BEFORE: Thank God it's the weekend, well, almost. I've got three LONG movies that I programmed in a row for some reason, really, I don't know what I was thinking. I only JUST caught up on my sleep by taking a long nap on Thursday afternoon, and now I'm going to ruin all my hard work and stay up late three nights in a row, it looks like. Thankfully I don't have to work at the theater this Saturday, but I do have to go in early on Sunday. Still, I'm more likely to have some extra time on the weekend days, so that's why I skipped Thursday, and this little indie movie called "Mission: Impossible" is going to be my Friday movie, even though I started watching it on Thursday night, it ran into Friday and the review may not get posted therefore.until the early morning hours of Saturday.
Vanessa Kirby carries over from "Pieces of a Woman".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mission: Impossible - Fallout" (Movie #3,112)
THE PLOT: Ethan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands.
AFTER: No, no, I said I was hoping to watch something UPBEAT after "Pieces of a Woman", not a nail-biting thrill ride that just won't let up on the action. Eh, you know what, I"ll take it. It's been a long time since the last "Mission: Impossible" movie, which was..."Fallout"? Damn, I watched that FIVE years ago (and over 1,700 movies ago), so really, I barely remember it, that's only because my internal memory is always so close to full. Really, if I knew I was going to need to remember movies that aren't "Star Wars" then I probably wouldn't have watched so damn many of them. And then next one won't be out until some time in 2025, so really, there's no point in me waiting for it, this one's on cable right now so let's deal with it.
There's just no way this was ever going to feel like anything but half a story, I'm sorry to report. They really spend two hours and forty-three minutes with the team just figuring out who or what the enemy IS, and that's not a good use of time, if you ask me. So one movie to figure out the villain and the next to defeat it, that seems quite a bit like "Infinity War" and "Endgame", if you ask me. But the villain of this film is nowhere as near as cool or awesome as Thanos was, it's a Russian artificial intelligence that they call The Entity, and thanks to the internet it can go anywhere, do anything, disrupt anything electronic and worse, mimic actor's voices, which could make them irrelevant and unnecessary in the future. So, clearly, it must be stopped, the paychecks of hundreds of movie actors depends on it!
They also saw fit to do kind of a "Greatest Hits" take on the M:I franchise with this one - if something worked in a previous film in this franchise, they kind of brought it back. The false faces are always a fave, you can't really go wrong there. And Vanessa Kirby was in "Fallout", I guess she did a good job because they brought her back, and Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust, she was in a couple installments and she's back, too. Then so there would be a human villain to fight they kind of shoehorned in Esai Morales as an agent that Ethan Hunt went up against years ago, on his first mission, only he forgot about him until now, and so we didn't know about him until now. I can confirm that Esai Morales has a somewhat forgettable face, he's almost one of those "Hey, it's THAT guy" guys, and to test this, go ahead and try to name the last film you saw with Esai Morales in it. Can't do it, can you? I wouldn't have been able to without the help of IMDB and my copious notes.
So this is half of a story, there's no way around it, and to try to disguise that fact they added two big stunt scenes, one is the car chase through the streets of Rome, and honestly, this goes on much, much longer than it needs to, which is a clear indication that they really needed to beef up this first half of the story. The second is the combination of the (you've probably seen it) motorcycle/parachute jump off the mountain, so Ethan Hunt can land on the train and get the thing he needs. Then just somehow save everyone from dying on a train with no brakes, and call it a day. Damn, it's too bad that "Bullet Train" did a whole train thing last year, with a somewhat similar ending, only in Japan, because now this whole bit in "Dead Reckoning" just seems really derivative, even if it's not.
Look, there's a lot here that doesn't make much sense. How does the Entity control the two humans that seem to be working for it? Do they get their orders by e-mail, or is some kind of mind control at work, or is the A.I. like HAL, he just uses that soothing droning voice to get them to do what it wants? More importantly, why does it want what it wants? Why does a giant A.I. computer want anything, except for more electricity and more knowledge? What does it gain by controliing our electronics and making things not work right, some of the time? OK, so the Entity can hack into any other computer anywhere and steal state secrets, but what is it possibly going to DO with them? How does it get ahead as a thinking computer by hacking, which seems like a very human thing to do? I'm just not clear on the goal here, unless it's to demonize artificial intelligence, which a screenwriter might obviously do because there's that fear of being replaced by a computer, especially if they write franchise films.
It's important to remember that computers aren't capable of doing evil things unless someone programmed them to do it. And even then the computer might not understand the concepts of "good" and "evil", because they're non-binary and ill-defined, different people have different ideas of what is "good" and what is "evil". An A.I. will (ideally) only do what it's been programmed to do and not be able to impart any morality to it. So, umm, what gives here, is the A.I. the big bad villain or did someone just program it to be that way?
What makes less sense is that this A.I. system is seen controlling a Russian stealth submarine, which is able to get very close to other countries' borders and even other submarines without being detected. For some reason, the A.I. system makes it appear that there is an enemy sub near its own sub, which forces the submarine crew to launch a torpedo to sink the sub that isn't really THERE, and then the torpedo comes back around and sinks the sub that launched it, so the computer is now on a sunken sub on the ocean floor. Huh? Why would the A.I. system cause the sinking of the sub carrying it? Did it hate humans so much that it really just wanted to get away from them, and the ocean floor seemed like the most inhospitable place? That's the only reason I can think of, but perhaps they'll explain more in the sequel.
So this whole "Part One" is just different spies, including the IMF team, fighting over the two parts of this electronic key, which when combined will grant access to the A.I. computer on the sunken sub. So obviously Part Two is going to be all about getting down to this sub somehow and then dealing with the computer system. I don't know how that's going to fill up another two hours plus of screen time, they're really going to have to stretch that out to make it interesting or entertaining. I maintain they should have just edited this Part One a little tighter, like maybe lose half the car chase, and then this could have/should have been just one long movie. I'm already bored by Part Two and it doesn't come out for another year, that's not a good sign.
It's really such a LONG way to go, just to get the MacGuffin key and now, supposedly, they can deal with the entity, which is at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean or something. Hey, crazy, idea, why not just forget about it, and once the computer runs out of electricity or battery charge or whatever, the problem just might take care of itself. Just trying to save you some trouble. Look, it's been 27 years since the first film, and this seventh film is the longest one, and the one with the highest budget. How much longer can this series possibly go one? If they're smart, they'll cut their losses and make the next one the last one. Really, it's OK, we've got enough M:I films, and Tom Cruise ain't getting any younger. At least they had the good sense to kill off James Bond a couple years ago (Or, did they?) so I had hopes that with "Dead" in the title, maybe it would be time to let Ethan Hunt sacrifice himself to save his team, or something.
Also starring Tom Cruise (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Hayley Atwell (last seen in "Blinded by the Light"), Ving Rhames (last heard in "Wendell & Wild"), Simon Pegg (last seen in "Man Up"), Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "Hercules"), Esai Morales (last seen in "Senior Moment"), Pom Klementieff (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Henry Czerny (last seen in "The Pink Panther" (2006)), Shea Whigham (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Greg Tarzan Davis (also last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Frederick Schmidt (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Mariela Garriga, Cary Elwes (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver"), Charles Parnell (last seen in "The Killer"), Mark Gatiss (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Indira Varna (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Rob Delaney (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Marcin Dorocinski, Ivan Ivashkin, Zachary Baharov (last seen in "The Way Back"), Adrian Bouchet (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Sam Barrett, Louis Vaughan, Christopher Sciueref (last seen in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."), Andrea Scarduzio, Barnaby Kay (last seen in "Conspiracy"), Gaetano Bruno (last seen in "House of Gucci"), Marco Sincini (ditto), Sean Patrick Brooks, Nico Toffoli (last seen in "American Assassin"), Anton Valensi (last seen in "RocknRolla")
RATING: 6 out of 10 airport terminals
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