This week at the movies: Tom Cruise returns as the flintiest spy; Ed Helms takes the Chevy Chase role in a reboot.
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation
Tom Cruise is well into his fifties, and he’s still playing action heroes. Awesome. I’ll say this for him—he’s actually a good action hero. He’s the right amount of perfect and vulnerable, charming and smarmy, serious and funny. His supporting cast is also pretty great—including Jeremy Renner, Alec Baldwin, Rebecca Ferguson (badass lady spy) and Ving Rhames. Most importantly, though, he’s got Simon Pegg, who lends much-needed comic relief to the movie. Mission Impossible movies have always been a little lighter on their feet than other action/spy flicks, and Pegg is one of the key reasons why. In a perfect world, we’d like to see him as the spy.
Perfect For: Fans of: Bourne Identity, James Bond, and other spy movies.
What the Critics Say: Pretty good, especially considering the competition. Writes Entertainment Weekly: “Rogue Nation may not be the best, the tightest, or even the most logically coherent M:I flick, but there should be more movies like it: relentlessly thrilling, smart entertainments for folks who can’t tell the difference between Quicksilver and The Flash—and aren’t particularly interested in trying to learn the difference either.” And says, The Hollywood Reporter: “At once questioning and reaffirming the pleasures of cinematic espionage, this is the rare sequel that leaves its franchise feeling not exhausted but surprisingly resurgent at 19 years and counting.”
Our Take: Looks like great, mindless fun. Enjoy it when it’s so hot outside that you need a nice air-conditioned break.
Watch the Trailer:
Vacation
A “reboot” (but not a remake) starring Ed Helms as the Griswald patriarch and Christina Applegate as his wife, the movie follows the family as they have one mishap after another on their family road trip. (Chevy Chase even shows up in a cameo.)
Perfect For: The family and those folks who want a bit of nostalgia in their slapstick comedy.
What the Critics Say: Evenly split. Some think it stinks about as bad as a particular scene in the movie. Writes Entertainment Weekly: “The new Vacation is both better than I'd feared and not as hilarious as I'd hoped. It's intermittently funny and instantly forgettable.” But says The San Francisco Chronicle: “"Vacation" is consistently funny from beginning to end, a piling on of dumb but inventive jokes and excruciating, awkward situations.”
Our Take: On the one hand, the trailer looks unbearably stupid. On the other hand, all three times that we saw it in a theater with a packed audience, people laugh raucously throughout. And we even chuckled ourselves. Maybe go, but to a theater where no one will recognize you.
Watch the Trailer: