I saw this dog’s breakfast of a movie last night. Hated it.
- It’s got a macguffin, a cruciform key that somehow will give the person who uses it control of an AI that can crack all of the intelligence agencies in the world. It does nothing in this movie. It’s just a small metal object that everyone has to chase, endlessly.
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It has the most boring villain ever. A handsome man named Gabriel who, apparently at the behest of the AI, appears to stand handsomely in the middle of the action, doing pretty much nothing, except it turns out he’s a great knife-fighter in one scene.
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There are car chases. They’re pointless exercises in chasing — they’re only motivated by the fact that someone has the macguffin, and someone else wants it. You want car chases? Go watch Baby Driver, which does them well and integrates them into the story.
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There is a fight scene on top of a runaway train. Of course there is.
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Ving Rhames is the stereotypical movie hacker. He doesn’t do anything but make portentous statements and announce that he’s going to hack a computer. He wiggles his fingers magically. Don’t worry, no one involved in writing this movie understands computers or hacking or AI.
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Oh my god, the writing. It’s terrible. For instance, there’s a scene where a room full of intelligence bureaucrats who are reciting a summary of the problem. The thing is, it’s a series of sentences, and the individuals go around the room with each one saying one sentence in turn. People don’t talk that way. There are multiple scenes where the dialog is clumsy and unrealistic.
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There is a stupid scene where Simon Pegg is sent on a side-quest to neutralize a tiny nuclear bomb. It turns out to be a puzzle game, with riddles. It’s like something you’d find in a video game. And then it turns out to be a fake bomb. The whole scene could have been cut without affecting the movie at all, except that they needed to give Pegg something to do.
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The masks. I hate the fucking stupid masks, and the obligatory scene where a character pulls off a thick rubbery latex mask to reveal that he was some other character. Masks can’t do that, they’ll fool no one, but it’s a thing in these movies.
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Tom Cruise, running. Running, running, running. He never arrives at a fight out of breath, though.
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There are stunts done for the sake of being stunts. The stupid mask machine burnt out, so Tom Cruise can’t just disguise himself and walk onto a train, he instead chooses to jump off a mountain in a motorcycle and parachute into the moving train. Yeah, much more subtle and sneaky. No one will notice.
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It is two hours and forty three minutes long, and it’s just part one.
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In the next movie, they already have the macguffin part one, so macguffin part two will be a sunken submarine beneath the arctic ice cap, where the AI exists. I don’t care.
The best thing about Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 1 is that it cured me of any desire to see Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 2. Too late. It’s going to make a derailed train car falling off a cliff full of money.
How many Mission Impossible movies are there now? Ahh, thank you Google, seven. Still got a way to go to catch up to the Fast and Furious series. They’re apparently up to eleven. NGL, I hate big dumb action movies. It’s what they’ve done to so many of my beloved franchises. Alien, Terminator, Star Wars, even Star Trek. They’re all BDAMs now. All action and explosions with no chill. How about compelling characters who go through a journey and are changed by it? There are children’s books that have more character development than the F&F enterprise.
Tom Cruise is made of plastic. He will never change.
…a cruciform key that somehow will give the person who uses it control of an AI that can crack all of the intelligence agencies in the world. It does nothing in this movie. It’s just a small metal object that everyone has to chase, endlessly.
Which they seem to have stolen from “God’s Eye” in the later “Fast & Furious” movies.
…Masks can’t do that, they’ll fool no one, but it’s a thing in these movies.
They were also a thing in the original “Mission: Impossible” TV series.
The Jack Reacher films were OK.
I hate Tom Cruise, will never intentionally watch a movie his stars in.
stuffin @5: Same. I haven’t watched a Tom Cruise movie in over twenty years and have no intention of starting now.
One thing I hate about these sort of movies is when they have the goober that they’re trying to keep out of the bad guy’s hands, all they do is run around everywhere. Nobody ever stops to think “hey, what’s the melting point of this little packet of plastic and wires?”
Also, I’ve decided to boycott all movies and TV until the writers and screen actors strikes have resolved.
Though this is not exactly a major stance since I barely watched movies or TV in the first place.
I can’t think of a Tom Cruise movie I watched end to end. That includes the original Top Gun, or any of the earlier MI’s. Never even tempted that I recall. When I learned he’s a dumb-as-a-rock Scientologist, he went to my “I’ll Gouge My Eyes Out First” list, along with the likes of M. Night Shyamalan (I made the mistake of watching Signs because my daughter wanted to see it). Heck, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom isn’t bad enough to make that list.
What would having the key to all the intelligence agencies in the world allow you to do? You kind of need a superior military to exploit the knowledge, or you just get crushed. Or, the knowledge wasn’t that powerful and valuable to begin with.
The culture of secrecy presupposes their secrets are vastly more important than they are. That’d make for a great big reveal: nobody cares.
You don’t seem to have a lot of good choices for movies for a college. Do they no longer have things like a film club on campus? I’ll admit I’m a long time from having anything to do with a college, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find that to be true.
Marcus Ranum @ 9
I suppose you could leak damaging information to make people distrust institutions they should never have trusted in the first place…
Ronald Couch @ 10
A great idea! Film clubs can give a second life to good films that were ovetshadowed and were forgotten. Blade Runner was overshadowed by other films the summer it was released. And a ton of good films never had the PR budget to reach a wide audience.
Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 2: Everyone finally collects their macguffins, puts everything together and learns to their horror, wzrd1 picked the lock that absolutely required macguffin 1, asked the AI a few questions and quietly disconnected the AI’s cooling unit, causing a fatal overheat condition on “the mainframe”.
Running time: barely finished my cup of coffee. The dregs of which disabled the cooling unit.
I considered enumerating things that Hollywood gets wrong, starting with everything’s a fucking mainframe, not that most people would know a mainframe from a Commodore 64, but found it simpler to enumerate things Hollywood gets right: Nothing.
Nukes weigh a few pounds, everything’s a firewall, gravity is optional, guns only run out of ammunition when the lousy plot needs them to, everything explodes – especially fender bender involved cars, the good guy always wins and gets the girl and violence resolves all problems.
Enterprise was an excellent example of Hollywood’s best. Have an established canon, got falling ratings due to nebulous skills in writing? Have a war. Make sure to have plenty of fist fights, because wars are full of them! Why, the Battle of the Bulge really was just a drunken donnybrook, ignore the artillery, it’s only for special effects.
It’s summer. No film club. However, there is a campus-only streaming service that provides a wider range of movies.
@8. AstroLad : “I can’t think of a Tom Cruise movie I watched end to end.”
His version remake movie of War of the Worlds was pretty good and had its very atmospheric moments I thought – at least the first half to two thirds of it anyhow. Of course, that had the advantage of following the original 1898 HG Wells story with a few odd twists, e.g., alien pods going down in the lightning.. Also I’m admittedly biased since I do love that classic story.
Apparently the latex mask disguise trope isn’t as phony as we all thought.
https://globalnews.ca/news/9224267/cia-master-of-disguise-helps-disfigured-people/
I just saw the new Indiana Jones movie, so I guess I’ll skip this one…
But what a weird coincidence! It also had a macguffin, a device that somehow lets you detect rifts in the space-time continuum. There’s a fight for the macguffin on top of a moving train, and later on there’s a car chase for the macguffin. What are the odds?
(This one follows the tradition started in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, where the villain’s plan is doomed to failure from the start, and Indy doesn’t actually do anything useful.) (He does point out that the plan is doomed to fail because Archimedes wouldn’t have known about continental drift.)
Based on the trailer, which seems to be everywhere, it looks like one pointless/mindless stunt after another. You could make a good movie with just the advertising budget for this horror show. I have not watched a Tom Cruise in many, many years, but I thought he was pretty good in “Born on the 4th of July”.
Gosh. It surprises me that you have such a negative opinion of the film given the amount of gushing praise I see in the media.
I thought payola was illegal.
I remember that I went to the cinema to see Mission Impossible 2 when I was working at Sun Valley in 2000. I do not remember anything about it apart from that it was the only movie ever that I walked out of the cinema less than halfway through because it was unbearably silly. I never felt even the slightest inclination to watch anything from the franchise since then, ever.
I stopped watching after the first movie made Mr. Phelps the bad guy.
I certainly hope the Oppenheimer movie will be good and perform well at the box office so Hollywood will be encouraged to make better movies.
Well, Oppenheimer likely won’t have fights on top of a train or car chases, but plenty of opportunities for explosions. The entirety of the design of the implosion system basically turned into pure trial and error, right until they brought in a British explosives expert.
Maybe they’ll fit in a rubber Groucho nose in there somewhere.
Tom Cruise is famous for his running. A quick search turns up gems like these:
Top 10 Tom Cruise Running Scenes Ranked by Speed
The More Tom Cruise Runs, The Better His Movies Are: A Tomatometer Deep Dive
Tom Cruise Running Form Analysis
@5,6:
I would like to recommend Tropic Thunder (2008). Unlike his other movies, in this one Cruise actually plays a character other than Tom Cruise. I.e. it may be his best acting performance, as opposed to his biggest star turn.
TT also has some genuinely funny and quotable bits, with the best lines coming from Robert Downey Jr.
I quite enjoyed Legend, from 1985. I thought Tim Curry was much more memorable that Cruise.
I don’t like Tom Cruise has an actor. In so many of his movies he comes across has an annoying sacharine “cute” chipmunk and if he not that he is often Tweety Pie complaining about the “Big bad Puddy Tat”.
In Interview with a Vampire his Lesat is not the least bit frightening but a simple whining chipmunk and in Top Gun he is Tweety Pie getting by on privilige and being “cute”.
Now Tom Cruise can act, just see Rainman, but in film after film he is a Chipmunk or Tweety Pie.
One film with Tom Cruise in super Chipmunk, Tweety Pie mode that I can recomend is Edge of Tomorrow. Why? Well because the character he plays gets killed over and over again and it feels so right.
StevoR @ # 15: … [Cruise’]s version remake movie of War of the Worlds was pretty good …
Huh?!? The one where the Martians blow up the town’s water main early in the story and TC runs around for a while, then goes home and … washes his face in the bathroom sink?!? (In fairness, the blame for that continuity failure belongs to Steven Spielberg, though Cruise could have made him fix it…) The people fighting over a working car outside the EMP zone, the kid who disappears and miraculously reappears at the end – I could go on, but suffice it to say after WotW and the botch SS made of Minority Report, I promised myself to boycott anything and everything Cruise and Spielberg did together, and still feel better for it.
Reginald Selkirk @ # 22: Tom Cruise is famous for his running.
Quick – sign him up for The Josh Hawley Story!
pacal @ 26, yeah, Edge of Tomorrow did have that singular saving grace of killing him repeatedly. One of the few times that Hollywood and mom agreed, you can’t get through your entire life just on your looks.
My wife and I loved that movie and cheered for the monsters.
Possibly childish of me, but “A surfeit of colons” brings to mind a more metaphorical meaning.
If you want a car chase watch Bullitt.
@ ^ John Morales : Yeah, the large intestine sense of that word.
@27. Pierce R. Butler :
The water supply got taken out? When the not-Martian “martian” emerges from underground? I hadn’t realised it had been or noticed that. Different plumbing “circuit” or upstream of it on their block maybe? He also has that (hot?) shower immediately after getting home and before running.
Not sure why the first one bothers you given there’s one car that works and a heap of people wanting it. I don’t know if you’d get that in reality but its certainly plausible given how selfish we see some people are. Where they manage to get fuel from given petrol stations probly wouldn’t work after the EMP is a whole other question. I presume the kid you refer to there is Cruise’s (movie) son – Robbie – who attempts to join the military attack on the aliens which is absolutely destroyed but then disappears when they get separated. Its not shown but I presume that Robbie like his father and sister managed to – extremely luckily but sorta plausibly – either managed to find shelter or evade the aliens as they focused on destroying the military there with Robbie seeing first hand how futile using military forces against the aliens is and then, like them, trying to make his way to the family place in Boston. Yes, Robbie got very lucky in not being vaporised but its not impossible or totally implausible that he, like they surivived and logical that having escaped he’d head to same family place they were heading to already beforehand. Really not sure what you’re problem is there – other than, yes, Robbie was very likely to be (tho’ not guaranteed nor seen to be) killed. (As were TC & DF.)
Fair enough. Not my choice because it depends on the movie for me but to each their own here. Crusie is certainly not an actor or person I’m a fan of and can understand the dislike for him. Also yeah, the 2005 Crusie WotW version had its flaws and wasn’t the best telling of that story* although as noted I liked at least the first half to two-thirds of that movie and it had its powerfully memorable moments as well as its flaws.
.* My personal fave being Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds FWIW. Had that on tape cassette & wore it out as a kid.
PS. Just noticed “outside the EMP zone.” which, well, was it? They had some electrical things working and others apparently not. So was it actually outside the EMP zone or were they just able to get power back there for some things? (Generators, hardened / separate / back-up systems?) That wasn’t clear – at least to me. I do tend to get emotionally caught up in movies & stories~wise and maybe I missed that but when there’s a crowd of refugees and no other cars, it sort of makes sense they were still inside the EMP zone at that point.
Why the Boston family being in a city that presumably would also be a major early target for the aliens were so much better off than the Brooklyn area etc.. given the apparent every (most?) major cities were being attacked early is another question but I guess aliens prioritise in alien mysterious ways?
StevoR @A # 32: Different plumbing “circuit” or upstream of it on their block maybe?
Gigantic geyser: even with a tank still feeding into it, no way would anyone in the neighborhood have any water.
Where they manage to get fuel from given petrol stations probly wouldn’t work after the EMP is a whole other question.
Yet another script/plot failure, iow.
… the kid … is Cruise’s (movie) son – Robbie – who … disappears when they get separated. Its not shown but …
I personally suspect the original script had Robbie’s adventures as well, but those episodes didn’t make it through the editing (gotta show lots of the big name $tar’s face, above all!). What’s another jarring non-sequitur after all the others?
… Crusie …
Maybe just another offering to Grate Tpyos, but an apt tag in any case.
StevoR @ # 33: … I guess aliens prioritise in alien mysterious ways?
That’s how theologians rationalize their inconsistencies, but I maintain even Hollywood hacks should be held to a higher standard.
I don’t see how that is possible – JJ Abrams doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the film.
Obvious question: is it a “so bad it is good” kind of film? I would watch that.
I want Marvel to buy the rights. And then make a version where Deadpool kicks Cruise and Gabriel in the balls. Car chases? Deadpool knows how to f*ck those up.
The Mask machine burns out ? Didn’t that happen in a previous MI movie ? They’re trying to retrieve some nuclear launch codes from a guy who wants to blow up the world and the mask machine blows up and makes them hotfix their plan ?
As for the writing: I suspect I could puke up a better plot.
The masks go back to the original Mission: Impossible series from the 70s.
One in 1000 movies or TV shows has a decent plot and non-horrible writing. The key is finding those gems in all the refuse.
The Bourne movies have a very good car chase sequence, regarded for its realism. The hero drives a shitbox, not a supercar, and it takes significant damage during the chase, which occurs at fairly low speed.
DLC @ 39, puking up a better script isn’t much of a challenge. Just had my morning coffee, gotta grab a spare roll of script paper and produce a better script. The most malodorous ones, to become a Cruise vehicle.
Reginald Selkirk @ 40, color me impressed when they do a chase sequence with an old K-car. Extra points when a kid in a Big Wheel passes the entire chase.
@41: Here it is. It’s a Cooper Mini, the original kind with lots of wear even before the chase begins.
link
I liked the one where he was a hit man. Otherwise, not so much
Collateral (2004) – Julie Richardson, Michael Mann
https://www.allmovie.com/movie/collateral-vm1702353
The impossible latex mask is such a hoary old cliche it appears in the opening sequence of the second ever James Bond move literally 60 years ago.
DLC @ 39
‘Night of the Creeps’ (more than 30 years ago) was one of those rare films. Also, the tongue-in-cheek German ‘Killer Condom’.
TV: Disney’s animatronic ‘Dinosaurs’ 30 years ago was genuinely fun.
Action movies… a very old one, North By Northwest by Alfred Hitchcock.
Seriously, the stuff is so formulaic I think the film executives are convinced new ideas will confuse the audience.
The chase scene in Bullitt is still the best and will always be, because they don’t even try anymore. It’s all CGI and quick cuts, and I hate it.
Carousel chase scene from Strangers on a Train
»There is a fight scene on top of a runaway train.«
I hope this one was at least on the right continent.
The fight on top of the TGV a few movies ago really annoyed me, because they had to turn the train into some sort of self-powered (diesel? gas turbine?) vehicle, because the overhead line was in the way of the choreography – and the helicopter.
This one had a coal-fired steam locomotive. I think there was a helicopter, too — the bad guy was on top of the train to escape — but I forget, it’s all lost in a fog of unpleasant memories.
@17
I saw the latest Indiana Jones movie too. It’s even worse than the “Riders of the lost arc” in the sense of “things would have been a lot better if Doctor Jones just gave up and didn’t do anything for half of the movie”. If he just went home and drank himself into stupor after the first third of the movie, “Antonio Banderas, Indy’s baddass diver friend and his crew TM” would have been alive, the bad guy wouldn’t have resources to dive deep enough (it would have taken him months to gather those, at least) and wouldn’t quite know where to search in the first place.
Or, after bad guys kill them, all he had to do was turn right until they are out of sight of bad guys and take the gold disk into the museum and the bad guys would have spent years digging at the ruins of library of Alexandria.with nobody any wiser. But no, good guy has to disable all the traps and solve the mystery for the bad guys.
Maybe I’m weird, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. But then again, I enjoy a lot of action movies like this.
I will also concede that movies like Baby Driver are FAR better.
@51:
While below projections, it got close at $78m domestic and somewhere around $150m intl over the first five days. So by that metric you’re not that weird. However you have to understand that people round here are especially fond of being disappointed and annoyed by things and going to great lengths to make everyone aware of just how much – it’s a surprisingly British attitude for what is predominantly a bunch of Yanks.