Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning has just been released. Taking up where 2023’s Dead Reckoning Part One left off, has Tom Cruise trying to stop assassin Gabriel (Esai Morales) destroying Civilisation as we know it with an AI thingamabob called The Entity.
Somebody once said they should never have been allowed to make all those sequels to Mission Impossible. If the first one was solved, how could the others be ‘impossibler’?
Similarly, we should never refer to various books as Best Sellers. There can only be one best seller, as someone said. The rest are just better sellers.
Tom seems to have been playing Ethan Hunt since Adam was a boy. He first played him thirty years ago. He’s supposed to be the last ‘star’ we have left. Really?
The star system went for its tea many decades ago. When I was growing up, people went to the cinema to see certain actors like Gary Cooper or Errol Flynn. Then we got all sophisticated and started talking about ‘Films’ instead. Or worse again, ‘Film’. I preferred it when we just ‘went to the pictures’.
That’s what I like about the Mission Impossible franchise. It reminds me of that time. There are heroes and villains and action sequences. Women are like ‘the romantic interest’, as the expression went. It’s a safe world where everyone does what you expect them to and there are no complex nuances of character. I go into these films almost expecting a man at the door to halve my ticket and refer me to a girl selling ice cream on a tray suspended from her shoulders.
Is The Final Reckoning” really the last MI movie? Okay, so it contains the line “Trust me one last time,” but Sean Connery said “Never again” to James Bond before filming Never Say Never Again in 1983.
The Flats is Alessandra Celesia’s post-Good Friday Agreement documentary featuring a group of people from the New Lodge apartment blocks in Belfast revisiting The Troubles in a series of dramatic reconstructions of a time when hunger strikes and educational injustices were a part of daily life. It could be watched as a partner piece to Kenneth Branagh’s softer Belfast. Ms Celesia is Italian but married to a Belfast man.
You may have been reading that actor/director Justin Baldoni is suing The New York Times for $250 million for an article by actress Blake Lively alleging that he sexually molested her on the set of the film It Ends With Us. I treated myself to the DVD of this last Christmas but didn’t think much of it. It’s a rather mushy treatment of (ironically) a woman surviving a sexually abusive relationship.
The acting and dialogue are saccharine and trivialise the theme. It’s now streaming on Sky Cinema. Because of all the hoopla about it – Lively’s husband is even involved, and no kidding, Taylor Swift – I may give it a re-watch.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
