BEFORE: Well, it looks like I'll be bouncing back and forth between action films for adults and animated films for children, at least for a little while. It's fine, I'm still in post-romance recovery so either or both or anything will do right now, as long as people aren't involved in love triangles or going on first dates or trying to plan a wedding. Hell, according to the Burned Toast maxim, this makes "Freedom Writers" OK because it was an integral part of bringing me HERE, and I can get rid of this enormous action movie, as well as some animated things that have been kicking around on the list for way too long.
Hayley Atwell carries over from "Paddington in Peru".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning" (Movie #4,821)
THE PLOT: Ethan Hunt and the IMF pursue a dangerous AI called the Entity that's infiltrated global intelligence. With governments and a figure from his past in pursuit, Hunt races to stop it from forever changing the world.
AFTER: All right, this is the eighth and LAST time I will be including a "Mission: Impossible" film as part of the countdown - really, only because they aren't going to make any more of them. I suppose they said that about James Bond films, too, so I guess which franchise will be rebooted sooner than the other. Hey, they said no more "Star Wars" films at one point (no, wait, at three different points) and we've got a new one coming out this year which I'll have to save space for.
This film is pretty much what I figured it would be - a very complicated trip for Ethan Hunt to the bottom of the ocean, to download some computer program that might (emphasis on MIGHT) contain the secret to stopping the evil A.I. program which is taking over Hollywood film production. Sorry, my bad, it's really taking over the world's nuclear arsenal, and seems very willing to cause armageddon, and somehow it doesn't realize that without humans alive, the world isn't really worth taking over. Like WHY does the A.I. want to destroy the world, does it not understand that it only exists because it was invented by humans, and also we feed it electricity? Without society, won't the A.I. perish too, to whatever extent it's alive, which it's not? Something doesn't really add up here, except that A.I. is the hot new big bad right now because it's coming for all the filmmakers' jobs - when we can just push a couple buttons and make a passable movie, all screenwriters and film directors will be out of work, and they sort of all see this as a BAD thing. Go figure.
But anyway, how do you make a final impossible mission that's somehow more impossibler than the previous seven? I mean, they were all successful, so "impossible" is relative, I guess - Ethan Hunt and his team always find a way, even if they have to sacrifice their personal lives or their actual lives. And at least one team member here makes that ultimate sacrifice, I won't say who, but really, I would have been OK with more of them biting it. We believe that James Bond is no longer living right now, until some screenwriter decides otherwise, and honestly, if Ethan Hunt had to go, this would have been the best time for it. Tom Cruise is OLD, man, I don't care if he still does his own stunts, it's maybe time to retire, even though I know he won't listen to good advice. Go out on top, man.
Before the final mission, though, we all have to endure a non-brief recap of what has happened to the IMF before this. Just in case you didn't see the last movie, or the six others before that, you all have to catch up. Everything's connected, man, and that's both beautiful and scary, because Ethan's actions in the past may have made this evil A.I. entity called "The Entity" possible. He carries so much guilt around, it's a wonder he can even walk, let alone run. Ethan also recruits a few new members for his team of outlaws, some people who were even on the other side in previous installments, but now their skills could be put toward saving the world instead of trying to destroy it. Makes sense, put your enemies on your team and you have fewer enemies...
But rewriting all of "Mission: Impossible" history over seven films to somehow justify all the events of THIS one and the one before it, it's a tall order. We didn't HAVE to make sure that all eight films added up to one big, impossibly twisty and bloated narrative, but I guess that's an OK thing? Still, as I said last time, maybe think about doing more with less instead of the opposite. We could have just taken each film as its own thing, like we did all along. Still, the Burned Toast maxim comes into play BIG time, even the guy who got discredited and sent to run a station in the Arctic for 30 years just because Ethan Hunt broke into the "impenetrable" data center he designed, way back in the first film is a great example of Burned Toast. Yes, sure, Ethan Hunt's actions got him fired and basically exiled - but he simply wouldn't change a thing, because if not for Ethan, he might still be in the same boring job, day after day, plus he wouldn't have had the adventures he had, he wouldn't have met his wife, he wouldn't have composed that cello concerto during his down time. Yeah, right. More to the point, he wouldn't have been in the right place at the right time (NOW) to help Ethan Hunt save the world. Again. So he's got that going for him, too.
But finding that submarine in the middle of the Bering Sea is a tall order, and then once they somehow find out the coordinates WITHOUT being able to read the old floppy discs, where all the information on everything that happened in the world's oceans is somehow backed up, Ethan still has to get himself down to that sunken Russian sub, and even harder, he has to get BACK to the surface without any help until he gets there, which means he's probably going to both drown AND die, but it's OK, because the cold ocean will make sure he's only MOSTLY dead, as long as somebody cuts through the ice in the exact right spot at the exact right time and puts him in a decompression chamber. OK, that sounds very unlikely, one might even call it impossible.
That mystery agent Gabriel wants that drive from the sub, though, and The Entity wants access to a bunker in South Africa where it can survive the nuclear armageddon that it's about to create. Umm, there's some weird logic here, because Gabriel tries to blow up that bunker with a nuclear bomb, because he doesn't want the Entity to hide there, he wants to control the Entity himself so he can control the world. The plan is to give Gabriel the drive he wants, but also let him infect that drive with the "poison pill" malware that Luther created and Gabriel stole - barring that, they plan to allow the Entity access to the bunker, but once it enters, they'll trap it inside this infinite mainframe thingy that it will bounce around in forever. The plan might have worked, too, if the stupid director of the rival CIA didn't show up with Jasper Briggs, son of former IMF team leader Jim Phelps. They spoil the whole thing so the mission just got a whole lot impossibler, maybe even the most impossiblest.
So now they have to defuse a bomb while fixing somebody's collapsed lung while Ethan Hunt chases Gabriel in a biplane, hoping to jump over to HIS plane, grab the poison pill from around his neck, attach it to the drive while parachuting to the earth, which will allow the Entity to enter the secret bunker storage, but really get trapped in a glowstick. Man, I wish to Jesus I was kidding here. This is way overblown and over-the-top and everything that possibly could go wrong does, making everything three times more complicated than it needed to be. Somehow it's just ridiculous how serious all this action is together, if that makes sense.
But now I really wonder if there is extra insight to be gained by watching ALL eight of this franchise's films in a row - which kind of was the point of this (usually) enormous exercise in futility that is the Movie Year. Unfortunately, I just don't have that kind of time, because the counter on that metaphorical nuclear bomb is always tick, tick, ticking down...
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie (director of "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning", duh)
Also starring Tom Cruise (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Ving Rhames (last heard in "The Garfield Movie"), Simon Pegg (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning"), Esai Morales (ditto), Shea Whigham (ditto), Greg Tarzan Davis (ditto), Charles Parnell (ditto), Pom Klementieff (last heard in "Superman"), Henry Czerny (last seen in "Ready or Not"), Holt McCallany (last seen in "Wrath of Man"), Janet McTeer (last seen in "Allegiant"), Nick Offerman (last seen in "Civil War"), Hannah Waddingham (last seen in "The Fall Guy"), Tramell Tillman, Angela Bassett (last seen in "Damsel"), Mark Gatiss (last seen in "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"), Rolf Saxon (last seen in "A Hologram for the King"), Lucy Tulugarjuk, Cary Elwes (last seen in "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre"), Katy O'Brian (last seen in "Twisters"), Stephen Oyoung (ditto), Tomas Paredes, Paul Bullion (last seen in "Dune: Part One"), Paska D. Lychnikoff (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Ryn Alleyne, Ned Campbell (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Charlie Carter (last seen in "The Real Charlie Chaplin"), Chantelle Roman, Kwabena Ansah, Ross McCall, Hugo Salter, Tommie Earl Jenkins, Sydney Cole Alexander, Gabriella Piazza (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Elliot Janks, Madeleine Day, Erin Battle, Stephen Samson,
with archive footage of Alec Baldwin (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Emmanuelle Beart, Henry Cavill (last seen in "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare"), Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Emilio Estevez (last seen in "Brats"), Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Philip Seymour Hoffman (last seen in "Hard Eight"), Anthony Hopkins (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Jens Hulten (last seen in "Alpha"), Kristoffer Joner (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Vanessa Kirby (also last seen in "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"), Michelle Monaghan (last seen in "The Best of Me"), Michael Nyqvist (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Paula Patton (last seen in "Warcraft"), Maggie Q (also last seen in "Allegiant"), Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "Letters to Juliet"), Jeremy Renner (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Jean Reno (last seen in "Die Hart"), Keri Russell (last seen in "The Upside of Anger"), Dougray Scott (last seen in "Ever After: A Cinderella Story"), Lea Seydoux (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Kristin Scott Thomas (last seen in "Easy Virtue"), Jon Voight (last seen in "Varsity Blues"), Liang Yang
RATING: 6 out of 10 protestors in Trafalgar Square
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