Gnashing

I’m mumbling and grumbling about the movies. Recently I’ve been buying tickets with a gulp of dread, sharply aware I might not like the film despite year-end critics’ raves. I haven’t been having a good time, see.

I’m quick to call the middlebrow mediocrity “The Descendants” rashly overrated. “A Dangerous Method” — a stifling chamber drama that’s as stiff as a sepia photograph. “My Week with Marilyn” — a mushy trifle. Lars Von Trier’s weirdly hailed “Melancholia” (is it really his “best” film??) — inexcusably misshapen (the movie flatly doesn’t work). An otherwise conventional children’s bore that’s much too long, “Hugo” only came to life during scenes animating the work of silent movie wizard Georges Melies.

(What have I liked? “Pina,” Wim Wenders’ exquisitely rendered look at the dance of Pina Bausch, was nourishing art, and the silent bauble “The Artist,” cutesy as it can be, didn’t offend. The Iranian domestic drama “A Separation” was riveting. Some older titles: “Midnight in Paris,” “Ides of March,” “Moneyball,” “Bridesmaids.”)

All this disappointment serves as a fat yellow caution sign. Now I’m wary of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Shame,” to name a few.

I got suckered the other day. After a deluge of critical plaudits, I saw Spielberg’s Oscar-baiting “War Horse,” and damn I want my money back. Like most of the movies described above, it’s not a terrible work, it’s just a superfluous one. I can’t fault it for feeling like it’s based on a children’s book, since it is, but Spielberg does little with the material except stage it often beautifully. It’s a rote work, freeze-dried and hung up like a pretty picture.

There’s ghastly warfare and some horsies (and men) die, but it’s not all that bad. Amid it all is cornpone humor and cornpone valor and mighty pronouncements and emotions fluttering on gusts of John Williams’ thrusting score. Old-fashioned and overly long, it would try a kid’s patience. I have to quote David Denby, when he calls “War Horse” “bizarrely unimaginative.” He also, wisely, makes fun of the movie’s squawking impish goose, a barnyard critter that seemed to have walked off the set of “Babe” and lost his way, waddling onto the sun-drenched grounds of the squarest movie of the year.

Why are critics, the bulk of our top-tier movie scribes, giving such an enthusiastic pass to “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol”? I normally wouldn’t care, but I just spent more than two hours (and $13) watching this convulsion of crushing tedium, much of that time engineering an early exit based on the next redundant action sequence.

I’m a mild fan of the series — I recall loving the second chapter, directed by John Woo (I was alone with that opinion, too) — so this isn’t an I-don’t-get-it, wrinkly-nosed huff at a cynical popcorn action blockbuster. This is a genuine say-what? to critical quotes like this from Roger Ebert, who granted the movie 3.5 stars: The movie “is a terrific thriller with action sequences that function as a kind of action poetry.” That’s the least of it. Other critics have authored small rhapsodies that swoon and twinkle. The movie earned a spot in the 90 percentile at Rotten Tomatoes.

The writers are wise enough to avoid “masterpiece” terrain, knowing what they’re dealing with — a whiplash-kinetic, mega-budget Tom Cruise vanity vehicle directed by Pixar whiz Brad Bird. That said, that’s pretty strong pedigree for an action picture. Cruise doesn’t fool around with work he’s produced, and Bird has shown swoops of genius with Pixar flicks like “The Incredibles” (this is his first live-action film).

I’m one of the few people who actually likes Cruise’s on-screen persona, no matter what it is. He’s a classic silver screen specimen, a humanoid formulated to be a movie star and all that that definition entails (including a spectacularly sui generis personal life). I even liked him in “Vanilla Sky.”

So it’s not a Cruise bias that had me bored, yawningly so, during “MIGP.” The whole enterprise felt routine, been there, done that. I won’t (can’t really) limn the convoluted plot, but the action set pieces, the reason we’re there, rarely scraped novel, save for the now-well-known bit with Cruise scaling the tallest building in the world, in Dubai. Even that fell flat. You knew he wasn’t going to fall, and anyway didn’t he scale some monstrous skyscraper in the last installment? Cruise is joined by Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Simon Pegg to make a crack spy team. The physical chemistry is fine, but the writing — all those wisecracks and piquant badinage — could have used a serious polish.

There’s abundant tension in the movie — your breath will cease when, say, Cruise plummets a car head-first down several stories (he lives, unscratched, indeed perfect, in this most implausible of actioneers) — but it only works on a watery visceral level. I never cared about the characters, and besides I knew our heroes at worst would take a flesh wound from a bullet. I didn’t demand much from this “Mission: Impossible.” I  just hoped it would have delivered something the critics promised: a teeny thing called fun.