C+

James Mangold’s biopic of singer Johnny Cash has been called this year’s “Ray,” and that turns out to be a pretty fair description of it–or at least of what it tries to be. If you wanted to be flip about it, you might say that while “Ray” was a film about a music icon who was black, “Walk the Line” is one about the icon called the man in black. But to speak more seriously, the basic similarity is that they’re both very conventional Hollywood musical biographies, structured pretty much the same way similar movies would have been back in 1945 or 1959 and presented without a great deal of imagination or any special insight. Both are also notable for the uncannily accurate performances in the lead roles–by Jamie Foxx in “Ray,” of course, and here by both Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter (though in neither case would they have been the first names you’d have thought of for those parts). And they’re also likely to be remembered at Oscar time, at least in terms of nominations if not for the statuettes themselves, as Foxx was.

But “Walk the Line” doesn’t match “Ray,” not because it’s any less a slickly professional job but because Cash’s story just isn’t as compelling as Ray Charles’s. With the latter you had not only the man’s emergence from impoverished beginnings but his overcoming blindness, too; and in addition to his inveterate womanizing, his heavy drug usage and his dealings with record companies, there was the racial issue that put the singer-pianist in the context of the most significant element of social change occurring in the country. Cash had troubles in his life, too, but it would be absurd to say that they were in any way the equal of those Charles faced. As depicted here, in a script by Mangold and Gill Dennis based on Cash’s own autobiographical books (which may be the fundamental problem), he must deal with childhood trauma resulting from the death of his beloved older brother (Lucas Till) and the stern, unloving attitude of his alcoholic father (Robert Patrick). And his singing career will not only take a toll on his marriage to his early sweetheart Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin) but introduce him to the woman who was his true soul-mate and became his real love–singer Carter (Witherspoon), who resisted his advances for years but finally became his second wife. (In fact, the movie seems to be essentially a two-hour difficult courtship.) Cash also had a serious drug problem that threatened his professional and personal well-being. But if you stack up Cash’s troubles against Charles’s, they come off seeming pretty minor. It may even be a shock to learn that despite his famous song from the perspective of a prisoner, Cash never served hard time; he did give a famous concert for the Folsom inmates, but that’s hardly the same thing.

That doesn’t mean that “Walk the Line” isn’t enjoyable, in a modest way. It includes a lot of Cash’s and Carter’s music, which is all to the good, and certainly Phoenix and Witherspoon prove engaging, even remarkable performers, going well beyond mere impersonation. But despite their excellence, the film never goes terribly deep beneath the surface of things; perhaps because it’s based on the singer’s own memoirs, it seems curiously superficial in its depiction of his dreams as well as his troubles. Of course, perhaps what we see here is pretty much all there was. But if so, the Johnny Cash so many people idolize and revere would appear to be more a triumph of showmanship than of reality. Nor is Carter explained any better. She’s resolutely chipper in spite of the fact that she has marital problems; in fact, her biggest crisis seems to arise when the conservative fans of her family puritanically sneer at her for insulting the sanctity of marriage by getting divorced (the movie is especially ham-fisted on this score). Somehow Phoenix and Witherspoon go beyond the blandness of the screenplay to suggest deeper currents in Cash and Carter, but they can’t do it alone.

The supporting cast strikes no particular sparks. Patrick is grim and sour-faced as Cash’s father and Goodwin no better than adequate as the luckless Vivian, while the parade of youngsters who have cameos as other rockers of the era–Tyler Hilton as Elvis Presley, Waylon Malloy Payne as Jerry Lee Lewis, Jonathan Rice as Ray Orbison–seem just like the impersonators they are. Technically the movie is fine, with glossily luxuriant cinematography by Phedon Papamichael and good period production design by David J. Bomba.

But though you’ll probably leave the theatre swinging to the music, this highly conventional movie really doesn’t do its subject justice: it’s a “Ring of Fire” that burns at distressingly low dramatic voltage.

Grade: C+

It’s entirely fitting that John Woo should have been called
upon to direct this second installment in the series based on
the old TV series: the script by Robert Towne (who once wrote
pieces like “Chinatown” and “Shampoo” rather than such mindless
fluff) is like Woo’s earlier “Face/Off” squared; the hero
and the villain change their appearances so frequently (and
so ludicrously) via the use of “state-of-the-art” latex masks
that one can never be entirely sure who’s really reciting
the dialogue or taking the bullet.

But unlike “Face/Off” or Woo’s other John Travolta-starrer
“Broken Arrow,” or most of his Hong Kong oeuvre for that
matter, “Mission: Impossible 2” is played extremely straight,
with little of the leavening of humor that might make the
absurd material more palatable. Since the director remains a
master of controlled, balletic mayhem, the outcome has a
certain stylishness and sheen, but the picture is like a
beautifully-wrapped package with nothing to speak of inside.

This time around Towne appears to have taken to heart the
criticism that the previous “Mission” film, for which he was
only one of the scribes, had a plot so convoluted as to be
well-nigh incomprehensible. In this instance he’s cobbled
together a fairly simple, straightforward narrative about an
assignment given our stalwart hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to
retrieve from a greedy turncoat colleague named Sean (Dougray
Scott) a destructive bio-engineered virus stolen from a
pharmaceutical firm. The effort involves him with a beautiful
thief named Nyah (Thandie Newton), a former squeeze of Sean’s,
whom he recruits for his team and inevitably falls for.
Though there are some twists and turns along the way and many
action set-pieces, the plot runs pretty much runs a direct
course to the final bravura showdown between the two men in
which–you guessed it–Nyah’s survival hangs in the balance.

Though it boasts some of the trappings of the TV show (the use
of disguises, most obviously), “Mission: Impossible 2” actually
plays more like an Americanized version of a James Bond movie.
The series was a real ensemble piece, with the company of
players regularly involved in an intricately-constructed,
duplicitous scheme to fool some bad guy into making a fatal
mistake. Here, however (as in the previous screen incarnation),
the story is mostly a one-man show, with the invincible star
using a few underlings but mostly his hands, feet and
innumerable guns to undermine the villain’s dastardly plot
through outrageous break-ins and lots of bone-crunching
fisticuffs.

Cruise doesn’t really fit this rather blank action-star mold terribly well, but he’s certainly buffed up for the part and carries off the various kung-fu interludes and chase sequences with reasonable elan, if too little a sense of fun. Scott is too lightweight a performer to generate the sense of menace his part requires (the absence of a truly formidable villain has weakened recent Bond flicks, too), but he tries to snarl efficiently. Newton is a gorgeous screen presence, whose enigmatic face Woo plays nicely with, but she can’t muster the tone of refined, Grace Kelly-like mystery (think of “To Catch a Thief,” for instance) that the film is
apparently aiming at in her character; and audiences will probably find her self-sacrificial inclinations at the close more risible than affecting.

The other two members of Hunt’s team are played by Ving Rhames and John Polson, both of whom are quite wasted–Rhames in being forced to spend most of his screen time in front of a dreary laptop computer, talking over a microphone, and Polson in desperately trying to provide
some comic relief without any material to do it with. Brendan
Gleeson is surprisingly anonymous as the head of the drug firm
involved in producing the virus (and also, as it turns out,
Sean’s primary mark), as is Richard Roxburgh as Sean’s second-
in-command, a character much less interesting than its
obvious model, Martin Landau’s slimy, sexually ambiguous
Leonard in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (yet
another nod to a performer who was part of the original
“Mission” ensemble, no doubt). Anthony Hopkins has a couple
of brief unbilled scenes as Hunt’s boss (I almost wrote “M”);
he smirks knowingly and cocks his head to one side in a
simulation of acting, but fools nobody thereby.

And that leaves Woo. The director manages to keep the plot
nicely clear throughout (something that Brian De Palma, great
craftsman though he is, didn’t manage in the initial episode
of the series), as well as including a few of his own personal
visual flourishes (lots of pigeons flying about in underground
tunnels in one climactic scene); and he and cinematographer
Jeffrey L. Kimball have given the whole picture a gleaming,
lustrous look that’s continually eye-catching. He’s also
staged the action sequences with predictable aplomb–lots of
flying glass here, saturated with deep blues and purples;
plenty of chopsocky pummeling there; and a motorcycle-and-
car chase toward the close, replete with flaming burnouts and
near-misses, that’s pulled off with virtuoso flair. (In this
respect, too, he’s succeeded far better than De Palma.)

But there are few of the iconoclastic undercurrents that marked his
best previous work: no self-referential humorous winks, and
certainly none of the operatic but oddly effective emotionalism
one felt in his Hong Kong classics. It’s not for lack of
trying: Woo obviously wants some of the bits to have an
amusing charge, and he strains at the close to give weight
to Nyah’s unfortunate situation. The problem is that Cruise
is simply too leaden a presence to generate the compensatory
sense of lightness that Chow Yun-Fat could effortlessly embody
even in the midst of the most raging violence and grief
(Cruise has a charming smile, sure, but it always seems to be
directed at others rather than himself), and the Cruise-
Newton relationship never achieves the sort of tragic dimension
that could give the concluding showdown the gonzo depth that
the director is famous for. As with so much of “Mission:
Impossible II,” therefore, the director’s achievement is just
a surface one. Still, the picture is Woozy enough, even on
the level of mere appearances, to keep the eye engaged, if not
the mind; and as explosive summer blockbusters go, it’s more
attractive and exciting than most. (It’s certainly preferable
to the limp Brosnan Bond efforts.)

It may be noted, finally, that Paramount’s advertising scheme
makes “Mission: Impossible II” one of those rare flicks that
are identified by simple abbreviation–here, “M:I-2” (an
apparent imitation of what worked for the “Terminator” sequel).
A pity that the same drive for shortening couldn’t have been
applied in the editing process, too: at slightly more than two
hours, the picture runs a little overlong, and some judicious
cutting would not have been amiss.