BEFORE: June is here, and so is the screening format breakdown for May:
4 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Destiny Turns on the Radio, Being Rose, Because I Said So, Pain & Gain
6 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Barbie, Georgia Rule, Stoker, Father Stu, The Big Hit, Shooter
7 watched on Netflix: Dumb Money, Poms, Penguin Bloom, Fear, Me Time, Ride Along, Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only
1 watched on iTunes: Kill Your Darlings
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Once Upon a Crime
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Once Upon a Crime
1 watched on Peacock: It's a Disaster
1 watched on Tubi: Ride Along 2
21 TOTAL
Oh, right, I took that trip to North Carolina so May was a short month. But here are the links that should get me past Father's Day and to the end of June: Gary Weeks, Amy Landecker, Patton Oswalt, David Koechner, Dennis Quaid, David Herman, Stephen Root, Susan Sarandon, Harvey Guillen, Natasha Rothwell, Hugh Grant, Sebastian Maniscalco, Robert De Niro, Dinah Shore, David Letterman, John Belushi, Penny Marshall, David Letterman (again), and Donald Trump. Yeah, that looks like some documentaries coming up in June for sure.
Kevin Hart carries over again from "Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Misfits" (Movie #4,431)
THE PLOT: Follows a master thief and his Interpol Agent ex-girlfriend who team up to steal $500 million in gold bullion being transported on an A380 passenger flight.
AFTER: Well, it's clear that screenwriters share a common belief that if you just put the right team of experts together, you can accomplish anything, including impossible things. You need a master-mind thief, for sure, and then you also need (in some order) a hacker, a safe-cracker, a pilot (or getaway driver) and a disguise expert. Throw in a martial arts expert or a demolitions expert if you've got room. This is, of course, recognizable as the "Mission: Impossible" formula, however it's a bit like a xerox machine, every time you make a copy of a copy, the result gets a bit harder to read or understand. For this one and the last film that followed the formula ("The Misfits") the guy who's the disguise expert only seems to be able to disguise himself, not other team members, and in both cases, his disguise efforts just weren't very good, he still looked like either Nick Cannon or Vincent D'Onofrio, no matter what he did. Umm, technically that's the opposite of an expert, if he's not very good at what he does - MAYBE think about replacing that guy, if he's not pulling his weight.
Now, we just need an idea for a heist that requires hacking, safecracking, piloting a plane, and some martial arts and blowing stuff up, and we'll be all set. Yes, I know this seems like building something backwards, or from the top floor down, but apparently this is how movies get made in Hollywood now, you have to tick all the same boxes that the LAST heist film did, because how else are you going to duplicate that film's success? Write something original? Nah nah NAH that just sounds too risky. Tom Cruise did a thing with a plane, so let's just do a thing with a plane too. That movie with Pierce Brosnan did a switcheroo with a pile of gold bars so let's just do a similar switcheroo too. And make sure the guy who can't really disguise himself as somebody else tries to disguise himself a few times, even though it's really not crucial to the plot in any way. LET HIM HAVE IT, because really, that's all he has.
This is the heist formula, apparently you can't change it if you want to be successful and entertain America, even if it's only on Netflix. Other elements you may have seen before, in addition to the ragtag bunch of misfits with particular skill sets include:
An Interpol agent who hires the team and promises them amnesty from criminal prosecution if they help out the good guys for once.
The fact that Interpol agent had an (accidental) one-week relationship with the criminal mastermind, while she was undercover. Jeez, you don't suppose that by working together on this job that they'll somehow get closer together and forgive each other for the past deceptions and maybe have a chance at a lasting relationship in the future, despite being on opposite sides of the law?
People swapping out gold-colored iron bars for real gold bars, and moving them around very easily, despite the fact that gold is one of the damned heaviest things in the world, but yet when it come times to steal them, somehow thieves find a way to subvert the laws of physics.
"Lift" doubles down on all these common tropes of heist films, then adds a few new impossible wrinkles of its own. Most prominent is a private jet that is co-opted by the team, and somehow given the ability to fly right under the commerical airliner and duplicate/steal its radio signal, so that when the airliner is diverted, it will still appear to air traffic control to still be on course. Most likely this is ACTUALLY impossible, not just "Mission: Impossible"-style very unlikely. For starters, we can assume that there should be some kind of security protocol used by ATC that would prevent this from happening. So this is NITPICK POINT #1, I don't believe it's possible for a small jet to somehow steal the signal of another plane. I also think that it's probably impossible to cover that jet with stealth-tiles, whatever those are, and for it then to be able to take off after being covered in those tiles. But screw it, let the screenwriter create whatever they want, magic is just technology invented by a writer that doesn't exist yet, right?
NITPICK POINT #2 tells me that nobody would put 19 tons of gold into a commercial airliner, because this magical second cargo level just does not exist, there's the passengers, there's the luggage compartment and...well, that's it, we're full. Cargo goes on CARGO planes, not passenger planes. If a passenger plane were carrying billions of dollars of gold, this is exactly what would happen, somebody would try to hijack it, putting all of those passengers at risk. Nope, it's just not gonna happen in the real world. NITPICK POINT #2.5 tells me that even if you DID put 19 tons of gold into a plane, how the hell would that plane be able to take off? Worse, you have to double that weight when you consider that the dummy gold made of iron or whatever is also aboard the plane. Yeah, it's not leaving the runway then.
NITPICK POINTS #3-6 - but this is a MAGIC plane, I guess. It can fly upside-down for a long period of time, it can do a nose-dive without slamming its passengers into the rear wall, and it can pull out of that nose-dive without breaking into pieces. Also it can shake off those stealth tiles just by doing a couple of barrel rolls, once they're no longer needed. Very handy. And also when you can't land it on a runway, you can just find an icy road at the top of a mountain and land it there, who cares if that road is only 100 feet long, you can make it work.
NITPICK POINT #7 - clearly screenwriters don't understand what NFTs are, either, but I guess that's OK because nobody anywhere really does.
NITPICK POINT #8 - Cyrus and his crew steal a famous painting in London by causing a distraction at an auction house in Venice. There's simply no way in the world this makes any sense, because even if their disruption disables or confuses the security in one location, that would have exactly ZERO impact on the security systems, alarms and guards in another building in another country, hundreds of miles away. In what universe does this plot point make sense?
OK, new proposed conversion method, five NITPICK POINTS means one point off my score. That seems about fair, right?
Also starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw (last seen in "Fast Color"), Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Ursula Corbero, Billy Magnussen (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Yun Jee Kim, Jacob Batalon (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Jean Reno (last seen in "The Promise"), Sam Worthington (last seen in "Avatar: The Way of Water"), Paul Anderson (last seen in "Nightmare Alley"), Viveik Kalra (last seen in "Blinded by the Light"), Burn Gorman (last seen in "Enola Holmes"), David Proud, Oli Green, Ross Anderson (last seen in "Macbeth" (2015)) Stefano Skalkotos, Martina Avogadri, Jess Liaudin (last seen in "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), Caroline Loncq (last seen in "The Protégé"), Alessandro Quattro, Morgan C. Jones, Nadira Tudor, Polly Middlehurst (last seen in "The 355"), Michael Absalom (last seen in "Extinction"), Andrew Wilson, Gerard Monaco (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Roy McCrerey (last seen in "One Missed Call"), Erol Ismail, Gordon Alexander (also last seen in "No Time to Die"), Russ Bain, Amit Dhut, Mark Hampton, Gary Fannin (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Alfredo Tavares.
RATING: 6 out of 10 first-class tickets (will that be "hijacking" or "non-hijacking"?)
No comments:
Post a Comment