Yet another installment in the series that has secret agent Ethan Hunt and his team returning for bigger and brasher action sequences tied to a nonsensical plot that just didn’t matter. Tom Cruise works so hard to make his character have some worth, but at the end of each action scene, the movie STOPS, and a character explains to us what has happened so far and what will happen next – enter Basil Exposition from the Austin Powers film franchise. I kid you not.
In the middle of my screening, I yelled out, Rocky Horror style, “I just wish everyone would die so I can go home.” The theater erupted, and I got the biggest laugh of the movie. Then the teenage boy, this movie’s prime demographic, turned to me and uttered, “I have no idea what’s going on.” Join the club. There is Nothing at stake, Nothing makes sense, and Nothing matters.
Director Christopher McQuarrie co-wrote this mess with Erik Jendersen about a powerful rogue Artificial Intelligence known as The Entity, which can access any digital network and becomes all-knowing and all-seeing. Clearly, neither of them possesses the slightest understanding of technology, where a $50 Firewall would have ended the threat of The Entity in the first ten minutes of the movie.
Mission Impossible – Dead Boring Part One is in theaters now.
