should you choose to accept it
Jul. 21st, 2023 06:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessOops, I didn’t mean for it to take me so long to post. I’ll probably overcompensate this weekend. On Wednesday night, I went to see Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1 (or ‘the Mission Impossible movie’) and it’s worth seeing on the big screen simply for the excellent stunts. The rest of the film is entertaining, but it’s not as good as Fallout.
They introduce an origin story for Ethan Hunt (why?) and of course it involves a dead woman, in a movie where, dress it up as a heroic sacrifice however much you like, Ilsa gets fridged. So, even though Hayley Atwell is an absolute delight as Grace, a thief who is well out of her depth and who gets roped into all this, you want to warn the character off “The Choice” (that isn’t a choice) because she’ll probably die too.
The uncontrollable sentient AI is very of the moment, though I kept thinking ‘Person of Interest’ did this better. (Something I’d best get used to thinking.) Vanessa Kirby has fun and it was nice to see Pom Klemetieff’s actual face. Meanwhile, Simon Pegg clearly doesn’t have a portrait in his attic, but you might or might not want to investigate whether Cruise (61???) and Cary Elwes do. Also, they totally hired Henry Czerny because you can film Mr Cruise as taller.
It keeps a good hold of its moving parts, but there are way too many Meaningful Looks (usually with a cocked head) about where the MacGuffin is, or a warning not to do something crazy – the character will inevitably do something crazy.
But the action stuff is all top drawer – swords! The extended car chase in Rome!! The stuff with the train, some of which harked back to the first film!!! The film is about two hours forty minutes long, but so long as you go to the bathroom first, you won’t care that the action scenes are extended.
In the build-up to this, I found myself thinking that it’s crazy that this series survived (except it stars Tom Cruise, bona fide movie star, and has the best theme) given that the first film seemed so opposed to the team ethos of the original TV show, then it had a new director for the next four films. Ving Rhames plays the only recurring character, and every time you think the team is settled…it isn’t.
Will Cruise save cinema again this year? Well, I went to see it on a Wednesday night at the nearest cinema a week and a half after release and I doubt there were more than 20 of us at the screening, but, for what it’s worth, I’m going to try to see Barbie and Oppenheimer, and, sure, I’ll see part 2 of this if I can when it comes out.
They introduce an origin story for Ethan Hunt (why?) and of course it involves a dead woman, in a movie where, dress it up as a heroic sacrifice however much you like, Ilsa gets fridged. So, even though Hayley Atwell is an absolute delight as Grace, a thief who is well out of her depth and who gets roped into all this, you want to warn the character off “The Choice” (that isn’t a choice) because she’ll probably die too.
The uncontrollable sentient AI is very of the moment, though I kept thinking ‘Person of Interest’ did this better. (Something I’d best get used to thinking.) Vanessa Kirby has fun and it was nice to see Pom Klemetieff’s actual face. Meanwhile, Simon Pegg clearly doesn’t have a portrait in his attic, but you might or might not want to investigate whether Cruise (61???) and Cary Elwes do. Also, they totally hired Henry Czerny because you can film Mr Cruise as taller.
It keeps a good hold of its moving parts, but there are way too many Meaningful Looks (usually with a cocked head) about where the MacGuffin is, or a warning not to do something crazy – the character will inevitably do something crazy.
But the action stuff is all top drawer – swords! The extended car chase in Rome!! The stuff with the train, some of which harked back to the first film!!! The film is about two hours forty minutes long, but so long as you go to the bathroom first, you won’t care that the action scenes are extended.
In the build-up to this, I found myself thinking that it’s crazy that this series survived (except it stars Tom Cruise, bona fide movie star, and has the best theme) given that the first film seemed so opposed to the team ethos of the original TV show, then it had a new director for the next four films. Ving Rhames plays the only recurring character, and every time you think the team is settled…it isn’t.
Will Cruise save cinema again this year? Well, I went to see it on a Wednesday night at the nearest cinema a week and a half after release and I doubt there were more than 20 of us at the screening, but, for what it’s worth, I’m going to try to see Barbie and Oppenheimer, and, sure, I’ll see part 2 of this if I can when it comes out.
