Trailer: CHARLIE'S ANGELS (2019)

The latest incarnation of Charlie's Angels is a new feature film directed by Elizabeth Banks and starring Kristin Stewart (American Ultra), Ella Balinska (Hunted), and, after seeing her in Guy Ritchie's Aladdin, my pick for Modesty Blaise should any studio ever wake up and realize the world is running out of heroes, Naomi Scott. And, after McG's two movies in the early 2000s (especially the second one) dabbled in espionage, this version seems to dive full into spy territory. And it looks pretty awesome! Charlie's Angels, which co-stars Banks (Catch Me If You Can), Patrick Stewart (Smiley's People), and Sam Claflin (Any Human Heart) opens November 15. Check out the trailer!

Tradecraft: Latest 24 Reboot Attempt to Focus on Young Jack Bauer

Ever since 24 went off the air following its eighth season in 2010, Fox execs have been looking for ways to bring it back. For years they tried to develop a feature film based on the real-time TV series (which I'd still like to see happen!), then eventually brought it back in 2014 as the summer limited series event, 24: Live Another Day. That 12-episode format proved to be a vast improvement on the previous 24-episode format, and after star Kiefer Sutherland announced that he was done playing Jack Bauer, they tried it again with the Bauer-less reboot/revival/sequel series 24: Legacy. That incarnation didn't quite live up to their ratings expectations, but they immediately started plotting another strategy. There were rumors of abandoning the counter-terrorism theme altogether, and rebooting the show as a legal drama that kept only the real-time format. (Indeed, when the series launched in 2001 and the producers weren't certain where it would go, one idea was to make it a real-time anthology show. To that end, Imagine Entertainment optioned The Da Vinci Code as possible source material for a second season of 24. Obviously, that book blew up and instead Imagine turned it into a big screen feature.) Apparently the legal thriller idea (written by longtime 24 producer Howard Gordon and Jeremy Doner, and said to focus on a female lawyer trying to save a client from death row as the clock ticks down) remains a possibility, but Deadline reports that Fox is simultaneously developing another new incarnation of 24 as well: a Jack Bauer prequel series.

Written by Gordon (Homeland, Legends) and original 24 creators Bob Cochran (La Femme Nikita) and Joel Surnow (The Equalizer), "it is said to be in the vein of the original and will trace the origin story of CTU agent Jack Bauer," the trade reports. The network presumably sees this as a way to revisit the iconic, fan-favorite character without depending on Sutherland's involvement. I'm a little torn on this idea myself. While the possibility of seeing Jack Bauer as a young agent in the waning days of the Cold War is certainly appealing (assuming that's the direction they go, rather than rebooting entirely with a younger Bauer active today. a la NBC's Taken prequel series), I just can't imagine any actor beside Sutherland taking on that role. It will all depend on casting. If they can find the right actor, I suppose it just might work.... And who am I kidding? I'll watch a real-time spy series set in the late Eighties no matter who it stars!

Movie Review: Mission: Impossible (1996)

NOTE: I had hoped to illustrate these movie reviews with lots of screen grabs, to make them match my TV season reviews, but my optical drive has failed me, so instead I'll make do with promotional material. Hopefully I'll have a chance to go back and add screen images in the future.

It took me about a decade to come around to accepting that Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible is actually quite a good spy movie. And twice that long to recognize that it’s even a pretty good Mission: Impossible movie. But when I first saw it in the theater my senior year of high school, I was just so incensed at the audacity of its major twist that I hated it for years. That twist (which I’m assuming is a spoiler to no one after 22 years) was making Jim Phelps, the hero of the TV show, the villain of the film. Granted, I had never even seen an episode of the classic 1966-73 series at that point, but I had seen and enjoyed episodes of the 1988-90 revival series, which also starred the great Peter Graves as team leader Jim Phelps. And I found the idea of making Phelps a traitor (even in the guise of a different actor) offensive and entirely unpalatable. And it still is, honestly, but as the subsequent film series has, over the years, both forged its own identity and simultaneously become more respectful of the TV series that spawned it (with direct references aplenty in 2011’s Ghost Protocol and 2015’s Rogue Nation), I’ve grown thicker skin as a fan. And the fact that in the film Phelps is played by the reptilian and generally charmless Jon Voight instead of the unflinchingly, endearingly earnest Graves definitely makes it easier to separate the two Phelpses. (I still wish, however, that one of the movies would include a cameo from a surviving star of the TV show reprising their role and explaining that somehow the Phelps who mentored Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt was not the same Phelps they knew and worked with. J.J. Abrams opened the door to such a possibility in 2009 when he suggested Graves himself might cameo in the next movie, but sadly the actor passed away before he had the chance to do that and rehabilitate his character.)

If one can manage to ignore the Phelps issue, however, Mission: Impossible is a highly entertaining movie, and a very rewarding one for spy fans. De Palma, who manages to be divisive even among his admirers (personally I find I tend to either love or hate his films), is, like Quentin Tarantino, a master of reappropriation. While he’s been accused of outright theft, I think that’s unfair. He takes scenes and situations he admires from classic films (and not little known ones, either; he blatantly borrows well-known imagery from the likes of Hitchcock, Antonioni, Kubrick, Coppola, and Eisenstein, among many others), and crafts them into something new, audacious, and often spectacular. He doesn’t just take imagery from these masters; he’s also studied their craft, and on a good day is right up there with Argento and Scorsese in his ability to construct epic cinematic setpieces worthy of Hitchcock. Mission: Impossible may owe its title, basic premise, and (most crucially) its theme music to its namesake television program, but the plot and central setpiece come from other spy and heist movies to which the director wishes to pay homage. And that makes it tremendous fun for fans of those genres. But despite the unforgiveable treatment of Jim Phelps, De Palma also pays homage to Bruce Gellar’s series.

The first act is pure Mission: Impossible, offering direct homage after direct homage to the show. The film begins with the tail end of an operation, and it’s clearly a classic Mission: Impossible con job incorporating several elements instantly familiar to fans of the show. Using a hotel room set of their own creation along with a life-like rubber mask and a staged death, the 1990s Impossible Missions Force (IMF) cons an enemy agent into revealing crucial intel. We then see them breaking down their set, an act that not only exposes the artifice of a good con, but also the artifice of cinema itself, recalling the final scene of Mario Bava’s classic horror movie Black Sabbath, in which the director keeps pulling back from a shot of Boris Karloff on horseback far enough to reveal that the actor is actually in a studio riding a fake horse, with crew members creating the illusion of movement through a forest. It may at first seem like a throwaway moment, but with this business, De Palma signals his intention to deconstruct the format of the series, as well as his commitment to cinematic sleight of hand. (A later scene reaffirms this with Cruise performing an actual magic trick for the other characters and the audience.)

Before that deconstruction comes, though, we’re treated to one more moment of pure, classic television Mission as the main titles unfold in a very familiar way to very familiar music. The TV series was somewhat unusual in cutting a new, unique opening credits montage for each episode, which teased actual scenes from the show you were about to watch with familiar graphics of a lit fuse burning down. De Palma crafts the same sort of opening for his film, showing bits and pieces of the movie to come set to composer Danny Elfman’s version of Lalo Schifrin’s iconic Mission: Impossible theme music.

Following the titles we’re treated to yet another familiar trope from the TV show, as Jim Phelps (Voight) is issued his orders via a recording hidden in an innocuous everyday item. (In this case it’s a personalized in-flight film selection, proffered by the complicit stewardess.) The voice is not Bob Johnson’s, but many of the phrases are: “Good morning, Jim…” “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…” and “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.” We know the drill! From there, however, De Palma and screenwriters David Koepp (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit), Steven Zaillian (Clear and Present Danger) and Robert Towne (who penned one of the greatest Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode "The Dove Affair" before going on to write such classics as Chinatown) serve up what the comfortably formulaic TV series never really gave us: an IMF mission gone horribly, deadly wrong.

The team (played in an act of calculated misdirection by recognizable actors who had been heavily played up in commercials and even “introduced” in a comic book promising fans their first look at the new IMF) is tasked with infiltrating a black tie embassy party in Prague, and securing a MacGuffin from a traitor named Golitsyn. (Yes, De Palma happily references real life spies as well as fictional ones.) It seems like a simple enough assignment for team members with familiar specialties, like electronics wiz Jack (Emilio Estevez), icy femme fatale Sarah (Kristin Scott Thomas, deliciously channeling Barbara Bain) and master of disguise “point man” Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), among others. And it goes smoothly enough at first, but then, shockingly, team members start dying in grisly ways. Jim calls abort, but Ethan desperately tries to salvage the mission, only to end up impotently watching as all of his colleagues are killed, one by one, before his eyes. This includes Jim, who appears to be shot at point blank range and then fall off a bridge, and Jim’s wife, the beautiful Claire (Emmanuel Beart), whose car explodes. De Palma has given fans exactly what they want, and then pulled the rug out from under them quite excitingly. And he just keeps on tugging that rug when, later on, Jim is revealed to be still alive, and the architect of his own team’s demise. (Claire has also survived.) It’s classic Mission: Impossible… thoroughly and brutally deconstructed.

This is the moment when De Palma starts referencing what must be his favorite spy movie, the Robert Redford classic 3 Days of the Condor (1975). Ethan makes it to a pay phone and scrambles a secure connection, reporting in to his Langley control Kittridge (the then-ubiquitous Henry Czerny, of Clear and Present Danger) that (in Redford’s exact words), “They’re all dead.” Just as Redford’s CIA superiors set up a meeting for him that erupts in violence, so does Kittridge for Ethan. Since Ethan appears to be the only survivor of the mission gone awry, Kittridge is convinced he is the mole they were looking for. And Ethan realizes the whole mission was actually a mole hunt. After a very effective escape sequence involving hundreds of gallons of water gushing out in a restaurant, Ethan finds himself on the run like Redford… or like so many of the heroes of De Palma’s favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock. From here on in, what we get is more or less a Hitchcockian man-on-the-run movie, as Ethan desperately struggles to prove his innocence and safeguard the MacGuffin (again, in true Hitchcockian form)—a list of active non-official cover agents, or “NOC list.”*

But even if the plot is pure Hitchcock (by way of Condor), De Palma’s most famous appropriation (and the defining scene of the film in most viewers’ minds) comes from Jules Dassin’s 1964 heist classic Topkapi (based on Eric Ambler’s novel The Light of Day, and also an influence on Geller) in the form of a tour de force heist of CIA headquarters involving Ethan memorably dangling from the ceiling into a pressure-sensitive, climate-controlled vault. To aid him in this impossible mission, Ethan ends up forming the basis of a new team by recruiting disavowed agents Luther Strickle (Ving Rhames, then riding high on his breakout Pulp Fiction performance) and Krieger (Jean Reno, fresh from his international star-making turns for Luc Besson in Nikita and Leon) to join himself and Claire. Luther is a computer hacker in the vein of the original series’ tech whiz Barney Collier (Greg Morris), and Krieger is an all-purpose tough guy who flies helicopters and likes knifing people. The role as scripted seems to call for more of a Peter Lupus-type strongman (Willy on the TV show), as Krieger’s main function on the CIA heist is to deploy the rope from which Ethan dangles and to haul him back up (indeed, Krieger was drawn as a hulking muscle man in the Marvel prequel comic… but then again artist Rob Liefeld didn’t know how to draw men any other way), but Reno was the flavor of the moment and more than capable of a convincingly evil turn when the script calls for it. While not part of the de facto team, Vanessa Redgrave (Blow-Up) also deserves mention for a scene-stealing turn as an arms dealer named Max with a fascination for paradoxes and a seeming affinity for Ethan… if not trust. And she’s aided by Necros from The Living Daylights, actor Andreas Wisniewski, who makes the most of a small part with a large presence.

Like his “Odessa Steps” sequence copped from Battleship Potemkin in The Untouchables (a very high quality adaptation of a classic TV show), De Palma’s vault heist is an excellent example of how he masterfully reappropriates iconic scenes and makes them work in new contexts. The scene shows off Cruise’s trademark acumen for physical stuntwork (the dangle might not be from the heights of the Burj Khalifa or an airborne transport plane, but the acrobatics involved in remaining stiff as a board, parallel to the floor are very impressive—and clearly required abs of steel!) along with De Palma’s ability to craft ever-building suspense. Taking a page from another classic Dassin heist, in Rififi (1955), the whole enterprise must unfold in silence because alarms will go off if Ethan makes any sound. So the sequence plays out purely visually and generally free of dialogue.

After cleverly establishing the elaborate rules of the room via pre-lap voiceover as Cruise briefs his compatriots in advance, De Palma is able to ratchet up the tension with a close-up of a bead of sweat rolling down Ethan’s glasses from his forehead (will it hit the floor, setting off the alarms???) or a shot of a rat approaching Krieger as he lowers Ethan from the air vents above (will he sneeze again, setting off the alarms, or lose his grip on Ethan???). The director moves skillfully from wide shots establishing Ethan’s place in the space of this carefully controlled environment to close-ups of things like that bead of sweat or digital countdowns to create a nail-biting sequence. And true to the tenets of reappropriation rather than rip-off, everything taken from Dassin plays out within the context, once again, of a classic Geller IMF set-up. While the movie as a whole relies too heavily on a single protagonist for fans of the very much team-based series, the individual setpieces tend to highlight classic Mission: Impossible teamwork. Every member plays a role in the events at CIA headquarters, from Claire drugging the coffee of the man who’s meant to occupy the vault they’re invading, to Luther in the van looking at screens with moving green dots (as in Alien, these dots also signify suspense within the context of the scene) to Krieger struggling with Ethan’s weight on the other end of his rope. And upon executing their plan, they all make their getaway dressed as firefighters (recalling the show's first season episode "Memory") to the familiar strains of Lalo Schifrin’s original series cue “The Plot,” as reimagined by Danny Elfman. While utilizing generous bits of Schifrin throughout, Elfman’s terrific score also reinforces De Palma’s Hitchcock influence by channeling Bernard Herrman in equal measure. Furthermore, the timeless score helps the movie feel less dated today than its contemporary, GoldenEye, whose Eric Serra score places it as instantly and precisely in 1995 as the computer technology on display.

The only setpiece where De Palma really falters is in the final one, a chase atop the TGV train that involves a helicopter chasing the high-speed train into a tunnel. This sequence was heavily showcased in the film’s original advertising campaign, but even despite the great score it does feel a bit dated today thanks to the very sort of CGI the series now does its best to avoid (in favor of practical stunts), but which was such an irresistible new tool at the time that everyone was using it… even though the technology was still far from perfected. But unlike many of the subsequent movies in the film franchise, the action setpiece was not the film’s real climax. The complicated spy plot of betrayals and reversals plays out dramatically on board the train (such a classic genre setting!) prior to the wind tunnel flips and fighting. And, once again, it involves sleight of hand, both physically and in the filmmaking. De Palma relishes his reveals, and deploys them in his unfailingly cinematic style, with Cruise envisioning different scenarios that play out visually for the audience and in his head while verbally describing something entirely different for the benefit of his on-screen audience—a trick Christopher McQuarrie would revisit decades later in the series.

In Mission: Impossible, Brian De Palma crafted a pretty terrific spy film that manages to simultaneously embody and subvert many classic tropes of the genre. He didn’t limit himself to the tropes of the titular TV series alone, however, and for better or worse delivered a film that owes more overall to the classic spy films of Alfred Hitchcock and heist films of Jules Dassin. While that may rankle some dyed-in-the-wool fans of Bruce Geller’s series (and while I’ll personally never be able to fully get over the appalling treatment of the series lead Jim Phelps), what spy fan can resist classically canted angles of Prague streets at night, treffs in London safehouses, live drops on European trains, or intrigue at black tie embassy affairs? Not this one!

Mission Report
TV Moments: The firefighter disguises from "Memory," the opening credits, lots of mask business
Dangling: The definitive Hunt Dangle—right out of Topkapi
Rogue Agents: Phelps and his associates
Rogue Ethan: Ethan goes on the run when Kittridge accuses him of being the mole
Fashion Alert: One attribute Voight's Phelps shares with Graves is a fashion sense that dates somewhat poorly. It mostly comes through in his hair, which seems an odd length and cut for a secret agent.

*NOC lists as MacGuffins are a personal pet peeve of mine. I can’t stand that trope. From Mission: Impossible to Skyfall to Atomic Blonde (all movies I thoroughly enjoy), the NOC list MacGuffin drives me nuts. Because once a list of active agents is out of the hands of the agency controlling them for even a minute, all those agents must be assumed blown. The damage is done in the mere theft or disappearance of such a list from safe hands. It’s toothpaste that can never be put back in the tube, and thus an ineffective MacGuffin. The only way the CIA can really protect its blown assets now is by doing whatever it can to warn them and exfiltrate them in a timely manner. And an object that becomes instantly useless when removed from its proper place fails as a MacGuffin. In Mission: Impossible, at least, the audience can be sure that the real NOC list is never compromised, because we’re always privy to its whereabouts and the ineffectiveness of any attempt to upload it elsewhere. But Kittridge and the CIA don’t have the benefit of our omniscient point of view.

Read my review of M:I-2 (2000) here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Seventh TV Season here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Sixth TV Season here.

Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Fifth TV Season here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Fourth TV Season here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Third TV Season here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Second TV Season here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The First TV Season here.

Full Trailer: CONDOR (2018)

Following up on March's teaser trailer, The Audience Network (yeah, that's a thing) has released the full trailer for their TV reimagining of 3 Days of the Condor entitled Condor. James Grady's novel Six Days of the Condor is one of the genre's all-time classics. Sydney Pollack then made it into one of the all-time classic spy films, Three Days of the Condor. Can lightning strike thrice? Can the same story now be successfully adapted once again, into a different medium? Well, it worked for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, so I suppose it's just possible... but obviously a long shot. Still, this full trailer looks pretty good, even if it seems clear that they've ditched the brilliant purpose of the CIA department Condor works for in both original versions.

As we first learned over a year ago, the series protagonist played by Max Irons (Crooked House) will be named Joe Turner, like Robert Redford's character in the film, and not Ronald Malcolm, as in the book. But the movie was close enough to its source material (despite a few key differences) that if the TV series is at all faithful to either, it should at least resemble both. Katherine Cunningham (The Playboy Club) takes on the Faye Dunaway role of Kathy Hale (again using the character's movie name rather than book name), and 20-year-old Israeli Arab actress Leem Lubany (Rock the Casbah) plays Gabrielle Joubert, a variation on the iconic role of the professional killer played so memorably by Max Von Sydow in the film. William Hurt, Mira Sorvino, Brendan Fraser, and Bob Balaban also star.

Condor premieres June 1 on The Audience network. My understanding is that the Audience Network was previously only available to DirecTV satellite subscribers, but now there is an app, DirecTV Now (similar to HBO Go, I think), that allows users to stream it on various set-top devices. I haven't done this myself, and can't vouch for it. But come June, I will have to figure out how to see it, and this seems the easiest way.

Tradecraft: Another Year, Another 24 Revival Rumor

It's a tradition that every year at the Fox upfronts (the event where networks unveil new series to advertisers), some executive teases the possibility of a 24 revival. Some years, that happens, leading to the excellent Kiefer Sutherland half-length reunion series, 24: Live Another Day, and the single season of "CTU: The Next Generation," 24: Legacy. But most years, nothing comes of such talk at all. (Like last year's rumors that the real-time format would be kept for another new incarnation, but the counterterrorism angle would be ditched altogether in favor of a female-driven legal drama.) This year was no exception to that rule. Deadline reports that, "during Fox’s upfront press call, chairman Dana Walden revealed that 24 executive producer Howard Gordon (Homeland, Legends) is working with 24 creators Joel Surnow and Bob Cochran on a possible new iteration of the real-time drama. The network and 24 producers 20th Century Fox, Imagine TV and Gordon had been discussing new ideas for a 24 series since the end of 24: Legacy last season, including a female-led legal thriller earlier this season. Walden would not elaborate what the new [premise] is, but noted that 'we are very excited about where the show would go.'" Make of that what you will. Most likely it means nothing, but it does remind you that it's very hard for a network to let a good idea go entirely. Sutherland has sworn that he'll never again play Jack Bauer... but spy fans know when to say "never again." (Sutherland made that definitive statement when he had another show, but Designated Survivor was just cancelled, so perhaps that will change things.) What I would love to see is for Bauer to return for another 12-episode season (which works so much better than the 24-episode format, which always sags in the middle) and team up with Corey Hawkins' next-gen CTU op from Legacy along with all the fan-favorite familiar faces (most essentially Chloe and Tony, the only original series cast member to show up on Legacy)... but each leaving their annoying family members behind. I just hope that Gordon, Fox, et. al. realize that 24's real contribution to the genre is not its real-time gimmick (which wore thin by Season 2, honestly), but the character of Jack Bauer, who belongs in the pantheon of the great spy heroes. Find a way to get Jack Bauer back in action, in whatever format Sutherland will agree to do!

Stonebridge and Scott STRIKE BACK Again Tonight on Cinemax

While they're not part of the main cast of Cinemax's rebooted counterterrorism action drama Strike Back, Deadline reports that Sullivan Stapleton and Philip Winshester will return as the beloved and iconic Stonebridge and Scott in tonight's episode of the revived series. Stapleton and Winchester starred in the series' second incarnation when Cinemax first came aboard, following an initial UK season on Sky which starred Richard Armitage and Andrew Lincoln. The Stapleton/Winchester version came to an end after four seasons, and the two stars moved on to other shows. Then the cable network decided to reboot the show again, re-launching it with a new cast that includes Warren Brown, Daniel MacPherson, Roxanne McKee, and Alin Sumarwata. Tonight, Stonebridge and Scott will presumably show the new generation how it's done... assuming their appearance proves more satisfying than Armitage's incredibly disappointing guest spot on the first Cinnemax incarnation!

The sixth season (confusingly the fifth on Cinemax following the one on Sky) wraps up on April 6, but per Deadline the rebooted Strike Back has already been renewed by the cable network for seventh season to air next year.

Tradecraft: Teen Spy Kim Possible Makes a Live Action Comeback

Well, here's some unexpected and very cool spy news! According to Deadline, teenage superspy Kim Possible is poised to make a comeback after an 11-year absence. (And a decade after an unsuccessful campaign for a fifth TV season.) But not quite as you might expect, should you be familiar with the hilarious, whipsmart cartoon spy parody Kim Possible that aired on the Disney Channel from 2002-2007. The new Kim Possible will be a live-action movie. The trade reports that series creators Mark McCorkle and Robert Schooley have penned the script along with Josh Cagan (The DUFF). Adam B. Stein and Zach Lipovsky (Mech X4) will direct. Casting is currently underway. Unfortunately, the new Kim Possible won't be a theatrical feature, but a Disney Channel Original Movie.

In the original series, Kim was an ordinary teenage girl dealing with ordinary teenage problems like crushes, dating, acne, social hierarchy, cheerleading, and homework... along with less average ones like supervillains, monkeys, ninjas, and monkey ninjas. Because in addition to being a regular full-time high school student, she was also a freelance superspy and crime fighter. (Her genes were in her favor, being the daughter of a rocket scientist and a brain surgeon.) With her best friend and sidekick, the clumsy but utterly loyal Ron Stoppable, his pet naked mole rat Rufus, and 10-year old Q-type gadget genius Wade, she took on the likes of the nefarious Dr. Drakken and his henchwoman Shego, Lord Monkey Fist, Señor Senior, Sr. and Señor Senior, Jr--not to mention her cheerleading rival, Mean Girl Bonnie Rockwaller. Part Buffy the Vampire Slayer and part James Bond, the series never condescended to its young audience and featured razor-sharp scripts sure to entertain any adult spy fan with humorous send-ups of 007, Mission: Impossible, S.H.I.E.L.D., Alias, and countless more spy standards. It was also quite impressive visually, with sets galore inspired by Ken Adam.

I'm a bit dubious about the live-action angle, and particularly worried about how Rufus, the naked mole rat, will be handled. (An anthropomorphized CG critter could ruin a live-action version.) I wish we were getting an animated feature or a rebooted cartoon series, but I'm excited to see Kim Possible returning in any form! The original remains one of my favorite spy shows of this century.

Shane Black and Fred Dekker Pen AVENGERS TV Reboot

Well, the big spy news of the day is undoubtedly the potentiality of a Shane Black/Fred Dekker-penned TV reboot of the greatest spy series of all time, The Avengers. Dekker dropped the news in an interview with print magazine The Dark Side, which then hit the Internet courtesy of Screen Rant. There are very few solid details available, but here is what Dekker told the magazine, verbatim:

It’s The Avengers, with John Steed and Emma Peel. We’re setting it in Britain in the 60’s, and our approach is The Ipcress File meets Doctor Who. At this moment, it’s my favorite thing we’re working on.

That's all we know so far from the horse's mouth. (And I have to say... I quite like Dekker's description!) The studio appears to be Warner Bros. Television. We don't know if there's a network involved, but it might be Amazon, for whom Black and Dekker previously penned the Western pilot Edge (which did not go to series), based on the 1970s Men's Adventure paperback series.

While my gut reaction is to instantly decry any attempt at an Avengers revival that doesn't originate in Great Britain, that impulse is checked by the creative talent involved. Shane Black is one of the greatest working screenwriters. He rose to fame on lucrative action spec script sales in the 1980s and '90s, most famously creating the Lethal Weapon franchise. His spy cred includes the 1996 amnesiac assassin thriller Long Kiss Goodnight with Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson. In this century, he's reinvented himself writing and directing smart, funny, pulpy neo-noir fare like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys. He's even made a Marvel movie--Iron Man Three.

Early in his career, Black wrote with frequent collaborator Fred Dekker, a partnership that most famously produced The Monster Squad (1987), which Dekker directed. Dekker went on to a less illustrious career than Black, but also earned his bona fides in the spy genre writing the 1991 Richard Greico teen spy comedy If Looks Could Kill and penning a glorious, but un-produced, live-action, 1960s-set Johnny Quest movie. The two partners reunited in recent years to pen the upcoming Predator reboot which Black is directing and the aforementioned Amazon pilot.

All of which is to say that The Avengers are in good hands. American hands, maybe, but hands I'm willing to trust for now. In all likelihood, this will go nowhere. But if it does, I'm willing to take the journey. It can only be an improvement on the 1998 feature film version of the series, which starred Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman, and Sean Connery.

Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, of course, starred as agents extraordinary John Steed and Emma Peel in the original TV series. Steed's other partners included Dr. David Keel (Ian Hendry), Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman), and Tara King (Linda Thorson). The Avengers torch has been kept burning lately in audio dramas from Big Finish (including excellent recreations of lost first season episodes) and comics from Boom! Studios (including a recent crossover with the 1960s TV incarnation of Batman).

First Trailer for the New, Rebooted STRIKE BACK on Cinemax

Cinemax has released the first full trailer for their upcoming, rebooted new season of Strike Back. This will mark the third distinct iteration of the action series, following the more cerebral, more espionage-oriented UK original (review here) starring Richard Armitage (Berlin Station) and Andrew Lincoln (The Walking Dead), and the sexier, more action-packed U.S. Cinemax continuation (review here) with Philip Winchester and Sullivan Stapleton. The latest incarnation features a larger, four-person anti-terrorist team comprised of Daniel MacPherson, Roxanne McKee, Warren Brown and Alin Sumarwata, but clearly retains the focus on extreme military action familiar to fans of the previous Cinemax series. The new episodes (which debuted this fall on SkyOne in the UK) premiere Stateside on February 2 at 10pm. Take a look!

Tradecraft: William Hurt Among Cast for CONDOR Remake Series

Variety reports that the cast has been set for The Audience Network's TV series version of 3 Days of the Condor. (All the trades refer to it as being "inspired by" Sydney Pollack's iconic 1975 film, rather than adapted from James Grady's 1974 novel Six Days of the Condor (itself a cornerstone of the spy genre). Indeed, the series protagonist played by Max Irons is named Joe Turner, like in the film, and not Ronald Malcolm, as in the book. But the movie was close enough to its source material (despite a few key differences) that if the TV series is at all faithful to either, it should at least resemble both.

Joining the previously cast Max Irons (Crooked House) as Turner are Hollywood heavyweights William Hurt (The Accidental Tourist), Bob Balaban (Best in Show), Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite), and Brenden Fraser (The Quiet American). Anyone who's seen A History of Violence knows that Hurt would be a perfect choice to play the assassin originally portrayed so memorably by Max Von Sydow, a role it's absolutely crucial for the series to nail in order to succeed. (And a role that's actually much more interesting in the movie than in the book, where he is more of a generic hitman.) But... that's not who he's playing, unfortunately. That part will actually be played by 20-year-old Israeli Arab actress Leem Lubany. Lubany was very good in Rock the Casbah (2015) and scored great reviews for the Oscar-nominated Omar (2013)... but her casting in this part raises some alarm bells for me. I've got no problem with the gender flip, but the age is a different matter. Casting a sexy young star in the role certainly changes the part from Von Sydow's scene stealing elder statesman of murder for hire. And based on Deadline's description of her character, Gabrielle Joubert ("an elite Special Forces operative whose formidable physical talents are matched by a deep emotional imbalance"), the role sounds closer to the generic killer of the book than the fascinating enigma of the film. Which is too bad.

Hurt, meanwhile, will play what sounds like a variation on John Houseman's character from the film. Per Variety: "Bob Partridge [is] a decorated CIA field operative who is rusty and a little soft after 20 years behind a desk. He’s tried to make changes for the better while at the CIA, including recruiting a team of the country’s top young minds to come up with out-of-the-box solutions to some of the United States’ most intractable problems."

Balaban is career CIA administrator Reuel Abbott, a name I don't recall from either the book or the movie. Sorvino, according to a different Deadline story, "will play Marty Frost, an investigator who has come out of retirement to take over the investigation after an attack at Joe’s office." It sounds like her role may be inspired by Cliff Robertson's in the film.

Fraser, per yet another Deadline story, "will play Nathan Fowler, an unstable yet efficient central cog in an unholy alliance between the private military company that employs him and the CIA. He’s motivated by his hatred of radical Islam, but also by his inner child’s desire to win the approval of his war-hero father. Nathan is redeemed by his fierce love for his daughter, but that relationship and his fanaticism are on a collision course."

Katherine Cunningham (The Playboy Club) takes on the Faye Dunaway role of Kathy Hale (again using the character's movie name rather than book name), reimagined for our times as "a corporate lawyer who’s lonely and dissatisfied with her buttoned-up life." Kristoffer Polaha (Castle) plays another character from the movie, Turner's friend and colleague Sam Barber.

The 24 Clock Starts Again Tonight After the Big Game

The long-awaited 24 revival, 24: Legacy, premieres tonight following the Super Bowl on Fox. Corey Hawkins (Straight Outta Compton, Kong: Skull Island) stars as former Army Ranger Eric Carter, who finds himself reluctantly following in Jack Bauer's CTU footsteps when followers of a terrorist leader killed by his team come after the team on their home turf. (Wasn't that more or less the exact same plot as the first season of 24 with Dennis Hopper? I guess they figure if it worked once...) Miranda Otto (Homeland, Lord of the Rings) co-stars as Rebecca Ingram, former director of CTU now on the campaign trail with her Presidential candidate husband John Donovan (Jimmy Smits). Carlos Bernard provides continuity with the original series as fan favorite Tony Almeida. Like the excellent previous revival, 24: Live Another Day, 24: Legacy will be just 12 episodes/hours of real-time action, as opposed to the 24 of the original series. This is a great thing, because at 24 episodes the show used to consistently lag in the middle of the season. This was not a problem with Live Another Day, and I don't expect it will be one with Legacy.

[Trailer removed]

Meet the New Bryan Mills in TAKEN TV Trailer

NBC has provided us with our first glimpse at the new, younger Bryan Mills in the forthcoming Taken TV show. The series, which EuropaCorp's Luc Besson has been developing since 2010, will serve as a prequel to the popular neo-Eurospy movies starring Liam Neeson, with Clive Standen (Vikings) stepping into Neeson's very particular skill set. Homeland's Alexander Cary serves as showrunner, and Jennifer Beals co-stars. Taken: The Series premieres on February 27.

Tradecraft: Abbie Cornish is Jack Ryan's Latest Wife

Deadline reports that Australian actress Abbie Cornish (Bright Star) will be the fifth actress (counting a non-speaking walk-on by Gates McFadden in The Hunt for Red October) to play Jack Ryan's wife, Cathy Ryan. Although at this stage in their relationship, she will still be Cathy Muller—as she was in The Sum of All Fears (as played by Bridget Moynahan) and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Keira Knightley), a reminder of how many times this series has been rebooted. (The trade actually spells her name "Mueller." I'm not sure if this is a typo or a departure.) While in the Tom Clancy books Ryan's wife was a surgeon, according to the trade she will be slightly reimagined in the new Amazon TV series Jack Ryan as "a doctor specializing in infectious diseases." The article goes on to describe the character as "intelligent, competitive, a rising star in the medical world and Jack’s love interest." To date, Cathy Ryan was probably most memorably played by Anne Archer in the two Harrison Ford Ryan movies in the Nineties.

As previously reported, the 10-episode straight-to-series Amazon drama stars John Krasinski as the titular hero. It hails from the Lost duo of co-showrunner Carlton Cuse (The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.) and writer (and, like Ryan, former Marine) Graham Roland. Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes, Skydance Media and Paramount TV co-produce. The first season will be an original storyline about Ryan's early days at CIA, though from the trade's description it sounds as if it will incorporate elements of Clancy's Patriot Games: "Jack Ryan is a reinvention with a modern sensibility of the famed and lauded Tom Clancy hero. It centers on Jack Ryan (Krasinski), an up-and-coming CIA analyst thrust into a dangerous field assignment for the first time. The series follows Ryan as he uncovers a pattern in terrorist communication that launches him into the center of a dangerous gambit with a new breed of terrorism that threatens destruction on a global scale." Will his report on this pattern in terrorist communication be entitled "Agents and Agency?" That would be a nice Easter Egg for Clacy fans.

New xXx Trailer and Posters

Here's the second trailer for xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, which opens in January. I'll let Vin summarize the revival of 2002's 2002-iest spy franchise: "The good... the extreme... and the completely insane! Now that's a team I can work with!" Because those are the qualities the NSA looks for! (Do you think xXx will still work for the NSA? 2002 was the year Hollywood conspired to make audiences believe that secret agency employed shitkickers like Vin Diesel, Halle Berry and Michael Madsen, but will anyone believe that in today's post-Snowden world where most people now actually know what the NSA is and expect its employees to be a little more pasty-faced and slightly less X Games-y?)



Back in 2002, the ridiculousness of the premise annoyed me. Today, I have to admit, I can't help smiling ear to ear at that very ridiculousness, and especially at the sheer earnestness of said ridiculousness! Also at the fact that there is now a movie poster in the world depicting Toni Collette (Muriel's Wedding, Unlocked) as a badass superspy. There are twelve of these character posters in total, most featuring various muscly bearded men in fedoras with names that probably mean something to a generation much cooler (and presumably more extreme) than my own. You can see them all at Imp Awards. Surprisingly there isn't one for Samuel L. Jackson, who played a key role in both of the original xXx movies. It does look from the trailer like he might be moving on to an emeritus role and passing the torch to Collette as the extreme agent's primary handler. Perhaps now that Jackson is the real Nick Fury, he no longer feels compelled to play Fake Nick Furies? Sigh. I miss the days of Fake Nick Furies. Charlton Heston was the best one, of course, but Angelina Jolie actually made a pretty good one in Sky Captain.... Forgive me; I've gotten extremely off topic. Get it?!

New 24: Legacy Trailer; Carlos Bernard Returns as Tony Almeida

Fox has released a new trailer for the upcoming spinoff/sequel 24: Legacy. I'm kind of surprised how much it looks to be retreading the plot of 24's first season (or was it the second? the one with Dennis Hopper), but it still looks great, and I can't wait! As 24: Live Another Day proved, twelve episodes suits this format so much better than twenty-four. While Jack Bauer won't be around for this installment, Deadline reported earlier this month that another beloved 24 alumnus would be back. Carlos Bernard will reprise his role as former CTU badass and sometime bad guy Tony Almeida. You can be forgiven if you were under the impression that Tony was either bad, dead or in jail, because he's been all of those things at the end of various seasons. But there was a special feature on the DVDs of 24: Live Another Day in which Tony is seen escaping from prison. He's not in this trailer, though, so no doubt his reappearance will come at a surprising moment during the new season.

[Video removed]

Tradecraft: Nineties Surveillance Movies Become Modern TV Shows

Two fun and fairly beloved Nineties caper movies about surveillance experts are being rebooted as rival TV series. Deadline reports that NBC is developing a hacker drama inspired, no doubt, by the timely post-Wikileaks success of USA's Mr. Robot, but ostensibly based on Phil Alden Robinson's classic 1992 movie Sneakers. The film starred Robert Redford as master hacker Martin Bishop (though I can't recall if it actually used the word "hacker"), who leads a Mission: Impossible-style team of surveillance experts as they conduct fake heists to test companies' security. They become embroiled in spyjinks when they're blackmailed into recovering that favorite espionage MacGuffin, a "black box" for the NSA. Bishop's arch enemy turns out to have a personal connection to his past, a set-up that lends itself well to a network series. The movie's producers Walter Parkes (who also co-wrote it) and Laurie MacDonald will executive produce the series along with Mentalist executive producer Tom Szentgyorgyi.

Meanwhile, according to Variety, ABC is taking a crack at Tony Scott's 1998 action movie Enemy of the State. The film's producer Jerry Bruckheimer is on board to produce the show, which will be written by Morgan Foehl, who mined similar territory in the 2015 movie Blackhat. The trade reports that the series is conceived not as a remake, but a sequel to the film. "Based off the movie, the show is set two decades after the original film. When an elusive NSA spy is charged with leaking classified intelligence, an idealistic female attorney must partner with a hawkish FBI agent to stop a global conspiracy that threatens to expose dark secrets and personal mysteries connecting all three of their lives." Other than a thematic similarity, it's difficult to see from that description how exactly the series relates to the movie, which starred Will Smith as a labor lawyer who becomes embroiled in a spy conspiracy involving the NSA, an assassination, and a reclusive surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman. Just as the fun of the Bruckheimer-produced The Rock was seeing Sean Connery unofficially reprising his James Bond role, the main attraction in Enemy of the State was seeing Hackman unofficially reprise his role from Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic The Conversation.

In addition to capitalizing on the success of Mr. Robot, shows about hacking and domestic surveillance are also obviously quite topical in the current climate. It will be interesting to see if one or both of these reboots ends up making it to series!

Tradecraft: Netflix Orders Spy Kids TV Show

The Spy Kids are returning, this time on TV. Variety reports that Netflix will debut Spy Kids: Mission Critical, a series spinoff of the Robert Rogriguez theatrical kids' films, in 2018. According to the trade, "the show follows brother-and-sister team Juni and Carmen Cortez as they attend Spy Kids Academy, a top-secret spy school for kid agents. They must train and lead a team of fellow Spy Kids cadets against the forces of S.W.A.M.P. (Sinister Wrongdoers Against Mankind’s Preservation) and their leader, Golden Brain." It's unclear from this article whether this is an animated or live-action kids' show, but the head writer is FM DeMarco, who previously worked on Netflix's animated show Dragons: Race to the Edge, so that might be a clue. Bob Weinstein and The Weinstein Company will produce. No mention is made of any involvement from Rodriguez, who has directed all four installments of the film series, most recently the quasi-reboot Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 2011. In that film, Juni and Carmen (the child heroes of the original trilogy) were young adults who had passed the torch on to a new generation of Sky Kids.

Tradecraft: Now There's a MacGyver Movie in the Works, Too

CBS just this week handed out a pilot order to Furious 7 director James Wan's TV reboot of the 1980s network staple MacGyver first announced last fall. And now, hot on the heels of that announcement, comes news from Deadline that Wan's Furious 7 producer Neal Moritz will team with the creator of the original series, Lee David Zlotoff, for a MacGyver movie at Lionsgate. The two projects are unrelated, though interestingly Wan's TV project began its life as a Young MacGyver feature set in the protagonist's college days. (A feature has been in the works in various iterations at various studios for years if not decades.) The TV show, which is produced by Henry Winkler, who executive produced the 1985-92 ABC series starring Richard Dean Anderson, will follow a twenty-something MacGyver through his early years with the clandestine spy agency DSX (Department of External Services). Little is known about the newly announced film version, including whether the hero will be an active government agent with DSX, a private contractor with The Phoenix Foundation, or something else.

So, to recap, yes, there are now two separate remakes of the Eighties series about the guy who always saved the world with a pipe cleaner and shaving cream in the works, if you can believe it, each one coincidentally involving a different veteran of the Fast and Furious franchise teamed with a member of the production team behind the original series.

Still no word on a follow-up to the highly amusing 2010 parody movie MacGruber (spun off from a long-running Saturday Night Live sketch spoofing the original MacGyver), but star Will Forte (The Last Man On Earth) has said many times that it remains a priority for him.

Bryan Fuller Wants to Reboot The Avengers on TV with Eddie Izzard as Steed

Bryan Fuller, the visionary showrunner behind Hannibal, Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls, would like to reboot The Avengers (the real Avengers, not the superhero team) on television. He told TVLine (via Dark Horizons), "I would love to reboot The Avengers with Eddie Izzard as John Steed. That would be wonderful." That's the full extent of his quote, given in a survey that asked successful showrunners what series they'd most like to reboot. So, to be clear, this is Fuller picking a dream job, not a pilot sale or even a pitch. But it's certainly a provocative notion!

The Avengers is my favorite TV show of all time. It has already been rebooted once, in the Seventies, by Brian Clemens as The New Avengers, and turned into a less than satisfying feature film in the late Nineties. I am not a knee-jerk reactionary against remakes and reboots of things that I love. After the failure of the 1998 movie (at least partly due to studio tinkering; I would certainly love to see a director's cut to judge the film properly), the show could definitely use some rehabilitation in the public's eyes. And I would love to see it get enough exposure that it could reclaim its own name, which has been appropriated by Marvel. Of course I would only want to see a reboot in truly capable hands... but Bryan Fuller's might be the perfect hands. He is both a storyteller and a stylist, a crucial combination for The Avengers. And he's got a decidedly offbeat point of view, which also helps. The sort of quirkiness he's demonstrated in cult favorites like Pushing Daisies or his one prior foray into spydom (sort of), the supremely, deliciously weird Amazing Screw-On Head (a bizarre animated steampunk pilot based on Mike Mignola's exquisitely weird comic book of the same name - full review here) makes him a good fit for the material. I also like that he starts in the right place, by choosing a Steed. Many fairweather fans of the show might pick a new Emma Peel first (and such casting, whichever female partner they went with, would of course be crucial), but Fuller seems to recognize that no matter which partner he was paired with, it was always Patrick Macnee as Steed who held the show together. That's the right starting point, and from there you should look for an actress with chemistry with your Steed - in this case Eddie Izzard. Which I think is another excellent choice. Izzard is on record as being a fan of the series, but also may have a black mark against him in many fans' eyes for his participation in the '98 movie, in which he played a (mostly) mute henchman for Sean Connery's diabolical mastermind. But anyone who's ever seen his standup act knows that Izzard oozes charisma (and, of course, he's got style - and a predilection for kinky boots!), and in my opinion he might just be the one man who could revive John Steed on television. Fuller and Izzard have previously worked together on two other reboots, the Munsters-derived Mockingbird Lane, and Hannibal. Yes, after careful consideration, I quite love the idea of a Bryan Fuller/Eddie Izzard Avengers reboot! Come on, Esteemed Representatives of Television, make it happen!

Fuller wasn't the only producer polled to pick The Avengers. Gabrielle Stanton, executive producer on The Flash, showed similar good taste. "I would love to reboot Space: 1999 or The Avengers – not the bad movie version, the really cool TV version. Both those things would be really great science-fiction genre properties to bring back."

Tradecraft: James Wan is MacGyver Reviver

According to Deadline, Furious 7 director James Wan is teaming with R. Scott Gemmill (NCIS: LA) and original series executive producer Henry Winkler on a television reboot of MacGyver for CBS. The new series will be a prequel of sorts (though, of course, set today) focusing on a twenty-something Angus MacGyver. It's unknown if it will be set prior to his days with intelligence agency DSX or The Phoenix Foundation, but it will show how he acquired his knack for making bombs out of Bic pens and binder clips. (Do we really want to see him acquiring that knowledge? The fun of MacGyver was that he just knew how!) The new series grows out of Wan's previous attempts to get a feature off the ground focusing on MacGyver's college years. It would be nice if a MacGyver revival led to a second MacGruber movie!