Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
The Cruiser does some shitty James Bond ripoff, with bad copies of other action films: The Matrix Reloaded freeway chase, The Bourne Legacy motorcycle chase, and The Man Who Knew Too Much opera assassination. Then they have the pointless legacy cameo: “should you choose to accept it”, “this message will self destruct in X seconds”.
Most of the cast returns, except Paula Patton and Léa Sedoux. Curious how this is suddenly a sausage fest, and Rebecca Ferguson does jack shit other than to look extremely sexy, get naked from the back for pure titillation, and hug the protagonist (not even first base, what the fuck is going on here?).
They think they are doing Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, but then Ethan holds his breath for five minutes and gets revived with a defibrillator, for some reason.
The evil doers try to kill the prime ministers of both Austria and the UK. This is from a former MI6 agent who went “woke” and decided to put his skill towards changing the status quo. There’s the whole speech about the US and the UK being allies and shit, but a few years later the top G men are Trump and BoJo.
The evil UK government dude is called Atlee, Clement? He was a fucking prime minister. The prime minister is the idiot MP from In The Loop, but the Camero-bot 9000 similarities are uncanny, even his wife looks like the real deal.
Chinese money pays Larry Ellison’s kid for 2 hours of derivative action stunts, and they get it. Their requisite Chinese main cast is a high up CIA officer with no lines, the right hand woman to the director. That’s not Maria Butina, that’s more Kim Philby.
Of course, in the end, the CIA is the hero, and people lecture directly to the camera. Alec Baldwin doesn’t shoot anyone, but Tom Cruise does hand him a loaded dart gun. Crisis averted.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.