Edge of Tomorrow

Director: Doug Liman
Starring: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton
Time Out rating:

It’s not summer until you’ve eaten your first Magnum or Tom Cruise has saved the planet. At 51 (but looking like a boy of 35), Cruise is battling a spidery race of aliens called Mimics in Doug Liman’s action sci-fi blockbuster. The film’s ‘Groundhog Day’-meets-‘Independence Day’ plot is actually pretty genius. Cruise is Bill Cage, the army’s top PR guy – a total coward with a salesman’s smile. After pissing off the wrong general, Cage finds himself demoted and on the frontline, where he’s killed in two minutes flat. But (and here is where it gets Groundhoggy) he wakes up in a loop, forced to fight the same battle over and over again. Each day, it takes a little bit longer to die, and Cage teams up with the army’s badass-iest fighter, Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), aka ‘Full Metal Bitch’.

Doug Liman directed ‘The Bourne Identity’ and goes for gun-metal realism here too, possibly at the expense of the special effects, which aren’t much to write home about. As for Cruise, he’s on to a winner for approximately half the film. In coward mode it almost looks like he’s taking the mick out of Tom Cruise, action hero. He sweats and he squeaks, looking frankly petrified. Then he starts with the search-for-the-hero-inside-yourself routine and goes on to autopilot like he’s barely got a thought in his head.

Edge of Tomorrow opens at select cinemas nationwide on June 28