Be true to your school (2/8/07)
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Mission Impossible III. [J.J. Abrams, 2006.]
On the eve of his marriage to absurdly cute but absolutely clueless medical professional [Scarlett Johansson, Lindsay Lohan, Jennifer Garner, Sofia Vergara, Kate Bosworth, Katie Holmes, no it’s] Michelle Monaghan, erstwhile Secret Agent Extraordinaire turned IMF instructor Tom Cruise is dragged out of retirement by curiously affectless bureaucratic spook Billy Crudup to mount an emergency rescue of his onetime prize pupil, talented but green novice spook Keri Russell; who, her attention having lapsed at some critical juncture during an attempt to penetrate the operation of terrorist facilitator and Evil Genius Philip Seymour Hoffman, now languishes in durance vile in an abandoned factory in Berlin, surrounded by barbed wire, broken glass, moonscape, minefields, a midsized army of mercenaries, maneating IRS agents, and a moat full of crocodiles.
Pro forma initial protests notwithstanding, our nominal hero saddles up, rounds up Posse 3.0 [Ving Rhames, Maggie Q., Jonathan Rhys Davies] while strapping on his bulletproof jock, and rockets to the rescue, charging recklessly through a hail of bullets into the enemy citadel, dropping the hapless Evil Mercs like tenpins, and making an exit with typical panache by diving out a window three stories above the pavement girl in arm while the building explodes behind him.
A helicopter chase ensues! through a German windfarm! blades turning slowly like the fatal flapping arms of Laura Palmer’s ceiling fan, while Cruise with missiles bursting all around him attempts emergency brain surgery with Swiss Army Knife and electroshock paddles to remove a bomb the diabolical Hoffman, that incarnation of Doctor Evil, planted in Russell’s skull. Just as Cruise is about to apply the paddles — her head explodes!!! blowing the engine out of the helicopter!!! and they crash ignominiously and flying helicopter and windmill blades hack the luckless Cruise to sushi.
No, just kidding. Cruise escapes and returns with the carcass to headquarters to get his ass chewed by Maximum Spook Laurence Fishburne [I told you he’d be next], necessitating the improvisation of another, somewhat more ingenious, caper, in which the charismatic lodestar of our cinematic attentions and his merry men penetrate the formidable security of the Vatican and kidnap Hoffman from a diplomatic reception at which, evil mastermind that he is, he is acquiring information vital to his ongoing pursuit of the McGuffin, a mysterious object known as The Rabbit’s Foot; about which we never learn much save that it is far from lucky and probably some kind of monstrous biological weapon. [See the previous episode.]
Alas, as they are making their escape their getaway Lamborghini explodes! no, that was part of the plan — no, an asteroid steered out of distant orbit by evil Jesuit astronomers recruited by Opus Dei strikes! evaporating the IMF team and leaving nothing but a smoking crater behind! over which bent priests in cassocks decorated with strange insignia sprinkle holy water and speak a brief benediction thanking the God of Fascist Catholicism for eliminating this loathsome insect from the silver screen.
No, just fucking with you. Cruise and his posse make their getaway with Hoffman in tow and fly back to the United States, where while ferrying the prisoner across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge — enemy aircraft strike! riddling the convoy with machinegun and missile fire, and annihilating the IMF team while they free Hoffman. Cruise escapes momentarily and is running toward a van to get a missile launcher to bring down the strafing jets when — giant robots appear! descending from the heavens and marching in military formation down the middle of the span, trampling the fleeing Cruise and stomping him into a thin layer of pink goo as they all take turns one by one stepping on his carcass. — After
Risky Business, after
The Color of Money, after
Top Gun and
Minority Report, to end so ignominiously... it brings a tear to your eye and a fart to your shorts ... .
No, just making it up again. Cruise and his posse escape, but the evil Hoffman is carried off by his henchmen, kidnapping Monaghan while they’re at it. As he gnashes those famous big white teeth, Cruise is captured by his own side and, suspected to be a terrorist himself, tossed into an airplane and flown to a prison in eastern Europe where he is waterboarded, treated with electroshock, stripped naked and forced to pose for humiliating Polaroids in which hillbilly bimbos leer at him while pointing at his shrivelled weenie, and implanted with microchips which whisper to him day and night of the hopelesness of the human condition should mankind not heed the healing word of L. Ron Hubbard. Reprogrammed, Cruise is returned to his native land, where he makes his way to Hollywood and insinuates himself into the highest councils of the motion picture industry as a mole, a Manchurian Candidate planted to turn Hollywood to the service of an obscure religious cult. In a series of increasingly bizarre public appearances he establishes himself as a pain in the collective ass and a menace to rationality and the heritage of the Enlightenment. Finally in a crescendo of aberrant behavior he embarks upon a widely publicized quest to find a leading lady for his next action movie, in which after making weirdly inappropriate proposals to two or three dozen of the most alluring and talented starlets in Hollywood he succeeds instead in alienating all of them by his hamhanded attempts to convert them to his bizarre pseudoreligion. Marginalized and viewed by everyone as unbalanced and dangerous, he compromises his position as the biggest action star in the world and loses his production deal at a major studio, necessitating some fancy footwork to maintain his bankability as a major star.
No, this is too ridiculous; obviously I’m making all that up too. No, Cruise is momentarily incarcerated but effortlessly outwits his superiors and, erstwhile sweetheart of Delta Phi though he may himself have been, escapes with prejudice from the headquarters of the secret spook fraternity, jumping a flight to Shanghai to rescue his swooning bride from the ever-more-nefarious Hoffman. Swinging on vines from tree to tree through the dense foliage and gigantic gnarled trunks of the Chinese rain forest, he summons his faithful elephants and leads a charge into the compound of Terrorist International [traded publicly on the Hong Kong and London exchanges after a wildly successful IPO orchestrated by bent financiers with French accents], where he corners Hoffman and faces him down in a triple Chinese standoff. At the last moment Hoffman rips his mask off and reveals himself to be — Philip Rivers! quarterback of the San Diego Chargers, and someone who has had a hardon for Cruise since
All The Right Moves. And, ripping off their masks in turn, his henchmen are revealed to be — Philips H. Screw driver! Richard Philips Feynman! Philip of Macedon! Philip Morris! Philip K. Dick! Phillipo, Duke of Bohemia! Philerupwithregular! Philip Glass! Mister Philipflop! and Philip Roth! who brandish machineguns and riddle the carcass of the hapless Cruise with depleted uranium rounds from Gatling guns firing ten thousand rounds a minute!! Surely this is the end of the disgusting little parasite.
No, this would be too easy. No, the momentarily daunted Cruise backs away slowly into an apparent culdesac, where he seems to be cornered — but then abruptly makes his escape! basejumping out the window ninetynine stories to the pavement. As he plummets past the shining glass of this gleaming symbol of the Chinese rise to hegemony, grinning the famous madcap grin of the cinematic daredevil audiences the world over know and love — his progress is arrested at the thirty-third story! by a giant strip of Human Flypaper set out to guard against this very contingency by — Billy Crudup!! whose traitorous intentions are now at last revealed. Dismissing Rivers and his posse to an athletic date with destiny on the other side of the globe, Crudup straps Cruise into a gigantic restraining device modeled upon the Frankenstein laboratory tables and prepares to jolt the hapless action hero with twenty thousand volts of electronic frontier justice. “Cables ... fifteen dollars,” says Crudup with evident unctuous satisfaction. “Large alligator clips guaranteed to be exceptionally painful when clamped onto the subject’s genitalia ... ten dollars ... storage battery and handcranked generator ... one hundred fifty dollars .... the look on the face of the meathead action star when he realizes you’re about to barbeque his gonads with electric current ... priceless.” Throwing a switch, he toasts Cruise and puts an end to the career of the obnoxious little twerp for good and all.
Hahaha, just making that part up. No, Cruise’s posse picks this convenient moment to crash through the windows and rescue him. Cruise guns down Crudup and rescues Monaghan, and as they are walking through the park and he explains that he doesn’t really work for the highway department — she cackles and says, “I know, you moron.” Ripping her mask off, she is revealed to be — Scarlett Johansson! leader of a conspiracy of Hollywood starlets who have banded together to put an end to the slimy little maggot. Materializing all around him in the fog of the London slums, they are revealed to be — well, everybody we rattled off in the first paragraph, and a few supporting bimbettes from the Hawaiian Tropics bikini contest besides. — “Your doom is upon you!” cackles Johansson, showing that her dramatic range extends easily to Deranged Villainess — “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” Surrounding the terrified symbol of the patriarchy with a slowly closing circle as they chant “One of us ... one of us ...” the avenging-angelic starlets whip out their carving knives and a few yards of dental floss and, in a brief but horrendously gory surgical procedure, splice the business end of a plastic Jenna Jameson doll into the void left by the removal of the genitalia of the screaming Cruise!! who expires of mortification as he realizes the impact his new status as transgendered action hero will have upon his earning potential.
No, just kidding again. The digital alarm clock goes off as it hits six o’clock and we realize that it’s Groundhog Day, and that Cruise, a vain and offensively overbearing weatherman, has been doomed by the true villain of the piece Punxsutawney Phil [not a mere groundhog, of course, but the projection into this dimension of higherdimensional beings] to relive the same day over and over again while he is repeatedly stabbed, shot, run over by trains, hit by cars, thrown over the edge of a cliff, tossed into a quarry hardened into concrete and poured into the foundations of Giants stadium, struck by meteors, and clubbed to a pulp and then flattened by roadgraders into a microscopic layer of protoplasm over which the USC marching band parades while playing “Louie-Louie”. Staggering as this realization overwhelms him, Cruise gasps out his disbelief that this can represent the truth of any motion picture in which he might appear. “The truth?!” Jack Nicholson screams at him. “You can’t handle the truth!” as his Marines haul Cruise away to the dungeons of Gitmo to be assraped by cave trolls.
No, I’m still fucking with you. Cruise staggers from his last assignation with the evil Hoffman clutching his skull, in which bombs have been implanted. Between clenched teeth he instructs Monaghan how to revive him with acupuncture needles after stopping his heart with electric shock. Grounding himself in a metal pan of saline solution, he takes the paddles. The lights dim! He slumps to the floor!!
Practiced now at rapid discorporation, Cruise flatlines easily and flashes back to a past life in the middle ages when he was one of a merry band of vampire hunters led, somewhat improbably, by Michael Madsen, riding on horseback through greenwood and vale in chainmail boots and leather jerkins sporting Prince Valiant haircuts waving swords in the air stacking shishkabob strings of the undead upon their spears. Kristanna Loken is just about to rip her shirt off and compromise the PG-13 rating the authors have somehow bribed the MPAA into giving them despite this unrelenting blood and slaughter, when — he awakes! revived upon the operating table by Kevin Bacon and Julia Roberts, and now looking just like Kiefer Sutherland, unshaven and with long gray locks. Summoned personally by the president, he must embark upon a desperate mission to save the country from a paralyzing series of terrorist attacks. No one is who he seems, wheels spin crazily within wheels, an impossibly convoluted plot reveals a descending chain of conspiracies nested one within the other like Chinese boxes, the Constitution is imperiled by the schemes of powermad rightwing fanatics, an inexhaustible army of Arab lunatics everywhere threaten to blow themselves to smithereens for a pack of cigarettes and the promise of Paradise, every babe is put in peril, each cliffhanger is topped by its successor — and our hero possesses a certain gravitas we find lacking elsewhere; an existential sense of responsibility. We sense that he is weighed down by the burden of his actions; that he feels that he must do his duty, but knows that in so doing he embraces his doom.
And, you know what, this looks a lot better. I think maybe I’ll take some time off and watch Kiefer instead. And forget all about what’s-his-name.
____________Roach motel on planet hell (1/4/07)
