Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning

AIs Wide Shut

Mission Impossible
The Final Reckoning
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
USA 2025
Paramount
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Spoilers for the last movie.

Okay... so right up front I will say that, since I thought the last film in this mostly wonderful franchise was a bit dull and, since there’s been a lot of word of mouth and critical response that the first hour or so of this one is pretty dreary before it picks up, I was going into Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning (which should rightly be called Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 2 but I suspect there’s a very good reason it isn’t, perhaps to do more with the box office returns on the last one rather than any superstitious caveats the main lead has with the number two) with not so high hopes. So right up front I would like to refute all those claims because, frankly, I had at least as much fun with the pre-submarine sequences in this as I did with the rest of the movie. Perhaps more than the rest of it to an extent.

This one sees the return of most of the crew from the previous three films... Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, and Ving Rhames (alas, my favourite character played by Rebecca Ferguson was killed off in the last installment) along with recent new regulars Hayley Atwell and the increasingly brilliant Pom Klementieff. Plus assorted newcomers.

Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character is in hiding, now possessing both parts of the cruciform key needed to lift the next gadget to help bring down the Artificial Intelligence (AI) known as The Entity, which is gradually taking control of the nuclear arsenals of the world for a big bang day to wipe out humanity. It’s obviously down to Cruise and some new, acquired on the job team members (including an absolutely brilliant call back character who was a very minor character in one sequence of the first film and played by the same actor... who’s has a lot more to do here and is just fantastic) to help him in his quest.

It’s fast and furious and everybody is really good, with some intense scenes between the president (played by the great Angela Bassett) and her staff, who want to start the nuclear war just a little early. Can Cruise and co come through in time? Well, the highly improbable set of split timing sequences which make this a possibility, leading to a thing which has to be timed blindly to within literally a blink of an eye, requires... people performing the usual superhuman style antics which takes a lot of suspension of disbelief, for sure.

Now the two big action set pieces of the last two hours of the movie were, to me, a little dull... a submarine suspense sequence and a bi-plane suspense sequence (I prefer the more punch punch, shooty shooty explosion style set pieces myself) but all in all I’d say this film has a much more even tone than the last one and it is, I’m glad to say, a fair bit better than that one (even with the exclusion of Rebecca Ferguson). The score by franchise newcomers Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey is serviceable but seems to be lighter on the Lalo Schifrin themes than some of them... that being said, since it’s so far not had a proper CD release at time of writing  (just a rubbish digital and scratchy vinyl release) it may be that I don’t ever get to hear it away from the movie, which would be a shame.

All in all, I didn’t find this film at all slow and I’m scratching my head at some of the comments by the critics. A criticism would be that Shea Whigham’s character did not, this time around, need an almost ‘so tacked on it seems fake’ callback to one of the characters in the first movie... that was kind of dumb and unnecessary, I thought. However, having said that, I’d like to throw out a big shout out to Rolf Saxon and Lucy Tulugarjuk, who were both brilliant here. Not to mention Love Lies Bleeding star Katy O’Brian, who doesn’t have much to do here but who certainly has a lot of screen presence.

And that’s me done with Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning other than to say... final reckoning my backside. Cruise and his cast and crew could easily make another one of these if they change their minds and the big bad of the movie could also easily be brought back if that is what the writers intend. Not the best of the Mission Impossible films (that would be this one, here) but nowhere near the worst of them and with some nice shout backs which tie it back to a number of the previous films too. Works well at the cinema and would probably suit a big TV set too, I suspect.

Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1

Ai Ai Oh

Mission Impossible -
Dead Reckoning Part 1
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
USA  2023 Paramount Pictures
UK cinema release print

This was okay.

Having said that, I’m really not sure why Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1 has had such strong word of mouth... the reviews I’ve been half hearing lifted my expectations to a point where I was possibly going to be a little disappointed with whatever I saw at the cinema last night, perhaps. Okay, so my history with the Mission Impossible film franchise (which you can read in its entirety via reviews accessed from the index link top right... just scroll on down past the book section and into the film section) is such that I thought the first one was so so and that, after that, each successive film kept getting better and better, up to and including the fifth in the sequence, Rogue Nation, which I personally think is the best of these movies to date. The sixth one was okay but I think was nowhere really near it in terms of the art and craft of the former and, I think, that holds for this one too, which seems to be not quite as good as the previous movie in the series also.

Still, it’s quite good and holds the interest all the way through. It’s a nice piece of espionage entertainment and the cast and crew still do a great job with it. This one continues with most of the regulars in place... so we have the core team now pretty much being Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Rebecca Ferguson. There are a few others returning too, in the form of Vanessa Kirby as the arms dealer The White Widow and, for the first time since the first movie, Henry Czerny as Kittridge. 

 We also have a ‘new to the franchise’, joint leading lady in the form of the great Hayley Atwell as professional thief Grace. I loved Atwell as Agent Peggy Carter in the various Marvel movies and TV show and she’s a good fit with Cruise for this film for sure.

Another stand out new character in this one is a female assassin called Paris (named after one of the original TV show characters) played by Pom Klementieff (who plays Mantis in the Marvel movies). She’s got a lot of screen presence in this and is a lethal proposition in any fight... she also has her own kind of shorthand mini arc in this and... well, not saying anything more about her other than she’s a good character.

The plot of the film in terms of the global threat the team has to face in this one does feel like the stakes are upped once again. It’s a newly self aware artificial intelligence (so we’re told) known as The Entity, with a human assistant from out of Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) past in the form of human villain Gabriel (Esai Morales). The Entity is a big problem because it sets everyone (every nation and power) against each other when it needs to and can be in the room listening to you all the time, because it’s in everything digital. Which is why, halfway through the film in a sequence where one of my favourite characters gets killed (nope, I’m not saying which one... there are more than a few deaths in this movie), the crew find out that their tech can’t be trusted to be working with them and, at one point, their espionage toys are taken away from them completely. So yeah, they’re alone and in the cold with everyone after them because, of all the interested parties who have a stake in finding the AI, which involves gaining possession of two halves of a key which will unlock something which nobody seems to quite know about yet... Ethan Hunt and his friends are the only ones who want to destroy it and not try and control it for world domination. So, yeah, it’s the rest of the intelligence bureaus in the world against them, not to mention the AI, which seems to be manipulating them at every turn.

The film has some good practical stunts (always a bonus and I wish Tom Cruise would just slow down a bit before he kills himself... he’s a good actor and doesn’t deserve to die for a movie) and some lengthy action set pieces. I did find a lot of those pieces kinda dull to be honest but, not so dull that it wasn’t entertaining enough in its combined onslaught that I ever got bored, to be sure. Lorne Balfe’s score, again incorporating Lalo Schifrin’s iconic themes, is pretty nicely done but, again, I don’t think it’s the best in the series. Of all the composers who have worked on these films over the years... Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, Michael Giacchino, Lorne Balfe... I think it’s Joe Kraemer’s score for Rogue Nation which is the most satisfying of the bunch. This one is pretty cool though and I’m looking forward to purchasing La La Land’s CD release of this and giving it a spin when funds allow.

Other than that, not much more to say about Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1... it’s a nice enough movie for lovers of the series and, as you’d expect, it kinda leaves things up in the air with all the threats still out there. Although it does have a stop and take a breath resolution of sorts at the end, to wrap things up and get things ready for part two next year. I guess it’s a cinematic rendezvous I’ll definitely have to keep with the caveat that Cruise has said that the conclusion will be his final part in the franchise. So expect more regular character deaths and mayhem would be my guess.

Mission Impossible - Fallout

A Running Cruise

Mission Impossible - Fallout
2018 USA Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
UK cinema release print.

So here we go again. The sixth entry into the big budget, big screen versions of the popular Mission Impossible TV show is with us and, once again, the trailer managed to drag me in using the cunning ruse of a running Cruise doing lots of action stuff against a coolish sounding score. Which always works on me, to be honest.

For a few years now, I have observed that each one of these films released always seems to be even better than the previous movie in the series and this culminated in my favourite of these fizzy, spy action confections from the Mission Impossible team, Rogue Nation. I have to say that, while Mission Impossible Fallout carries on the same story, set a couple of years later, this one doesn’t actually get nearly as good as that previous installment. Although it’s still a pretty cool movie and certainly as good as the third and maybe fourth movies. Nothing to rival that wonderfully spy-hard cool opera house sequence in Rogue Nation though, alas.

The plot set up is that, with the captured Solomon Lane (played once again by Sean Harris) in the hands of various governments, the remnants of his terrorist group The Syndicate, calling themselves The Disciples, are being held together by a mystery man known only as John Lark. Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt whose mission, should he choose to accept it, is to get back a load of stolen plutonium from The Disciples and, presumably, find out who John Lark is and shut The Disciples down before they blow various countries up etc and destabilise the world as we know it.

So, yeah, business as usual and Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Alec Baldwin from previous films in the franchise are there to help him do it. Unfortunately, Jeremy Renner doesn’t return here as he was busy shooting the sequel to next year’s follow up to Avengers - Infinity War (reviewed here) but instead we have a new character played by the current Man Of Steel himself, Henry Cavill. Of course, Cavill is no stranger to the spy game as he played an interesting variant of Napoleon Solo in the recent The Man From U.N.C.L.E movie (reviewed here) and, sure enough, he does a pretty good job here as the ‘blunt hammer’ of a character he is initially introduced as. Also back in the mix, we have the very welcome return of Rebecca Ferguson as the double agent Ilsa Faust from the last movie and an interesting turn from actress Vanessa Kirby playing a character called White Widow. There’s also another, very special returning character... but I’ll get to her in a minute.

So the film is full of the usual action sequences and I was absolutely horrified as to how much of the stunts Cruise gets to do here. Sure, we all know the story of how he injured his ankle jumping between two buildings and, yes, you can totally see that shot in the final cut and feel the pain of the star as he does things to his ankle that  he’s not supposed to. What really worried me, though, is that he’s also flying helicopters quite dangerously by himself, riding motorbikes against traffic and even performing a free fall rescue operation and halo jump (for which he trained for about a year) and, wow, I’m so amazed this guy is a) able to get insured on set/location in any country other than Hong Kong and b) hasn’t accidentally killed himself making one of these things yet. This guy is certainly dedicated to his craft, though, so despite heavy qualms about his personal beliefs off of the set, you have to give this guy a lot of respect for these kinds of shenanigans. Not to mention he’s also a pretty great actor with a very likeable on-screen presence (and I know from a first hand story on a bus ride from one of his old costumers that he’s a pretty nice guy to be around on set with too).

The film is a blast if you like stunts and action sequences as they are all done with the usual slick, professionalism that this kind of high profile Hollywood blockbuster usually achieves but my biggest problem is that... okay, it’s good but there are absolutely no real surprises in it. There’s a so called twist in this and there are also a fair few scenes set up to fool the opposition and, for effect, the audience at the same time but, honestly, if you’ve seen just a few of these films then you’ll see all this stuff coming a mile off... not to mention the ‘not so well hidden’ true identity of John Lark. That one’s kinda obvious. So the lack of ‘I never saw that coming’ really does bring the film down a level, I think.

That being said, it’s still a blast and it also sees the return of Michelle Monaghan in a quite respectfully highlighted role in the last big section of the film, reprising her character from the third and fourth films and finally tying up that ‘big loose thread’ from the third one which people like me have been so worried about since that installment. Things seem definitely finished up with that character and Ethan Hunt in this one but they don’t do this in the obvious way and it’s not what you’re thinking... perhaps the only half surprise in the movie is the restraint by the writer/director not to do the obvious thing with her character... which is kinda nice.

And of course we have the all important score by a composer I quite like this time around, Lorne Balfe. Now, as much as I would have preferred the director retained the services of composer Joe Kraemer, as his score for Rogue Nation was possibly the best of the big screen franchise scores, Lorne Balfe does an excellent job here, as I knew he would. I really have to listen to the CD when it comes out (with extra music not on the stupid electronic release I’m told... Woohoo!) to get a more accurate impression from the score as it gets covered up by various explosive actiony noises here but from what I can hear of it, it’s not too shabby. He didn’t, from what I could make out, use Lalo Schifrin’s classic title melody as much as some of his predecessors (although The Syndicate theme also seems to be back here too) but when he does use elements of it he makes them count and I am looking forward to hearing this one away from the movie (I thought his score for the reboot of The Sweeney was superb).

And that’s about all I have to say about this one. If you are a fan of these films then you will already know what to expect and you’ll probably have a good time with this one. If you are more casual in your Mission Impossible viewing habits, however, then I would say you would be doing yourself an injustice if you didn’t watch Rogue Nation before watching Mission Impossible Fallout, to be fair, so you can get a sense of the recent history of the series. Definitely one to watch, though, when you’ve seen the others... should you choose to accept that mission.

Mission Impossible at NUTS4R2
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to click on one of the titles below to take you to my review.

Mission Impossible
Mission Impossible 2
Mission Impossible 3
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol 
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation 
Mission Impossible: Fallout

Mission Impossible - Rogue Nation

Mission In Action

Mission Impossible - Rogue Nation
2015 USA
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
UK cinema release print.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to review this fine movie without using the phrases, “pulse pounding”, “high octane” or “rollercoaster ride” because they’re such clichés, even though these specific phrases are more than true descriptions of a film which delivers on all those counts.

Mission accepted.

So here we are again. Regular readers of this blog will possibly remember that it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I first saw the movie incarnations of the Mission Impossible films. I reviewed them all, right here on this blog, and if it wasn’t for my dad finally talking me around to watching them with him (he loves them) then I wouldn’t be reviewing this one now. As it is, I would have been missing out on something pretty damn special in terms of this being a Hollywood blockbuster which more than exceeds any of my expectations of it and also, to boot, my first Mission Impossible movie seen at the cinema.

Now, it’s really not a film that I was expecting to be that good, in all honesty but, now I’ve looked the movie up on the IMDB, it comes as no real surprise to me because the director of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Christopher McQuarrie, also directed one of my favourite films to star Tom Cruise in recent years, Jack Reacher (reviewed here) and was partially responsible for the screenplay of another, Edge Of Tomorrow (reviewed here). To say he does a good job on this one, seriously, is a big understatement. It’s rare I like big budget summer movies quite this much but this one is so well put together and it’s written in such a way that, right from the second sequence in the movie, you really want Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hawke character, and the rest of the Mission Impossible team for that matter, to sort out the bad guys by whatever means necessary.

The movie starts off with a very big scene which is the main set piece used in the promotional trailer and in some of the movie posters. If, like me, you thought the film was going to gradually lead up to the sequence where we see Tom Cruise hanging from the side of a plane, think again... this sequence is just the pre-credits tease, just whetting the appetite for the real main course. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t just go from action piece to action piece without much attention to the plot... although there are a few “chain sequences” of pulse pou-... errr.... I mean, of fast paced action which will have your heartbeat racing in an enthusiastic celebration of aggressive rhythm, there is also a lot of cool espionage type storyline, well fleshed out characters, loads of old faces in the form of Ethan’s associated played by Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames, plus a  couple of new characters played by Alec Baldwin, as the film’s chief ‘good antagonist’, the villanous Sean Harris and a new female double, triple or possibly even quadruple agent named Ilsa, played stylishly by the amazing Rebecca Ferguson, who seems to be playing the role as if Ingrid Bergman was engaging in athletic fisticuffs before being handed a bunch of firearms to play with. Absolutely amazing.

The film, after the pre-credits sequence and a brilliant opening title design appropriate to the franchise, then gets absolutely brilliant with the traditional “your mission if you choose to accept it” scene... and this is where the movie took me totally by surprise which, regular readers of this column will know, is not an easy thing. It also sets up the leading villain, Sean Harris’ character Soloman Lane as the guy to hate and in this movie, he plays the head of a loosely built organisation know only as The Syndicate, who were apparently a major recurring enemy in the original Mission Impossible TV series.

After the initial set up which sees the Impossible Mission team disbanded and Ethan a fugitive from his own people, it’s up for him and his friends to outwit both Lane and the CIA to try and stop the syndicate, which involves numerous encounters with the beautiful and deadly Ilsa, a typical infiltration caper, a not so subtle or surprising scene where one of the gang gets to wear a mask (why do they put those in still... it’s always so obvious who is posing as who way before the reveal) and tons of action but, it has to be said, well choreographed, beautifully edited and not inappropriate action to the plot... I’m glad to say.

And there are some beautiful moments in the movie, to be sure. A sequence in an opera house where Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg are trying to figure out what’s going on before becoming embroiled in a movie moment not totally unlike the one in either of Hitchcock’s versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much is truly entertaining and nicely handled with some fantastic cinematography taking full advantage of the multiple vertical shapes in the interiors of the locations which are used to isolate and highlight characters within smaller compartments, chopped up from the full width of the frame. It’s really nicely put together and, since it’s such a fast moving and suspenseful sequence, something you really have to take your hat off to... if you happen to be wearing one. There’s a similar nice use of verticals used near the end of the film in a two hander sequence between Ilsa and a villanous henchman known as The Bone Doctor which, in all honesty, reminded me of scene in the cathedral/church in the 1963 James Bond movie From Russia With Love (reviewed here) and, happily, it’s no less satisfying.

There’s also a wonderfully long segment of film where we get the typical Mission Impossible infiltration caper... one which will, if you’re anything like me, have you holding your breath as much as the characters involved in this particular sequence, followed by a high oct-... err... petrol injected car chase and then, furthermore, followed by a spectacular motorcycle chase... all one after the other and punctuated by comical highlights and dialogue revelations in just the right mix that it all works and leaves you breathless when the sequence is done.

Added to this, we have the first Mission Impossible score by composer Joe Kraemer, who also scored the same director’s Jack Reacher. What can I say? Much as I loved all the scores for the franchise by Hollywood giants Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer and Michael Giacchino... Kramer’s score, for me, is by far the greatest of the Mission Impossible soundtracks so far and I’m really looking forward to that CD turning up in the post in a few weeks time. He really nails how to both use and then integrate Lalo Schifrin’s famous original TV theme for the show without using it as just a crutch for his own, truly awesome solutions to the scoring on this movie. Now, I have to say, when the film reached Morroco, the composer used a big melody which sounded extremely similar, to these old ears, to a sub theme used in Jerry Goldsmith’s score for The Mummy. Now maybe it’s a musical cliché based on a specific quirk of the locale in which this part of the movie is set... I only mention the similarity, nothing more. However, Kramer really knows how to work it into the music and he uses it in a few moments in the movie, most astonishingly in a sequence where the big sweeping melody is suddenly used as the base line to support a different musical solution a little later in the story.... which really blew me away, I can tell you. Can’t wait to listen to it away from the context of its functional use.

And that’s about it, I think. The cast are all absolutely great with Simon Pegg’s character really getting a much more prominent role here and with the always excellent Jeremy Renner seeming, perhaps, a little underused but certainly doing some great supporting work here. Rhames is grand, Ferguson is sublime, Harris and Baldwin are both really on the money and... well I’ve always liked Cruise as an actor. Not necessarily the roles he sometimes chooses but he always does a great job in whatever film he’s in and, as with many other roles, he makes you believe he’s capable of what his character is supposed to be able to do here. Added into this we have some really nice writing, great comic moments and some action sequences that make this a real rolllerco-... err... the movie equivalent of one of those big rides on tracks you see at theme parks... so that’s all good. If you’re a fan of the franchise then you will surely love this latest installment and, if not, it’s a great jumping on point to start off from, although knowing who the regular good guy characters are in this will take away a little of the intrigue of the earlier films if you watch them out of order. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation is real good time at the movies, though, and I really would be happy for them to do another one at some point soon. This review will self destruct in five seconds.



Mission Impossible at NUTS4R2
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to click on one of the titles below to take you to my review.

Mission Impossible
Mission Impossible 2
Mission Impossible 3
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol 
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation 
Mission Impossible: Fallout

Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Ghosting The Machine

Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol 
2011 USA/United Arab Emirate/ Czech Republic
Directed by Brad Bird
Paramount DVD Region 2

Warning: Spoiler protocol enabled.

Well this is interesting. I’ve only ever seen one other Brad Bird movie (which also happened to have an excellent Michael Giachinno score) and that was The Incredibles. Turns out, the fourth in the Mission Impossible franchise is actually his first stab at directing a “live action” movie and I have to say that I found this one to be the most entertaining in the series so far. Maybe it’s because espionage movies like these and others like the Bond movies are all just big live action cartoons anyway that makes Bird a natural for this kind of assignment. Or maybe I’m being a little less charitable than I could be and should just swallow the fact that Bird can obviously direct live action fine and does the animated stuff because that’s what he’s more interested in. Either way, this one is certainly the best of a sometimes lukewarm bunch of movies so I’m glad this guy stepped up to the bat.

Starting off with a jailbreak sequence as two agents, including Simon Pegg in a much less annoying incarnation of the character he played in the previous movie, get Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character out of a prison... but with him obstructing their plans just a little because he won’t go without bringing someone  else out with him... the opening titles jump start from Cruise telling Paula Patton’s Agent Carter to “light the fuse”. After a rousing titles sequence wherein we see key scenes from this film picked out and excerpted as part of the design, we go into standard Mission Impossible territory with a caper to get inside the Kremlin but, the team is piggy-backed by someone else after the same thing as they are and Ethan and his team are basically framed for blowing up the aforementioned building.

So the team is disavowed and gone ‘rogue’ (yet again... they’re always going off to do their own thing, it seems to me) and it’s up to Cruise, Pegg, Patton and their new bestest buddy, the always excellent Jeremy Renner, to stop the bad guys from nuking the world.

This film has a lot going for it. Simon Pegg loses his fake American accent (for some unexplained reason) and provides some excellent comic relief while still being a very credible part of the team. Renner and Patton are very good support and Renner even takes over from Cruise and does the ‘iconic’ dangling into space moment in this entry... seriously though, do we really need these sequences? And Michael Nyqvist, the original Mikael Blomkvist in the Swedish adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (reviewed here), The Girl Who Played With Fire (reviewed here) and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest (reviewed here) makes for a credible and pleasantly non-theatrical bad guy, for a change. This is all good stuff.

As is the nice gadgetry and little quirky things that Bird and co have put in for this little outing. The movable video corridor that Cruise and Pegg use to infiltrate part of the Kremlin, for example, is absolutely brilliant, funny and recalls the days when Wiley Coyote would order a new gadget from the Acme Company to help him try and catch Road Runner. Given Bird’s track record with animated storytelling, I’m wondering if he had some major input into that part of the writing.

Also cool was Cruise’s return to a public telephone to give his mission briefing a little helping thump to self destruct and a scene where the mask making equipment goes completely wrong and the team has to improvise. It’s all pretty good stuff.

More importantly, for the first time in a Mission Impossible film that I can see... you don’t know what’s going to happen way in advance of it happening. It doesn’t rely on a “oh, it was you all along” series of twists, which are usually easy to figure out because the studios get nervous about the audience and telegraph them too quickly, and instead we are left with a storyline where everything is up front and laid out with no surprises.

Having said that, however, there were two little things I did see coming a long way off... they were Ving Rhames and Michelle Monaghan and, I’m afraid, I was kinda expecting them to show up at some point. Rhames due solely to his past association with the film series in that he is now, along with Cruise, the only person to have appeared in all four films in the franchise to date.

With Monaghan’s character, Ethan Hunt’s wife, she is referred to all the way through the film as either having left him or having died. The fact that the writers didn’t just come up with a way to leave behind such an important narrative point very early on in the picture in a very clear manner practically writes up in mile high letters that she will be appearing at some point in the movie... I just don’t know where they’ll go with this character if they make a fifth one. Would be silly to leave her behind I think... especially since Monaghan is such a good actress and star personality.

Giacchino’s score is good too... and not just because this one is especially rich in reorchestrations of Schifrin’s original theme (which it is, the most Schifrin heavy score of all four movies I think). Proving himself one of the most versatile composers working in Hollywoodland right now, while still being humble enough to amalgamate or mimic other composers works for the good of whatever franchise he’s working on, I think Michael Giachinno will be around for a very long time and be the composer of choice for a lot of future film-makers who haven’t even started out yet. Only time will tell if he’s the Jerry Goldsmith of his time, but he’s certainly up there with the likes of Alexandre Desplat and Brian Tyler as far as I’m concerned. We shall see what we shall see... and hear what we will hear, I guess.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a really cool entry in the franchise for fans of the previous films and probably a good enough jumping on point if you’re not. Definitely will be on my “one to watch again in ten years” list. Worth a look.



Mission Impossible at NUTS4R2
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to click on one of the titles below to take you to my review.

Mission Impossible
Mission Impossible 2
Mission Impossible 3
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol 
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation 
Mission Impossible: Fallout

Piranha 3DD

Storm In A DD-Cup


Piranha 3DD USA 2012
Directed by John Gulager
Now showing in UK cinemas.

Wow. I really don’t get it.

This movie is not the film it needed to be... and is not what I was expecting for a sequel to the previous successful franchise relaunch either, for that matter.

It’s funny... up until a few weeks ago, I’d never seen any of the Piranha movies and never really had any desire to either. But then I saw the cinema trailer to this one and it made this look like a really fun movie. I knew that the original movies had been kind of revered by legions of fans over the years (which is kind of understandable since they’ve got directors like Joe Dante and James Cameron involved with them) and I figured, what the heck, I might as well check these movies out sometime soon, especially if I want to catch the new one in cinemas.

So the last few weeks I’ve been watching the previous four movies Piranha, Piranha 2: Flying Killers, Piranhas and, finally, Piranha 3D and reviewed them here on this blog before the first movie hit the cinemas. Since these reviews have come out quicker than I’d anticipated releasing them, I’ve rushed to get the movie reviews for these ones up on my blog before I write this review on the weekend of this film’s release.

So now it comes to it, the first thing that I have to say about this is that it’s nowhere near as fun as the trailer makes it out to be. Nor is it, and I’m hesitant to say this because I really didn’t like the last one very much, a worthy or even lively sequel to the shenanigans going on in the previous movie, which is where a few of the troubles with this one begin.

Set in a completely different place to the previous film, this one has very few familiar faces back from Piranha 3D... just cameo roles, really, in the form of Ving Rhames' police man (who lost his legs fighting off piranhas in the last film), his beach friend from the last one, and, of course, Christopher Lloyd, again taking the role of the “fish expert” from the previous film (although his character’s wife doesn’t seem to have been asked to come back). Then, of course, there are the piranhas themselves. The previous film had a visual punchline to the movie which took place in literally the final second or two of the final shot of the movie... when Christopher Lloyd tells the main protagonist that the piranhas they’ve been fighting are just the babys and a giant piranha whizzes over the boat and takes one of the central characters into the water with it for a snack. With this ready made set up for a sequel, I was expecting this thread of parental, giant piranha to at least get a mention, but this movie just ignores it and settles for piranha that have got confused and used the drains and water system to migrate into another small town without being noticed... well okay, they are noticed as soon as they start eating people but, since a brand new water park which connects to these same water systems is about to have its opening ceremony, the usual “you’re not closing the park” kind of conversational clichés apply.

There are some major things wrong with this film though. I wonder if it had enough budget because, honestly, even the so-called set pieces happen, more often than not, when there just aren’t that many people around to take part in them. It’s like the film is always pausing to add a new piece of fish chaos without actually flowing along visually with the bigger picture. Sure these sequences make sense and contribute a little (very little) to the advancement of what passes for a story in this one... but they still seemed to be disjointed and confused as to their intention in some sequences... that is to say, many of these sequences seem quite superfluous in their contribution to main narrative and also, I have to say, seem quite unenthusiastic in their execution. I certainly wasn’t engulfed in a wave of energy and fun on this one.

Another terrible thing about this movie is that, after a pure genius title like this which plays around with women’s bust measurements as part of its promotional identity, there is really not much nudity in it compared, even, to other movies in the series. So I did feel a bit like the final product was unrealistically represented by the marketing.

One, small, ray of light is that The Hoff is in it. Yep, David Hasselhoff is in here playing himself and doing lots of riffs and jokes regarding his time served on Baywatch, and he was kinda amusing in this because he seems to be taking himself much less than seriously than you might expect. Personally I’ve never seen an episode so I didn’t really get a lot of the jokes but some people in the audience who saw this were laughing along with him so I’m not ruling out the allure of Hasselhoff. In fact, Hasselhoff fans would do well to stay considerably into the end credits as there are a lot of outtakes and general tom-foolery taking place while the final credits roll.

And there are a lot of “credit breaks” in this movie.

Another good thing about this is that there is a main female protagonist who positively shines in regards to any other players in the movie and this, coupled with a much less objectifying or misogynistic set of characters in their attitude towards women, means that you actually feel some sympathy, or at least empathy, with some of the characters.

There’s also some semi-inventive violence again... although it does, to be fair, seem more tacked on there in a rather more blatant and less subtle way than I found it to be in the previous movie... although it irks me to say the previous movie was, in any way, subtle about anything, to be perfectly honest with you. The majority of the carnage takes place in a small water park and when the camera finally cranes up to take in the dead on the final “field of battle”... I was quite surprised how unimpressive it all looked and, lets face it, seriously underwhelming... like the purse strings had been cut sometime after funding had been promised or something similar. I’d hate to think there was no reason for this blatant disregard for an impressive climax to the movie (despite a nice ending shot of fish-induced decapitation).

Out of the five Piranha movies I’ve watched over the last few weeks, I can honestly say that I can’t find much to recommend in any of them. This one is, especially, quite lame and I expect, if it didn’t have the gimmicky title and the gimmicky process to match it, that it would perhaps have wound up as a straight to DVD release under any other circumstances. This film was not a fun watch and I think I’ve had my fill of trashy fish-monsters for a while.* Time to get on to some better quality movies as a counter balance. I need more Kurosawa in my life... I’ll sort it out.

*Coming sometime soon.... my review of The Alligator People!