All last year, while entertainment columnists were pondering the diminshed box office returns, I kept thinking, "Of course movies are bombing. I'm not going to see any of them."
Not that I'm any kind of bellwether for the motion picture industry. If anything, I'm a pretty atypical moviegoer, since I see well over 100 movies a year, and most of them are independents, foreign films and documentaries. Still, I've always had a soft spot for high-profile major studio product–no matter how cruddy–because I like the experience of sitting in a big crowd on a weekend night and sharing the excitement of "going to the movies." Lately though, whenever I've picked out a movie to see on any given weekend, I get discouraged by weak reviews and dim buzz, and I end up staying home.
This summer's going to be different though. I may have only been to the multiplex three times this year–once for a double feature of Hostel and Wolf Creek, once for Inside Man, and once for, of all things, The Sentinel–but by God, I'm going to spend this summer getting re-acquainted with an old friend: The big-budget, mass-marketed Hollywood blockbuster.
One a week. That's the plan. And then posting here about how this whole blockbuster business is working out in the summer of '06.
First up: Mission: Impossible III. A reasonably entertaining little action picture, well-acted, well-crafted, and even, for the most part, well-written. But is it boffo enough? The problem with most Big Movies™ these days is that digital effects have become so prevalent that a lot of straight-to-video and made-for-TV fare can compete with would-be blockbusters on the dazzle front. So what do Big Movies have to offer, really? Just stars and ambition. MI:III has got the stars, filling nearly every role (Billy Crudup! Jonathan Rhys-Meyers! Laurence Fishburne!), and all led by Tom Cruise who, say what you will about his increasingly bizarre personal life, still knows how to drive a star vehicle.
As far as ambition goes, the main idea here seems to be to put together a clean-running thrill ride with lots of cool stuff happening and minimal opportunities for the audience to roll its collective eyes. (Which happened a lot on MI: II, whatever its John Woo-ian virtues.) The big explosions and chases I could take or leave, mainly because my eyes have gotten tired over the years, and I find I can't follow the shaky-cam, quick-cut action style the way I used to. But I enjoyed the brio of the missions themselves, which were stacked so close together in the movie that they didn't even bother showing all of some of them. There's even a couple of minor stabs at real world subtext, from the pointed suggestion that the U.S. might plant a WMD in order to have a reason to attack an enemy nation, to the overriding sense that this movie is really about Tom Cruise being in love.
Still … was I wrung-out, awe-struck, or otherwise stung that with that old familiar blockbuster romance? Not especially. This is good, solid, action filmmaking, but it could just as easily have been done for half the budget. Or on TV.
Next week: Poseidon! And a few words about trailers.