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Doctor Sleep

Director: Mike Flanagan

Screenwriter: Mike Flanagan

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis, and Carel Struycken

When I heard that a film adaptation was in the works for Doctor Sleep, Stephen King’s sequel to his 1977 novel The Shining, I admit I was worried. When I read the 2013 novel, I remember immediately thinking, “Well, this will never work as a film.” Then, to my surprise, within a few years, it’s announced that it’s already in production, and with the talented horror-guru Mike Flanagan (Haunting of Hill House, Hush) as writer/director. That’s enough to get me in the theater, and fortunately, Doctor Sleep does not disappoint.

As I mentioned, Doctor Sleep is Stephen King’s long awaited follow up to his horror classic, The Shining. The original film version of The Shining from 1980 directed by Stanley Kubrick has taken on a life and mythology of its own being hailed as one of the greatest horror films of all time as well as inspiring countless stories and documentaries about some of the strange occurrences associated with the production. Doctor Sleep picks up 30 years after the events at the Overlook Hotel from the original novel. Danny, now going by Dan (Ewan McGregor), is a fully grown, recovering alcoholic, and still has the shine, a term referring to his psychic abilities. Dan’s pretty messed up as one tends to be after a haunted hotel possesses your dad leading him to chase you and your mom around with an axe and just murder a bunch of people before freezing to death in a hedge maze. Oh…spoiler alert.

Now, Dan is sort of a lost soul leading him to taking a job as a hospice nurse, a job that puts his abilities to good use, as his shine gives him an uncanny ability to help soothe the dying in their final moments – subsequently earning him the nickname Doctor Sleep. The shining is a pretty valuable thing – even more so to a group of steam-punk looking, cultish demons known as the True Knot. Lead by ancient matriarch, Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), the True Knot travels by RV across the country seeking out those with the shine, torturing them, and then devouring their essence, which they call steam. It’s a motley crew of weridos with weird names to say the least (a tip of the cap to Twin Peaks’s Carel Struycken as Grandpa Flick). They survive on steam and it must be extracted through pain and torture, which results in some very unsettling scenes in the film.

When the True Knot sense the presence of a young girl named Abra (Kyliegh Curran) who possesses incredibly strong abilities, Rose and her band of scoundrels look to hunt her down. Abra reaches out to Dan asking for his help to stop the True Knot from capturing and killing more people in their caravan of death!

I enjoyed Doctor Sleep much more than I expected I would. The performances are good, especially by Rebecca Ferguson as Rose. The horror is quite terrifying in parts, and while The Shining is on a different plane in terms of achievement and experience, Doctor Sleep is a well-told, strongly designed sequel. The nods to the first film are appropriate, but this is a fully realized, complete story all on its own. The adaptation from the source material is extremely faithful in most respects, but Flanagan also takes some massive left turns in other places, most notably with when Abra’s powers manifest and with the film’s ending. Stephen King said in an interview that it is important for readers to understand that the novel Doctor Sleep is a sequel to the novel The Shining and not the film. I think Flanagan took to that approach with this film in that the movie Doctor Sleep is a sequel to the movie The Shining and not the book, therefore the choices he made to deviate from the book make sense to the characters as we know them from the movie (even though I would have loved to see the novel’s ending play out in the film).

Doctor Sleep does what it set out to do very well. It invokes the spirit of The Shining without needlessly relying on it to stay above water. The inexplicable 152-minute running time does unsurprisingly result in the occasional drag here and there, especially in the first act. Still, there’s plenty that works and more than enough play in this film to keep Doctor Sleep from being a dull boy. B+

Doctor Sleep is rated R and has a running time of 2 hours and 32 minutes.

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Mission: Impossible – Fallout

MI6Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Writer: Christopher McQuarrie

Cast: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett

This summer’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout represents the completion of the second trilogy of the Mission Impossible franchise. The first trilogy’s films are simply titled with subsequent installment numbers (1, 2, and 3), but the second trilogy rejected the number scheme for a more ambitious title sequence (Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, Fallout). Not only did the naming scheme become more ambitious, but the stunt sequences and set pieces also got more impressive in each successive volume, and Fallout is no exception!

Mission: Impossible – Fallout finds our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) dealing with the “fallout” that follows Hunt’s capture of Syndicate leader, Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). Lane’s group, The Syndicate, has reorganized with a terrorist group known as the Apostles, and their plot for creating a new world order through a series of catastrophic terrorist events is still in play. Guided by a chilling refrain, “The greater the suffering, the greater the peace,” the Apostles obtain three plutonium cores in order to construct three nuclear weapons. Hunt is now on a race against time with his loyal IMF team, Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), and testosterone-tag-on August Walker (Henry Cavill), an agent forced on Hunt by CIA director Erica Sloane (Angela Bassett) to keep Hunt accountable. MI6 specialist, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) rounds out the crew, now with loyalties firmly with Hunt and IMF’s camp; her identify crisis from Rogue Nation between MI6 and IMF is seemingly resolved. In fact, going back to the title, one can not overlook the fact that this film, in the original naming scheme, would have been MI6.

As I mentioned, this film has some of the most spectacular action sequences of the entire

mission-impossible-fallout-helicopter-chase-r8-1400x900
Just another day as Ethan Hunt

franchise, or perhaps of the action genre as a whole. I will not spoil anything, but I can not write a review without mentioning that there is a helicopter chase through the mountainous region of Kashmir that will blow you away. That’s right, a helicopter chase.

Stunt spectaculars aside, Fallout is most impressively a true sequel. This is the first Mission Impossible film to resurrect an old villain, and it is the first to carry the female lead into the next installment. This sense of connectedness gives the film more reach and significance in the series than the previous films, which could essentially be mixed up and played in any order. The success of this film’s story, pacing, and strength relies heavily on its writer/director, Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie has aligned himself with Cruise now on five separate projects as either writer, director, or both. More significantly as writer/director of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, he is the first to helm two installments in the series; an impressive feat in a series of films with directors like Brian DePalma, John Woo, and J.J. Abrams. The decision to stick with McQuarrie appears to be a good one, and to champion that, I would like to emphasize a quote from my 2015 Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation review that is just as appropriate today as it was then, “This time McQuarrie ‘rounds up the usual suspects,’ and puts together this year’s best action film that does not involve super powers or dinosaurs.” That’s right, 2018 is basically 2015 [brief pause while your minds explode!].

The film also gets a lot of help from its capable ensemble cast. Everyone pitches in and has a moment to shine. Cruise is obviously the central role, but he does not get to steal the whole show. The bumbling antics in the film’s first act between Cruise and Cavill are as entertaining and engaging as anything else in the film. I wanted to find fault with these scenes, but I couldn’t. Mission: Impossible – Fallout complicates the classic movie conversation about those sequels that outshine their originals. Now we have a fifth entry that was superior to its predecessors only to then be outdone by the sixth!

Two key thematic elements within Mission: Impossible – Fallout are time and destruction for the sake of improvement. The film seems to use these themes to meta-style reference itself in that Fallout while representing the culmination of a trilogy, feels like the beginning of something else. Fallout takes some massive swings at the way things have previously been in the franchise making way for some major shifts ahead in future missions that I hope Hunt and company choose to accept. A

Mission: Impossible – Fallout is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 2 hours and 27 minutes. There is no post-credits scene; this movie decided to have its ending be the ending!

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Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation PosterDirector: Christopher McQuarrie

Screenwriter: Christopher McQuarrie

Cast: Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin, and Ving Rhames

A scene early in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (a title so dramatic, it requires both a colon AND a dash!), finds our heroes in Casablanca, Morocco – a city fairly iconic in American cinema lore.  In one shot Tom Cruise, reprising his role as Ethan Hunt for the fifth time, seemingly looks at the camera and gives one of those Tom Cruise smirky smiles that he has perfected over the past 34 years.  A smile that at least in this case seems to say to director Christopher McQuarrie, “This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

And it just might be!  McQuarrie, most famous for his Oscar winning screenplay for 1996’s The Usual Suspects, has written three of Cruise’s most recent projects[*] and served as director for two of them, including this film.  This time McQuarrie “rounds up the usual suspects,” and puts together this year’s best action film that does not involve super powers or dinosaurs.

Kremlin Explosion Scene from Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Oops!

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation begins right where Ghost Protocol left off.  The nefariously named Syndicate (gasp!), has managed to force the American government to basically dissolve the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) over that nasty Kremlin incident from Ghost Protocol.  Now the Syndicate has its eyes on…world domination, Mwa, ha, ha, ha, ha!  Yes, the Syndicate’s goal is to set off a series of global terrorist attacks, creating a need for an entirely new world order.   Now Ethan Hunt is a rogue agent who will stop at nothing to bring down the Syndicate and clear the name of the IMF.

Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
“Of all the torture chambers in all the towns in all                   the world, she walks into mine.”

But he can’t do it alone…although he tries.  Eventually, Hunt has to recruit his old team including William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames).  Hunt’s only lead is a blonde man with glasses named Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), whom Hunt believes is the director of the Syndicate.  When Hunt is surprisingly rescued from a torture chamber by a mysterious double agent named Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), Hunt’s mission is further complicated regarding her motives.  Is she MI6 or is she working for the Syndicate?  Questions abound as Hunt trots the globe searching for Lane, while also trying to prevent more catastrophes.

The Mission: Impossible franchise is as fascinating as they come.  Each entry is a fresh take starting with director Brian De Palma in 1996 and inviting a new director for every subsequent film: John Woo, J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird, and now Christopher McQuarrie.  The result is a series of films that while connected through narrative have a truly unique look and tone that makes for a really interesting set of films.  Of course, the critical unifying element is Cruise.  Cruise is a juggernaut, and he does not take it easy the fifth time around.  Rogue Nation opens with the much talked about scene featured on the poster above where Cruise hangs on to the exterior of an aircraft as it takes off.  The reason that this scene can be talked about and be used to open the film is that there are at least four more tremendously entertaining action stunts left to come that rival this opening scene’s intensity.  Too often films are ruined in the trailer; this is not one of them.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is an action film that harkens back to the golden age of adventure, invoking films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard or as I mentioned earlier, even Casablanca.  However, the film it will be most compared to is the fantastic fourth Mission: Impossible film, Ghost Protocol.  As great as Rogue Nation is, it does fall slightly short of the magnificence of its predecessor and here’s why.  Ghost Protocol was a real ensemble film.  The stunts were incredible, but more importantly, every character was deeply involved.  Cruise, Pegg, and Ferguson are on full display in Rogue Nation, no doubt about it, but Renner and Rhames are given very little to do in this film.  And did I mention Alec Baldwin is in this film?  He is, but he’s there to wear a suit and say stuff like, “Where’s the proof of this so-called Syndicate?” or “I need Hunt captured by whatever means necessary.”  Someone does need to say lines like these, but they feel wasted on Baldwin, who is slowly devolving into a caricature of his Saturday Night Live appearances.  Let’s hope Mission: Impossible 6 or M:I 6, as it’s bound to be called, has more in store for these second tier characters because, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”  Nonetheless, this film represents the best time at the theater so far this year.  A-

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 2 hours and 15 minutes.

[*] McQuarrie wrote and directed 2012’s Jack Reacher, wrote 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow, and served as writer/director on 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.