Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars
Bottom Line: A gripping, fun adventure that fails slightly in the third act.
When you go into a movie whose premise is time travel, you try not to get your hopes up. “Edge of Tomorrow” sounded so cool from the previews, though, that my hopes were up and I am happy to report that the movie didn’t disappoint.
Most of Europe has been taken over by an alien species. Tom Cruise plays Cage, a major in the U.S. army who starts the movie much like I’d expect Tom Cruise to be in real live; smarmy, manipulative, and just a general asshole. Through a series of events that I won’t spoil, Cage ends up repeating the same day over and over again. The montage of him performing this Groundhog Day makes for some really entertaining film viewing.
Cage eventually runs into Rita, played most bad assedly by Emily Blunt, who had once experienced the same thing Cage is now experiencing. She eventually ends up training Cage to be as bad assed as she is and with the help of a theoretical physicist, they hatch a plan to defeat the aliens once and for all.
An interesting thing about living the same day over and over again is that you get to learn a lot about the people you interact with on that day, but they learn nothing about you. Thus, Cage falls in love with Rita, but she keeps on just meeting Cage for the first time. It was very cool how they developed this relationship even if the director decided to go the complete cop out feel good ending route. Stupid test audiences.
The movie keeps up a pretty good pace throughout except for some slowdown in the third act. They spend a little too much time on the day where Cage decides to go completely off script and visit London instead of joining the battle. I also would have liked that day to end a different way, but that’s a small complaint for a decent movie about time travel. There are some weird “oh, but this is what the enemy wanted us to do all along” problems with the movie that don’t really make sense when you stop to think about it, but the movie moves quick enough to make this stuff not really matter too much.
All in all, “Edge of Tomorrow” is an entertaining movie that kept my interest throughout. You should go see it.
I’d say this was the first decent Tom Cruise movie in years. I was actually quite surprised it did so poorly at the US Box office. with only about 75 mil stateside and another 220 World wide, I think it would be considered a box office failure.
It is interesting to see Tom still playing the action lead at 52. George Clooney at 53, has transitioned to the middle aged guy roles and could forseeably continue in that role for the next couple decades.
Tom’s role in this film, should have been played by an 30ish A lister (Bradley Cooper, Channing Tatum, Ryan Gosling) but Tom’s credit he pulled it off.
I mean you have to throw some disbelief in to get through some of the more implausible parts of the film, but overall I was quite entertained.