“I’ll figure it out.” Ethan Hunt’s reassurance, repeated through Mission: Impossible — Fallout, is the mantra of the eternal optimist, one embodied perfectly by Tom Cruise, contemporary blockbuster cinema’s most industrious instrument of can-do energy, only but one of the diligently-spinning cogs in Christopher McQuarrie’s meticulously constructed, if occasionally overwhelmed, return to the Impossible brand. If the traditional, Bondian image of espionage (pre-Daniel Craig anyway) is that of effortless ease — a silencer under a dinner suit, a wry one-liner with alcohol on the breath — then in Cruise we get the opposite: intelligence work as aerobic overkill. Under the instruction of the Impossible series’ five distinct directors (McQuarrie…
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As far as real-world parallels to contemporary studio franchising go, if Wonder Woman is Corbyn’s Labour revival — an optimistic, youthful reprieve from what’s come before — then The Mummy, the opening salvo for Universal’s ‘Dark Universe’, is surely Theresa May’s bungled Brexit power grab, a rash, self-deluded project that stutters and shuffles in a mimicry of flesh and blood realness, before succumbing to a fit of shambolic self-immolation. Lustfully eyeing the returns coming in for Disney and Warner Bros’ shared superhero universes, Universal has brought their monster squad properties back from the dead, opened their cheque books to tempt bankable, if fading, stars,…