Movie Box Review

THE FIRM isn't NBC's #1 priority for midseason--that would clearly be Smash.  (In other news, there's no truth to the rumor that NBC has decided to change its corporate name to "Smash--The Monday After the Super Bowl".)  But The Firm is the inheritor of the network's once-grand Thursday 10PM timeslot from the busted Prime Suspect, making it an important part of the line-up.  And NBC has taken enough hits by now--after years of battering and the network's gradual loss of its years'-long arrogance, it's not even fun to beat the place up anymore.  So it's not with any joy, but with simple obligation, that it's necessary to call The Firm out for the terrible, tedious show it is.

Technically, the series is an extension/sequel to John Grisham's 1991 best-selling novel--the book that made his career--as well as Sydney Pollack's gold-plated 1993 film version, which starred Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, Jeanne Triplehorn, Holly Hunter, Hal Holbrook, Ed Harris, David Straitharn, and half the character actors in Hollywood.  The show is set 10 years after the events of the book and movie, in which lead character Mitch McDeere (Cruise in 1993, Josh Lucas now), was pursued by a murderous, mobster-controlled Memphis law firm and had to go into witness protection.  McDeere and his family (Molly Parker in the Triplehorn part, Callum Keith Rennie taking over David Strathairn's role as Mitch's ex-con brother who's now private investigator for Mitch's law firm, and Juliette Lewis as the brother's girlfriend and Mitch's assistant, plus a new character of the McDeeres' 10-year old daughter) have come out of the program and relocated in Washington DC--although actually the series is shot on a low budget in Canada, so after a brief slam-bang (extra cost) opening sequence, there's no effort at all to even simulate a DC setting--where Mitch and company have started a struggling small firm.

The 2-hour pilot barely pays lip service to the carryover plot from the original novel, although there are hints that it'll become a more prominent thread at some point, since the Memphis mobster Mitch was responsible for overthrowing has a college-age son who will now presumably be on his tail.  Instead, the show is mostly a familiar procedural, with Mitch representing criminal defendants and an Erin Brockovich-type product liability claimant.  The wrinkle is that in order to get the resources to fight his cases, Mitch has to associate his scrappy firm with a larger and clearly evil one headed by Tricia Helfer (6 from Battlestar Galactica--at some point she and Rennie will have a scene together and we'll get a mini-BSG reunion), which of course has nefarious and ulterior motives related to a murder case Mitch is defending.  Eventually the evil firm will probably tie in with the Memphis boy gangster, although that hasn't happened yet.

The Firm may improve in its regular 1-hour format, but as a 2-hour pilot, it commits the cardinal sin of being flat-out boring.  It's also frequently ludicrous and often horribly written (by Lucas Reiter), with dialogue that sounds like the poor actors, who've all proved their very solid talents elsewhere, are reading out place-holder lines from a script outline.  Grisham's novels themselves can often be accused of some of the same flaws, but he's such a master of rip-roaring pace that his books work despite their deficiencies.  Slowing down his kind of mush, especially when the tone is utterly humorless as well, is nothing less than suicidal for TV drama, and the result is painful. 

If NBC is to regain anything like its old form, it needs to embrace some kind of identity, something other than the scatter-shot desperation that (except in its Thursday sit-coms) has been its mode for the past half-decade.  Smash, based on its pilot, could be a step in that right direction.  The Firm, though, offers no identity beyond bland mediocrity.

With MISSION:   IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL, Brad Bird makes the very unusual transition from animation auteur to live-action director.   Of course, since his animated work includes The Incredibles, one of the snazziest and smartest action-adventures of recent years, the leap isn't as great as it might be for others.  And for a while, it appears as though Bird might triumphantly transfer his genius for space, movement and timing to real people and settings:  the opening sequences of MI4, an assassination and a jail-break (staged to Dean Martin singing "Ain't That A Kick In the Head"), have a deftness and visual buoyancy that are completely new to the usually heavy-handed, moody universe of Mission: Impossible. 

Then, alas, the plot kicks in, and for all Bird's skill and occasionally wonderful touches (in the scene where Cruise famously climbs a massive Dubai office tower, Bird practically turns an high-tech climbing glove into a Looney Tunes character), MI4 becomes another big-budget spectacle too overloaded and generic for its own good.  Any thriller that has as its MacGuffin the search for nuclear launch codes is at least 20 years too late, and MI4's storyline, credited to Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec (longtime members of producer J. J. Abrams' writing brotherhood) seems to have been thawed out from late in the Cold War.

It's a shame, really, because MI4 gets a lot of important elements just right.  Considering that Bird had never worked with live actors before other than as voice recordings, it's remarkable how good he is with the performers.  Tom Cruise is infinitely more bearable here than he was in Knight and Day; Cruise is letting his age show (albeit in the way that Hollywood stars with unlimited resources permit themselves to age), and his slightly haggard, slightly tired air is becoming--it gives some weight to his derring-do.  Although he mugged unforgivably in Knight and Day, when he keeps himself in check, Cruise has always had a flair for subtle comedy, and Bird draws that out of him, especially when he interacts with Simon Pegg as another member of the IMF team.  (Pegg is also kept under commendably tight rein.)  Until he's defeated by the movie's one thudding attempt at a plot twist, Jeremy Renner is a fine addition to the group, a 1970s type action star who carries his own wariness and edge.  Paula Patton rounds out the leads, and here again, while she of course has her badass catfight scene, Bird doesn't play her for the obvious angle of beauty-plus-violence.

Apart from its rote and overly padded (133 minutes) storyline, MI4 ends up derailed by its utterly bland villain, that dealer in nuclear codes, who has a ridiculous motive and as played by Michael Nyqvist (Blomkvist in the Swedish Dragon Tattoo films), no presence at all--I kept waiting for the revelation that he was just henchman to the real villain, but no such luck.  Of the baddies, only Lea Seydoux (the sweet girl Owen Wilson meets at the antique stand in Midnight In Paris) has any evil heat.  The picture is also oddly unbalanced, with the best action sequences coming at the beginning and middle (that climb up the Dubai office tower), with a relatively weak conclusion out of a second-caliber Bond movie.  (What would these pictures do without bombs that come equipped with Abort buttons?)

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is fair entertainment, especially if you have the opportunity to see it in real Imax, because chunks of the film were shot in that format, and the giant shots of Dubai, Budapest, Moscow and other locales are breathtaking.  Here, as in every other way, the picture makes great use of Grade A Hollywood craftsmanship:  photography by Robert Elswit, music by Michael Giacchino (incorporating, of course, Lalo Schifrin's immortal theme), editing by Paul Hirsch, production design by James D. Bissell.   MI4 is far better than its main competition for the action-movie franchise audience this holiday season, Sherlock Holmes:  Game of Shadows.  But there was potential here for an adventure as thrilling in live action as Brad Bird's Incredibles is in animation.  That, it seems, was ultimately a mission truly not possible.