“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” Review
Ethan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands.
I didn’t enjoy watching this movie at all, but I’m not sure if it’s because I wasn’t able to see it in Dolby Digital, or because there were 5 people in the same row as me that were either on their phones the whole time or were just straight up talking to each other about random nonsense. There was also one lady with a 50 piece charm bracelet that got up twice during the film that sounded like she had bells on and she walked slooooow. The guy that I was immediately sitting next to was great, no talking, no phone at all, but the dude next to him was there with his kids and was letting them play with their phones / tablets all during the film and he was on his own phone too. At one point the good seatmate next to me straight up took the phone from the other guy’s hands and turned it off, something that completely freaked me out but I supported on a fundamental level, but I’ve read way too many stories lately here in my state about people either shooting or fighting other patrons for far less things than that. Most of the time I was not enjoying myself or was hyper aware of the people in the theater
The movie itself I have some complicated feelings about. The action, soundtrack, cinematography, and actors with their acting are all great and I have no complaints about them at all. I love everyone here, but the plot is a worn out retread of a story that I’ve seen in nearly every season of Star Trek since I was a kid and has been bouncing around Hollywood since Hollywood first learned what a computer was and by now I’m just weary of anything remotely talking about technology taking over the planet, even if it’s in a franchise like Mission: Impossible. There’s a few quibbles I have that on the surface feel small but I think might be a larger issue with what they’re actually trying to do in the film. I don’t want to get to spoilerish about my complaint though, but just know that submarines can’t receive radio signals when they’re underwater and the radio signals they DO get at shallow depths wouldn’t support the kinds of data feeds that are at work here in Part One of the “Dead Reckoning” story.
This is also the second movie I’ve seen in the last month that featured a fight on top of a train, which is an odd trope to resurrect.
