The action in this 'Mission' delivers

 

  I enjoyed Mission: Impossible -- Dead Reckoning (2023) but grumbled about the movie's two-hour and 41-minute length. And that was only Part I. 

 The second chapter, Mission: Impossible -- The Final Reckoning, takes two hours and 51 minutes to conclude an epic battle between the IM force and The Entity, a hunk of super-AI intelligence that lingers from Part I and threatens to wipe out all of humanity. 

   Length and story aside, it’s unlikely that the audiences that flock to Final Reckoning will be discussing the dangers artificial intelligence poses to human life as they leave the theater.

   What will they be talking about? If you said “stunts,” you’re right on target.

    More on that in a moment.

   Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie begin Final Reckoning in a wobbly fashion, using flashbacks from previous movies as refreshers but also generating a bit of confusion.

   Once the movie settles in, the story becomes a springboard for a couple of major set pieces — one involving a sunken Russian submarine, the other centering on an airborne battle between Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and Gabriel (Esai Morales), the movie’s primary villain. 

   Gabriel wants to rule humanity by controlling The Entity; Hunt wants to save humanity by destroying The Entity. The aerial action takes off with each character flying a biplane in a fight that's augmented by an antagonistic history between Gabriel and Hunt to which the screenplay alludes.

   Both nerve-wracking sequences are executed with  exceptional skill and without benefit of CGI. As Hunt plies the freezing depths of the Bering Sea to find a device needed to fulfill his mission, the sub threatens to roll off a steep ocean precipice into even deeper waters. Unmoored torpedos slam against the sub’s interior and threaten to clobber Hunt as he conducts his search.

   The aerial antics find Hunt hanging from the struts of his plane and executing high-flying moves that make you wonder how they were done.

    Forget dialogue, Dead Reckoning is at its best when it allows action to speak louder than words. And keep this in mind: Each of these set pieces functions as a mini-movie: goals are set, obstacles arise, and a resolutions are reached.

    Much of the IM cast returns with notable contributions from Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn, technician supreme. Hayley Atwell portrays Grace, a thief who has become part of Ethan’s crew and who flirts with the role of love interest. Ving Rhames returns as Luther Stickell, a character who serves as the voice of the franchise, offering an ode to Hunt and those heroes who, as he puts it, “live in the shadows.”

   Angela Bassett adds gravitas to the far-fetched plot machinations. As the president of the US, she must decide whether to trust the roguish Hunt or listen to the generals who want her to unleash nuclear Armageddon, part of the screenplay's growing accretion of risk. 

     The movie’s mildly ambiguous ending could signal the conclusion of a series that’s in its 30th year. Or it could suggest that there’s more to come — with or without Cruise in the lead. Cruise’s once boyish face shows the beginnings of jowls. At age 62, he may have had enough. 

    Whatever decision Cruise makes, it’s a good bet that audiences will follow. Sure, much of Final Reckoning proves uneven, but with this level of excitement, complaints seem beside the point.

Tom Cruise on another action-packed mission

 

 Let me get this off my chest about Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. Any movie that's two hours and 43 minutes long and calls itself "Part One" wrinkles my brow. If two hours and 43 minutes isn't enough to tell a Mission: Impossible story, how did Citizen Kane manage to be so scintillating, colorful, and richly alive in a mere one hour and 59 minutes?

 OK, now back to reality.

 Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part I boasts some of the best action footage you'll see this year. Moreover, a strong cast adds enough nuance to keep the story from seeming like an excuse to vault from one dizzying set piece to the next.

 This edition takes a topical turn with writers Erik Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie, who also directs, injecting artificial intelligence into the plot. 

 A brief explanation: An artificial intelligence called The Entity has the potential to control everything. Because AI knows no allegiances, many people want to control The Entity, either living in its good graces or harnessing it for evil.

  Not Ethan Hunt, the character played by Tom Cruise. Hunt, the IM agent who has been defying death since Cruise brought him to life in 1996 aims to kill The Entity. He has no interest in using it, which means he's the defender of humanity's right to be ... well ... human, a value that fits nicely with the series’ preference for stunts over CGI-created effects.

   Cruise, who just turned 61, looks a bit longer in the tooth than he did when Hunt undertook his first mission. Still, longer in the tooth for Cruise, who does his own stunts, isn't quite the same as longer in the tooth for anyone else and he deepens Hunt by adding layers of doubt and regret.

    Two major additions add spark. Hayley Atwell signs on as Grace, a pickpocket who'll end up working with Ethan. Esai Morales portrays Gabriel, a villain who makes no bones about his evil designs on The Entity and who is connected to Hunt's past in ways that presumably will be explored in the next movie.

    A variety of actors make return visits, notably Rebecca Ferguson as Isla Faust, a sometime antagonist and sometime ally of Hunt whose smile suggests that she's crushing on him. Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg reprise their roles as part of the IM crew, and Henry Czerny shows up as a former IM boss who still keeps a hand in intelligence.

   Enough about the cast, which is large and which, over time, has developed characters that rival the Marvel Universe for interconnection and overlap. 

   In these moves, action goes a long way toward defining character, so it's worth mentioning of a few highlights. 

   Dead Reckoning opens with a tense prologue on a Russian submarine and then serves up a battle in the Arabian Desert, a suspenseful scene in Abu Dhabi International Airport, a clever Roman car chase in which Cruise and Atwell are handcuffed to each other in a Fiat, and  a white-knuckled motorcycle ride that finds Hunt driving over a cliff.

   A  literal cliffhanger of a finale puts us aboard a speeding train headed for a demolished bridge while leaning into vertiginous thrills.

   Much of what happens in the movie is motivated by the need to find two halves of a key that can unlock mysteries that the movie pretty much keeps to itself. Using a key as a MacGuffin seems less imaginative than we expect from Mission: Impossible movies, almost Indiana Jones-ish. 

   But everyone wants the key and we'll have to wait until next year to learn what it will reveal about The Entity.

   Now, it's time to offer an addendum to my opening paragraph.

   Look, I prefer forms of storytelling that are more economical and richer; I wouldn't want to call this IM screenplay a model of efficiency. 

  At the same time, I wasn't bored. Going in, I knew the movie was two hours and 43 minutes long, so I occasionally checked my watch to see how McQuarrie was handling all the globe-hopping as he barreled toward an ending.

   Reservations about length aside, I'll look forward to Part Two. My anticipation has less to do with learning the secrets of The Entity than with knowing that Cruise and his team can be relied on to deliver the action-packed goods -- with enough style and sophistication to keep the series humming at high levels.

 

Wild, crazy and ... well ... dangerous

Tom Cruise plays a drug smuggler in the middle of an impossibly complicated situation.

If you really want to know the story of Barry Seal, a pilot who supposedly worked for the CIA and smuggled drugs for the Medellin Cartel, you'll have to do some on-line research or read books such as Daniel Hopsicker's Barry & The Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History. Or you could try Del Hahn's Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal or you could devote your time to something other than taking a deep dive into a strange footnote to US history.

As someone who hasn't delved deeply into Seal's life (I haven't read either of the above two books), I assumed that director Doug Liman took a Hollywood-sized share of liberties with Seal's story to bring American Made to the screen. He also hired Tom Cruise to play Seal, a bored TWA pilot who -- according to the film -- went did surveillance work for the CIA in Latin America, stumbled into the drug trade with the Medellin Cartel, found himself at odds with the DEA, and cut a variety of deals as he attempted to keep himself out of jail.

Liman, who directed Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow, uses a framing device to tell Seals' tale. The smuggler makes a series of videotapes that lead us into extensive flashbacks in which Seal's complicated life of crime unfolds.

Cruise portrays Seal in typical Cruise fashion. Seal is all amped-up energy as a pilot who responds to events with pinball speed and very little reflection. Cruise's Seal has enough mischievous charm to make the movie fly, that and screenwriter Gary Spinelli's appreciation for the rank absurdity that put an unknown man into the middle of a historical maelstrom.

Seal may be a pilot, but he's no Top Gun; he's a blur of serial impulses, a down-scale version of other Cruise characters, but a welcome reminder that even when he plays a less-than-admirable guy, Cruise's big-screen magnetism holds sway.

The script isn't big on motivation: Bored with his TWA gig and dabbling in the occasional smuggling of cigars, Seal becomes a prime target for CIA agent Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson). Schafer assures Seal that legality doesn't really matter so long as he's working for the "good guys."

Seal lies to his wife Lucy (Sarah Wright Olsen) and tells her that he's leaving TWA to open his own business. As the movie progresses, Lucy senses the truth, but she, too, is dazzled by the riches that Seal's drug smuggling brings, especially when the CIA relocates his operation from Seal's native Baton Rouge to the small town of Mena, Arkansas.

Liman approaches a fractured narrative with speed that tends to give a near antic quality to the proceedings which also include an appearance by Caleb Landry Jones as Seal's dirt-dumb brother-in-law.

If you approach American Made as a Cruise-driven entertainment, you'll find an involving helping of all-American cynicism in which the world spins without the benefit of a moral compass.

To bolster the film's authenticity, Liman makes occasional use of news footage, but in American Made, tone convey's more of the movie's truth than any particular incident, and -- like most movies that deal with the rise and fall of a criminal, American Made shows the dizzying fun of Seal's rise, a time when he had so much money, he couldn't launder it fast enough.

The difficulty with this kind of buzzed filmmaking is that it immerses us in a world that spins without the benefit of any moral compass, obliterating any real sense of personal responsibility. Part conniver and part pawn, Seal resembles an adrenaline junkie looking for the next high.

Whether you see this as a statement about American life during the 1980s or as a perverted form of entrepreneurial striving may not be the point: Cruise and Liman ask us to share Seal's kicks and risk, right up until the inevitable crash puts a stark exclamation point on what has been an enjoyably crazed ride.

'The Mummy' vanquishes Tom Cruise

A muddled helping of horror? Campy fun? Or ... maybe it's just another summer dud.

In a better world, The Mummy would be wrapped in linens, placed in a sarcophagus and buried in an obscure location where it would be unable to knock on thousands of multiplex doors.

Even with Universal's history with mummy movies, something the studio revisited with several Brendan Fraser efforts, this edition never becomes a fitting member of the comic book/fantasy universe that dominates so much of the movie landscape.

Trace elements from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Night of the Living Dead, the customary booming effects and a lead performance from Tom Cruise aren't enough to elevate a badly muddled effort. The Mummy hits screens having been embalmed of logic with a story that begins by linking the Crusades to ancient Egypt.

In some of its scenes, The Mummy travels to London to unleash torrents of mayhem, prompting thoughts about how that recently battered city deserved a better break.

Cruise plays a soldier who seems to use his time in Iraq as an excuse to steal antiquities. During a burst of heavy fighting, Cruise's Nick Morton and his pal Chris Vail (Jake Johnson) discover a tomb that contains the mummy of evil Egyptian princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella).

An Egyptologist (Annabelle Wallis) who happens to be wandering around Iraq immediately recognizes the importance of the find, and the mummy is carted away to Britain.

Asking whether the 5,000-year-old Ahmanet will spring to life is like wondering whether temperatures in the desert are prone to rising at midday. You shouldn't have to ask.

Six credited writers are unable to make sense or add much winking humor to a movie that doesn't seem to understand that its only pathway to success involves an indulgence in camp.

And forget about horror. The Mummy is no more scary than the average amusement park fun house.

Now in the midst of all this, we learn that everything involving the mummy is being orchestrated by Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe). Crowe's Jekyll, who takes injections to keep his Hyde side at bay, arrives in the movie like a visitor from another planet -- or at least another movie and his doesn't look as if it could be any better than the one we're watching.

The movie's best creative touch: The risen mummy has four eyeballs, which -- perhaps -- means that mummies don't need special glasses to watch 3D movies like ... well ... The Mummy.

I can't say that I've loved every movie that Tom Cruise has made, but I've never seen him give a performance quite this unconvincing. Perhaps Cruise was trying to be funny or perhaps he, like the movie, couldn't find the right tone for a story that tries to present Ahmanet as a seductress for the dark side. She inhabits Nick's mind, causes him to have visions and makes him seem as addled as the movie itself.

Whatever prompted Cruise's performance, a murky script makes The Mummy his mission impossible for the summer of 2017. Do I need to ask you to pardon the pun?

Director Alex Kurtzman serves up plenty of mediocre action as he staggers to a conclusion that suggests that sequels loom, as well as other movies from what Universal is calling its Dark Universe series, films based on rights the company owns. Maybe Universal's other monsters will fare better.

As for The Mummy, the only appropriate conclusion might be: Let the dead continue to slumber. Please.

Tom Cruise brings back Jack Reacher

An adaptation of a Lee Child novel hits the skids.

Thoroughly mediocre and heavy on standard-issue action, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back showcases a haggard looking Tom Cruise and a cast of unremarkable others in an adaptation of a Lee Child novel in which everyone approaches everything with a degree of seriousness that seems at odds with the movie's lack of freshness.

As directed by Edward Zwick, who you may recall directed Cruise in The Last Samurai, Never Go Back amounts to an unsurprising continuation of Jack's adventures as a disaffected warrior.

With an occasional flex of his ever-tightening jaw muscles, Cruise frequently shows off Reacher's fighting skills. And although Reacher is often seen running, Cruise might as well be marking time until the next Mission Impossible movie.

Reacher, who's battling villainous former military types, quickly finds himself in the company of Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders). Reacher springs this highly competent female officer from jail after she's falsely accused of espionage.

The two, then, are off and running.

Eventually, Reacher and Turner are joined in flight by a 15-year-old girl (Danika Yarosh), a skilled pick-pocket who acts out her teen anger with occasional bouts of kleptomania.

We're also asked to wonder whether Yarosh's Samantha might be Reacher's daughter from some long-ago dalliance, an obviously contrived question that sits atop the movie like a wilted bit of garnish.

The main villain is a ruthless assassin known as The Hunter (Patrick Heusinger), a relentless, off-the-wrack killer who shows no compunction about exercising his trade.

Made to look as if Reacher has taken several beatings, Cruise seems to be going through the motions in movie that too often feels as if it's doing precisely the same thing.

Familiarity with just about everything in Never Go Back may not breed contempt, but it puts a damper on anything resembling real excitement.

'Mission: Impossible' scores again

A worthy addition to a reliably entertaining franchise.

The well-orchestrated action is plentiful, and an intense Tom Cruise approaches his role with the usual grim determination.

What else could we be talking about but a Mission: Impossible movie, this one entitled Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation?

I shouldn't be flip, though.

Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher and The Way of the Gun) drives the movie with sufficient skill to ensure that the Mission: Impossible series remains one of the more reliably entertaining franchises of recent years.

A breathless opening finds Cruise's Ethan Hunt hanging onto a speeding jet, but before you even dip into your popcorn, the movie has jumped into a plot that begins with the IM force being dissolved by Washington bureaucrats.

Suddenly a rogue agent, Hunt is left to battle with a world-threatening outfit called "The Syndicate," and we're left to wonder whether the lithe and lethal woman in this scenario (Rebecca Ferguson) can be trusted.

A spy who early on saves Hunt from Syndicate bad guys, Ferguson's Ilsa Faust may not be entirely on the righteous side of the fence.

With any Mission Impossible movie, character and plot deficiencies are easily overcome by great set pieces.

Rogue Nation never quite matches the vertiginous thrill of the signature scene from 2011's Ghost Protocol, the one that found Hunt hanging off a Dubai skyscraper.

Still, McQuarrie is no slouch when it comes to action.

A prolonged sequence at a Vienna opera house proves classy and exciting, action coupled with gorgeous music from Puccini's Turandot. An underwater scene generates plenty of tension, and Hunt's obligatory motorcycle chase -- this one across a winding mountain road -- is executed with quick-cut precision.

The usual suspects arrive, adding color and linking Rogue Nation to the series' past:

Simon Pegg reprises his role as Benji Dunn, the movie's technical wizard, as well as a comic foil for Hunt.Ving Rhames returns as an ace tracker.

Jeremy Renner shows up again; he's the IMF guy who -- in the movie's first half -- is stuck in Washington trying to defend his colleagues before a very official looking committee.

Alec Baldwin joins the fray as a CIA chief who wants to shut down the IMF. He regards Hunt as a loose cannon who needs to be eliminated.

Ferguson, a Swedish actress, lands a breakout role. She brings beauty and subtle helpings of gray matter to her character, giving the movie an aura of intelligence, it might otherwise lack.

At 53, Cruise continues to bring coiled energy and a sense of danger to a role that seems tailor made for him.

A gem? Hardly. The plot can feel preposterous enough to be laughable, and the movie doesn't always bristle with wit. At times, Rogue Nation feels like a Bond movie that's taking itself way too seriously.

Still, abundant style and excitement keep this one solidly in the plus column. Not bad for a series that's now in its 19th year.

Over and over, war is hell

Tom Cruise gets caught in a time loop in action-packed Edge of Tomorrow.

Tom Cruise answers another call to arms in Edge of Tomorrow, a blockbuster-sized helping of sci-fi involving Groundhog Day-like time loops, ultra-intense combat sequences and a plot that allows director Douglas Liman (The Bourne Identity) to load up on action.

The challenge with a movie such as Edge of Tomorrow involves telling a story based on repetition without making it feel repetitive. Liman mostly succeeds, even if the plot occasionally baffles.

Cruise plays Maj. William Cage, an officer who has been recruited into the military because he was a skilled ad man in civilian life. At war with an alien race called Mimics, the military evidently needs men who know how to manipulate public opinion.

No one is more surprised than the glad-handing Cage when a general (Brendan Gleeson) tells him that he's being shipped to the front to be part of the first wave of a desperate invasion.

Why? Maybe because he's Tom Cruise and he has to somehow be thrown into the fray.

Cage tries to wangle his way out of the assignment, but the general has him arrested and dumped him into the middle of a unit of hardened combat vets.

With little time to adjust, the untrained Cage finds himself on a beachhead fighting creatures that spring into action with whiplash-like fury. They look like toys designed by a sadist who hates kids, part Slinky, part razor-blades.

In Edge of Tomorrow, soldiers don't make amphibious landings: They're dropped from crafts that hover over the water in pulse-quickening sequences designed to rattle the nerves.

The battle scenes -- presented in Saving Private Ryan style -- are chaotic and convincing, so much so that the invasion costs Cage and fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) their lives.

But wait.

No sooner is Cage killed than he wakes up back at a command post, confused and apparently caught up in a never-ending cycle in which he's doomed to repeat the landing, each time getting a bit further toward the objective of destroying the source -- it's called the Omega -- that controls the creatures that are destroying the Earth.

We later learn that Blunt's Rita Vratask once had the same ability to relive her last day that Cage now possesses. Rita, affectionately known to her fellow troopers as Full Metal Bitch, is a seasoned warrior who has become a poster-girl for the military.

Cruise wisely has found a role that allows him to retain his action-movie standing in reasonably credible fashion. He makes a convincing transition from a smiling media man to a hardened warrior, keeping his smile under control and sometimes playing second fiddle to Blunt, whose character eventually agrees to give Cage some training.

Adapted from a 2004 novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka (All You Need is Kill) by a trio of credited writers, Edge of Tomorrow doesn't feature much by way of a supporting cast, although Bill Paxton does stand-out work as a smug, by-the-book noncom who pushes Cage into battle, after having been told that he's a deserter.

Tough to say whether there's a ton of deeper meaning here, but the consistely excting Edge of Tomorrow -- which resists the mournful ending that would have greatly ennobled it -- feels like it's about something more than action. Neat trick.

'Oblivion' has an intriguing look

But Tom Cruise's latest doesn't have a plot to match ...
I saw Oblivion at a preview screening at an IMAX theater. I'd have to say that seeing the movie that way made for a heightened viewing experience. Even at that, I can't say that I'd ever had any desire to see a three-story projection of Tom Cruise's face, particularly in a role in which an awful lot of Cruise's acting consists of open-mouthed staring at special effects.

Maybe Cruise shouldn't be blamed. The effects in Oblivion -- directed by Joseph Kosinski of Tron Legacy fame -- offer a lot to tempt wandering eyes. Here's one post-apocalyptic thriller that doesn't look like every other sci-fi movie you've ever seen.

Set on Earth in 2077, Oblivion revolves around a future in which civilization mostly has been destroyed. The planet's population used nuclear weapons to annihilate an invading army of interplanetary thugs, achieving what may be the ultimate in pyrrhic victories. When the movie opens we meet a two-person mop-up crew that has been left to patrol the war-ravaged Earth before they join the rest of the survivors on Titan, a distant moon of Saturn. The team consists of Jack Harper (Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough). The duo periodically checks in with a mission controller (Melissa Leo) who speaks with a folksy southern accent.

Jack and Victoria occupy a home above the clouds that has a spare, ultra-modern look, sort of what you might imagine the creators of the Jetsons would have come up with had they taken themselves seriously.

You'll just about have settled into your seat when Kosinski has Cruise flying around Earth in Top Gun-style, only this time his airborne vehicle looks like a cross between a helicopter, a jet and a drone. Not content with one toy for Cruise, the movie quickly provides Jack with another, a motorcycle that detaches from the body of Harper's aircraft.

And speaking of drones ...

It's just here that Oblivion finds a small measure of topical relevance. Jack's job involves servicing flying weapons the movie calls ... well ... drones. Harper's job: Refuel the drones, which are used to wipe out lingering marauders known as Scavengers or, more familiarly, "Scavs."

The movie's early scenes are devoted to action set pieces, including one that takes place in an abandoned library. Another scene takes us to the top of the Empire State Building, which now sits at ground level. Jack's haunted by memories of pre-war New York City, but doesn't know what to make of them. He knows every detail of the last Super Bowl, which he tells us was played in 2017. He wears a Yankee baseball cap, and evidently has given up shaving on a regular basis.

The plot -- which can be confusing -- takes a strange turn when Harper discovers a crashed ship during one of his Earth patrols. The crew has been scattered about in coffin-like containers where they've been "sleeping" for an extended period, presumably because they were supposed to make a lengthy space flight. Harper is able to rescue one member of the crew.

I guess if you had to pick one crew member to save, you could do worse than the beautiful Olga Kurylenko, last seen in Terrence Malick's To the Wonder. Kurylenko's Julia seems to have some sort of connection with Jack.

Jack, of course, must be portrayed as having a few special traits. Perhaps that's why he savors a book that he finds on one of his missions, a copy of Thomas Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. Jack's particularly drawn to line about how to die a noble death.

If you've seen the trailer for Oblivion, you know that a cigar-chomping Morgan Freeman appears in the movie. Best not to explain Freeman's role in the story, but his character eventually helps drive the plot toward its muddled and disappointing destination.

Because the movie's primary pleasures are visual, it's worth mentioning that cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who also did Life of Pi, contributes to the movie's allure -- although Oblivion's considerable visual pleasures become somewhat repetitive as the action unfolds.

So what goes wrong? The troubles seem to have started at the typewriter; i.e., with the screenplay by Karl Gajdusek and Michael DeBruyn, who based their work on a graphic novel and original story by Kosinski. The various plot machinations often defy logic, and the movie includes an epilogue that struck me as a cheat.

I also wish that Cruise would find something else to do aside from big-budget extravaganzas that can undermine their intelligence with dumb dialogue (Oblivion has its share) and obligatory action. But that, I'm afraid, takes us out of the realm of science fiction and into the realm of hopeless fantasy.

Another loner, another show

Tom Cruise fights his way to justice as Jack Reacher.

Somewhere along the line, it became mandatory for a certain kind of male hero to display as little emotion as possible, to become an icon of don't-mess-with-me toughness. As played by Tom Cruise, former soldier Jack Reacher -- the main character in a series of popular books by British novelist Lee Child and the title character in Cruise's new movie -- is one such man: decisive, physically fit, brutal when necessary and unencumbered by possessions. Reacher has only one shirt to his name, travels by bus and always seems to keep moving.

Jack Reacher, a new movie adapted from Child's 2005 novel, One Shot, takes place in in Pittsburgh and kicks off with a harrowing shooting. Positioned in a parking garage, a sniper picks off five people in what appear to be random acts of senseless murder.

The sniper (Joseph Sikora) is quickly arrested. Evidence against him seems overwhelming and irrefutable. Of course, in movies, a scenario such as this only can mean one thing: The guy didn't do it. It doesn't take long for the shooter's attorney (Rosamund Pike) to become embroiled in an attempt to discover why Sikora's character has been made into a patsy.

She has help. Just before slipping into a coma, Sikora's character scrawled one sentence on a legal pad, "Get Jack Reacher."

Pike's Helen hires Reacher, who turns up in Pittsburgh for reasons of his own, to help figure things out, a task for which he's well-suited because he's a former military policeman known for his brilliant investigatory powers. You know the drill: Reacher's the kind of guy who can visit a crime scene and notice things that the police always seem to overlook.

The cast of characters drawn together by the murders includes the Pittsburgh District Attorney (Richard Jenkins), who happens to be Helen's father, a man with whom she has long-standing but ill-defined tensions. David Oyelowo plays the lead detective on the case. Neither the DA nor the cop can understand why Helen insists on wasting time on such an unambiguous situation.

Looking a little gaunt in the face, Cruise does his version of the tough, mysterious loner, and the rest of the actors do little to compete with him. How tough is Reacher? He can take out five guys in a fight outside a bar.

The villains in Jack Reacher offer the only hints of personality. They're led by Werner Herzog, a director who spends most of his time behind the camera. Herzog brings just the right amount of sadistic intensity to the proceedings. He's not playing a villain, but Robert Duvall -- in a late-picture appearance as the owner of a shooting range -- adds life to a story that's not without a few dull spots.

The mystery at the heart of writer/director Christopher McQuarrie's screenplay isn't especially compelling, and Jack Reacher builds toward a shoot-out at a construction site that doesn't exactly represent a high point in the history of imaginatively presented action.

McQuarrie, who wrote the screenplay for Cruise's Valkyrie, receives a major assist from cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who gives Pittsburgh an appropriately noirish sheen, and who has fun with a woozy car chase, the movie's best action set piece.

But there's something tired and lame at the core of Jack Reacher, which doesn't exactly break fresh cinematic ground.

I know there's nothing new under the sun, so there's no shame in telling a story about another tough guy who'll let nothing stop him from exercising his own brand of justice. But unlike the best of Cruise's Mission Impossible movies, Jack Reacher isn't enough fun to make you overlook its flaws. And you can't take it all that seriously, either.

This 'Mission' hits an action bull's-eye

A 'Mission Impossible' movie that pushes most of the right buttons.

Look, they don't call it Mission Impossible for nothing.

Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol -- the fourth in a series of Mission Impossible movies -- features action that's either physically impossible, highly unlikely or downright ridiculous.

But that's just what we want in a Mission Impossible movie, and director Brad Bird, best know for animated movies such as The Incredibles and Iron Giant, serves up a Mission edition that delivers the action-packed goods. Along with star Tom Cruise - and a worthy supporting cast - Bird ensures that this Mission flies through some of the year's most compelling action.

The movie's best set piece takes place on the glass wall of Dubai's Burj Khalifa, a 2,700-foot-high skyscraper. I'm squeamish about heights, so this tense bit of business was strictly a white-knuckle experience for me. Still, it's indicative of the kind of a crackerjack action Bird strings around a serviceable story about a lunatic general (Michael Nyqvist) who wants to start a nuclear war.

Joining Cruise's Ethan Hunt on a mission aimed at stopping nuclear Armageddon are Paula Patton (as a highly competent IMF agent); Simon Pegg (as the agent with tech skills) and Jeremy Renner (as an assistant to the IMF secretary played by Tom Wilkinson).

The screenplay wisely affords Renner -- scorchingly good in both The Hurt Locker -- an opportunity to show another side of himself. The rest of the crew is in equally good form.

Watch for Lea Seydoux, as a deadly blonde assassin, who ultimately winds up duking it out with Patton's character. And, hey, the gadgets and high-tech wonders are pretty impressive, too.

Cruise's main function here is to take a variety of beatings and keep on ticking. Whether he's scaling the walls of skyscrapers or leaping onto moving vehicles, Cruise portrays Ethan with old-pro efficiency. It's almost as if he understands that he's playing second fiddle to the action, and has no problem with it.

The screenplay, which tries for a bit of emotion with a backstory involving Ethan's late wife, doesn't skimp on locations, taking us to places as far flung as Moscow and Dubai. It also makes good use of the powerhouse presentation that IMAX offers. (The film will be released at non-IMAX theaters on Dec. 21.)

Despite its near-maniacal commitment to efficiency - cramming as much action into every scene as possible - Ghost Protocol knows it's also supposed to be fun, and it is. (It makes for an interesting contrast with this week's other franchise release, Sherlock Holmes. That movie seems to know its silly; this one is earnest in its approach, refusing to waste time putting tongue into cheek.

There are times when Ghost Protocol , like most action-heavy thrillers, threatens to wear out its welcome, but it never really does. This is one Mission fans should have no trouble accepting.