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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE Cert ★★★★★
In cinemas now
Tom Cruise has turned the action movie into an art form with the best Mission: Impossible film ever. The perfectly choreographed fight scenes, stunts and chases are like ballet for the masses.
Cruise is the Nureyev of the blockbuster without the tights. He’s got all the moves.
He dances through an escapist epic of the highest order, so dazzlingly thrilling that you spend large parts of the two hour 43 minute running time holding your breath.
One day, MI7 will be massively enjoyable on your telly at home, but I beg you to watch in a cinema with a decent sound system. This film’s natural home is at the flicks. It’s so very, very BIG.
Cruise has never been better and that’s saying something considering he’s 61. We
PINOCCHIO: A TRUE STORY Cert ★
UIn cinemas now
Anyone praising this stinker will end up with a nose longer than a former prime minister’s.
The Russian animation is mediocre and the new take on the old story proves woeful.
But it’s the English-language voice “talent” that takes this film into the realms of the spectacularly awful.
Pinocchio sounds here like a whiny should be throwing flowers at his feet.
Here, as Ethan Hunt, he is the action hero par excellence and also commands new levels of self-deprecation and comic timing. He totally out-bonds Bond.
It’s quite grown-up, too. There’s a bang up-to-date plot concerning artificial intelligence getting a mind of its own that could take over the world. Two keys combine to control the super-computer so it’s a race against time to find them both. It’s reasonably easy to grasp, which makes a nice change.
And the female characters are in no way patronised. They are not required to expose acres of flesh, they are tough, smart and funny. High-class fraudster and pickpocket Hayley Atwell is an attractive foil for Cruise but very much her own woman.
So far, so super. It’s the action and the stunts, however, that make MI7 the movie event of the summer.
Director Christopher Mcquarrie sets a
American brat. It’s worth looking up a clip online to hear Pauly Shore in full flow. When you get past the cringe, it’s hilarious.
This wooden toy has few redeeming features and leaves his creator to join the circus without a backward glance.
In a borderline-racist way, the Big Top bigwigs turn out to be crooks.
Then Pinocchio gets the blame and has to prove his innocence to become a real boy.
I thought briefly it might be one of those so-bad-it’s-good efforts. I was wrong. It’s so bad, it’s rotten.
The action and the stunts make this the movie event of the summer