Sean’s movie thoughts

This is good but too long. Maybe that is because it is the first of two films. The plot is that some AI has gone rogue and Ethan and his team are called into action. Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust is mixed up in this situation. Stunt are good. It is nice to see the team again and the theme song still sounds good after all these years. I felt the car chase did not go on too long.  I think I liked a few other films in this series more than this but I liked it. I liked Alec Baldwin's speech in Rogue Nation, that was fun. Also I liked the idea of a rogue Mission Impossible team (the Syndicate). 

I think the Mission Impossible series really works because it is committed and sincere. Tom Cruise is committed to doing as many stunts as possible and that comes acros while watching these movies. He broke an ankle during the making of Fallout while doing a stunt. The makers of the movies seem committed to doing old fashioned and amazing stunts. When I say the films are sincere, I am not saying that they are humorless. However the films are not ironic. Also Marvel movies, as much as I enjoy most of them, have a tendency to undercut the drama with humor. (Thor Ragnorok does it a lot.) The Mission Impossible movies don’t do that.  I have not seen the first Mission Impossible movies in years and I mostly thinking about the last three movies. I remember in at least two of the first three movies the bad guy is a former member of the Mission Impossible team.

What is Ving Rhames up to these days? I feel like I never see him out of the Mission Impossible movies. So it is nice to see him here. This time Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team are trying to recover some stolen plutonium. A CIA agent named Walker (Henry Cavill) is assigned to the team and his orders are to get the plutonium no matter what. Isla Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) is back from the last movie and so is the villain. Some people have hidden motives. The story is mostly an excuse to go from amazing action or stunt sequence to another. There is an amazing fight in a bathroom. Jeremy Renner’s character from the last two movies is not back. Cruise is good as usual in the role and the knowledge that he is performing a lot of his own stunts adds to the  enjoyment of the film. I am not sure Rebecca Ferguson needed to return for this film, she did not have a lot to do. This might be my harshest comment about the movie. This movie is pretty good.

I have seen all five Mission Impossible movies but I have not seen any of the first three in at least a decade. I don’t think they pop up on cable on a semi-regular basis like the Star Wars movies do (for example.) At the end of the month, the sixth film in the franchise opens and I am not sure if I should go back and watch the first three films in the series. The first one I remember being decent. The second one has become interesting to think about because actor Dougray Scott was supposed to play Wolverine in the first X-men movie but he got hurt on a stunt while making Mission Impossible and Hugh Jackman became Wolverine. How different would things have been if Scott hadn’t been injured is fun to think about but impossible to know. I don’t remember much about the third film. The fourth and fifth films in the series are really good. I liked the fourth one and I thought the fifth one was even better. The upcoming film, Mission Impossible Fallout, looks like it will be really good....