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Ant-Man (2015) – Pick
Fantastic Four (2015) – Pass
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) – Pick
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Action fans, the No. 1 escapist action movie of 2015 is now on home video. Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation is an exhilarating follow-up to the equally terrific Ghost Protocol, with a similar blend of brilliantly constructed set pieces, spectacular stunts, humor, exotic locations and — well, that’s about it, really. What more do you need? One thing, perhaps: The franchise now has a durable team — Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner — but it still needs at least one recurring female team member. The good news is that, in Rebecca Ferguson, an ambiguous femme fatale, the franchise has its best female lead so far. Rogue Nation also has a great villain: Sean Harris (the demoniac in Scott Derrickson’s Deliver Us From Evil) is entertainingly creepy as a soft-spoken, Bond-villain-ish mastermind. Both the girl and the bad guy are well matched with Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, which makes for a tense, exciting game. The door is flung wide open to another sequel, but we aren’t left hanging for it.
The same doesn’t apply, alas, to Ant-Man, which, like all Marvel movies these days, has a certain middle-movie quality tying it to everything that’s gone before and everything yet to come. That doesn’t make it bad, exactly, but it’s a movie I can really only recommend to Marvel fans, whereas Rogue Nation I can recommend to almost anyone. I enjoyed Ant-Man most as small-scale spectacle, a high-tech update on Honey, I Shrunk the Kids cinema.
Then there’s Fox’s latest pathetic attempt at Fantastic Four, which I can’t recommend to anyone.
Caveat Spectator: Ant-Man: Stylized action violence, including a couple of icky sci-fi deaths; menace to a child; tolerant depiction of criminal behavior; some crude language and swearing; a mildly crass sexual reference. Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation: Constant intense, often-deadly action violence and menace; an occasionally scantily clad female character and brief partial nudity. Both teens and up.