or mimic other composers works for the good of whatever franchise he’s working on, I think Michael Giachinno will be around for a very long time and be the composer of choice for a lot of future film-makers who haven’t even started out yet. Only time will tell if he’s the Jerry Goldsmith of his time, but he’s certainly up there with the likes of Alexandre Desplat and Brian Tyler as far as I’m concerned. We shall see what we shall see... and hear what we will hear, I guess.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a really cool entry in the franchise for fans of the previous films and probably a good enough jumping on point if you’re not. Definitely will be on my “one to watch again in ten years” list. Worth a look.



Mission Impossible at NUTS4R2
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to click on one of the titles below to take you to my review.

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Torn Music: Rejected Film Scores, a Selected History

Tornography

Torn Music: Rejected Film Scores, 
a Selected History
by Gergely Hubai 
Silman-James Press
ISBN: 978-1935247050

Remember David Rose’s score for Forbidden Planet? No? How about Graeme Revell’s score for The 13th Warrior? Or Mychael Danna’s score for Hulk? Not ringing any bells?

Nor should they, but all of these films, among many others, have fallen foul of one of the more controversial aspects of cinema history... that of the rejected score. Which is a shame, actually, because sometimes, perhaps even often, the scores which are thrown out are either better or at least as good as the compositions written to replace them.

This is what happens to perpetuate this practise in a lot (but not all) cases where this happens.

A rough cut of the film is shown to a test screening/preview audience and they are asked to comment on it. If a film doesn’t test up to a studio’s expectations (and there’s a lot of rubbish being made these days, don’t forget) then the people in charge of production need to do something about it. And when I say they need to do something about it... what I really mean is they need to be seen to be doing something about it. By this time, though, the film is all shot and reshoots for your actors can be extremely expensive, even if the actors schedules happen to miraculously match up to when you want to reshoot the footage and the sets or location haven't changed in any way. So the people in charge decide to fix the cheapest thing they can think of and... yeah, that’s right... blame the bad test results on the musical score. So what happens in most cases under these kinds of circumstances is that the original composer who has been on the project for a while is fired and another composer is brought in to compose, arrange and record a completely new score within a matter of weeks/days and this is then deemed a sufficient enough effort to try and “fix” the movie. It probably doesn’t always pan out like that exactly but from what I’ve read in various industry news pieces over the years... that’s pretty close to what happens a lot of the time.

And there have been some really hefty stories over the years, some of them very well known such as...

Alex North’s original score to 2001: A Space Odyssey being rejected and replaced with the original rough cut temp tracks.

Jerry Goldsmith’s shabby treatment at the hands of Ridley Scott concerning his written and replaced and spliced and diced cues for both ALIEN and Legend (in the case of ALIEN, for which he wrote a fair few alternate cues too, some of his score was replaced by some of his own music in the final cut from his score to Freud).

Philip Lambro’s experimental score to Chinatown, which was rejected and replaced with Goldsmith’s classic score.

Bernard Herrmann’s score to Torn Curtain (where this book obviously takes the inspiration for its title) which was thrown out by Hitchcock before it was all even recorded and which caused the rift which stopped them working together ever again, after a very productive and, some may say, perfect composer/director artistic relationship over the years.

Lalo Schifrin’s score for The Exorcist, replaced by Penderecki, Ligeti and others... including brief excerpts from Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, of course.

And also, one of the more high profile replacements of recent years, that of Gabriel Yared’s score for Troy which, after he’d been working two years on it, was rejected due to test screening cards and replaced with a rush job James Horner score within a matter of weeks. Yared was, understandably, very upset at the time... so much so that he went public with his rejection and put clips from his recorded score up on his web site. He was forced to take it down by the studio behind Troy very soon after although, a bootleg CD of his original score was quite easy to get hold of at the time (I’m not saying anything except, perhaps, to add that his original score sounded pretty marvellous to my tin ears). But I guess the studio must have thought it was a case of: if at first you don't succeed... Troy, Troy again.

These and many other stories, some powerful miscarriages of justice and others, probably a good call, are detailed in Gergely Hubai’s Torn Music: Rejected Film Scores, a Selected History and I have to say I certainly never expected to see such a volume in print in my lifetime, given the barbed nature of the subject matter.

The book is stripped down into around 300 chapters, one for each film score covered, ranging anything from half a page to four pages per chapter. These are presented chronologically from Max Steiner’s 1932 replacement score to the classic movie The Most Dangerous Game, all the way up to the solitary video game included as a nod to this trend continuing in the future... Steve Jablonsky’s replacement score for Gears Of War 2. Although the 300 scores are covered in detail in some very frank and informative sections, there are many other rejected scores named (and shamed?) as asides to the main text and even in his introduction, Hubai notes that 300 is just the tip of the iceberg and the book also includes some interesting TV score replacements as well, for such shows as Columbo and Doctor Who.

There are a couple of criticisms I have, the main one being that every now and again, something is represented as fact when it’s plainly incorrect. When covering Joel McNeely’s replacement score for The Avengers, for example, the writer incorrectly states that Diana Rigg was one of a few actresses who played the part of Emma Peel throughout the show’s history... when in actual fact the other actresses to play “Avenger girls” were all playing uniquely different characters. But asides from a few moments like this, the text is always warm and engaging and not scholarly enough to frighten off the casual reader while still retaining a wealth of information about the subject in hand.

My second criticism of the book not catching all the score releases is not really fair, I think. Because the timing of the book is such that it happened to be released in a year when a lot of rejected scores were given a limited commercial release (Chinatown, Wolfen, The Last Hard Men etc) and where, in a lot of cases, the author has kindly highlighted where portions of the rejected scores may be heard, either as commercial releases or reworked into other scores, the timing of the book was such that a few of the newer releases slipped by between the writing and publishing stage, is my guess.

All in all, though, this is not only one of the best books written about movie scores (and I’ve read a fair few where the authors just seem to be making it up as they go along) but also the only book, as far as I know, written on this particular specialism. To sweeten the pot for film score fans I should probably mention that the book includes a foreword by one of the more important names in modern movie scoring, Christopher Young, but even without that sweetener, it should be recognised that for anyone into film composition and the politics at work behind these works of art, this is an absolutely essential purchase. An amazing read.