Tom Cruise

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

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  • Title: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
  • IMDb: link

Creating a six-hour action movie and splitting it into two parts is unbelievably self-indulgent. Thankfully, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is worth it (although we’ll have to  reserve full judgement until next year’s release of Part Two). The seventh entry into the franchise once again finds Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team out in the cold on their own on a race to a prize with the safety of the entire world at stake. This time the enemy is both an AI capable of crippling the world with disinformation and its disciple, a spy with a past tied to Hunt’s life before he ever joined the IMF.

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Top Gun: Maverick

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  • Title: Top Gun: Maverick
  • IMDb: link

From the opening credits, Top Gun: Maverick lays heavy into the nostalgia by recreating the opening of Top Gun. Not much has changed since we last saw Maverick (Tom Cruise), the film is deliberately vague about what year the movie takes place and exactly how much time has passed. Pete Mitchell is still the maverick who flies by the seat of his pants even if that has left him at yet another crossroads of his decorated, but rocky, career.

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Top Gun

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Top Gun
  • IMDb: link

If you weren’t alive in 1986 it’s hard to explain how big Top Gun was. Now, nearly four decades later, a sequel is about to hit theaters so it’s time for Throwback Tuesday to look back at the movie which introduced us to the United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program and United States Naval Aviator Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in a role that would solidify Tom Cruise as a movie star. Cruise so loved the film, he found a way to star in nearly the same story four years later with Days of Thunder.

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Mission: Impossible – Fallout

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  • Title: Mission: Impossible – Fallout
  • IMDb: link

Mission: Impossible - Fallout movie reviewVery much a sequel to Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Mission: Impossible – Fallout brings back both heroes and villains from the previous film. As we saw in Rogue Nation, the various other government agencies are still struggling to work with the IMF. This isn’t helped when three nuclear warheads slip through Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) hands in the opening action sequence and are about to be sold on the black market to a terrorist with delusions of grandeur.

Forced to work with CIA thug August Walker (Henry Cavill), Hunt and his team (Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg both return) accept their assignment, but, as usually happens, things don’t go according to plan. Rebecca Ferguson and Sean Harris both return to reprise their roles from the last film as a potential love interest for Ethan and a villain harboring and even bigger boner for the spy who put him behind bars.

Although Jeremy Renner isn’t present here, the latest in the franchise includes callbacks to several of the earlier films and in some ways feels like a final chapter to the series (while still leaving the door open if Cruise and company wish to return).

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American Made

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: American Made
  • IMDb: link

American Made movie posterWe’ve seen this all before. And even if we’ve seen it done better at times (see Charlie Wilson’s War, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, American Hustle, and others), American Made certainly entertains. Director Doug Liman and screenwriter Gary Spinelli come together with star Tom Cruise to offer us another one of those stories too crazy not to be true.

Cruise is in fine form. I’ve remarked before that I have always enjoyed the movie star more when he’s able to unleash a bit of the crazy. And American Made certainly has enough crazy to go around. The film is based somewhat loosely on the real experiences of former TWA pilot Barry Seal (Cruise) who went to work for the CIA in the late 70s and 80s running clandestine reconnaissance missions in South America while also working on his own making money smuggling drugs into the United States from Columbia. After introducing us to his Seal, his wife (Sarah Wright) and the CIA agent (Domhnall Gleeson) who enlists him and funds the dubious enterprise, the insanity begins in earnest. What makes things work is Seal is just smart enough to know when to take advantage of the situation and just dumb enough to not know when he’s over his head.

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