dual personalities

I’ve mentioned before that action movies are an unexpected overlap in the Venn diagram of genres DN and I will choose when browsing movies. For a while now, I’ve been promising DN that I will watch some iteration of Mission: Impossible with him. Well, this week, the time came to make good on my promise.

I didn’t not like the movie, but I had a number of complaints:

First of all, the movie is TWO AND A HALF HOURS long. We watched it over two nights. That is way too long. The movie had too much plot (but also, somehow, very little plot?) and could have used some extensive editing.

As you might guess, there isn’t a whole lot of character development, but there are two women characters that are vaguely in love with Tom Cruise and look EXACTLY THE SAME. So the whole time, we were like, was that the spy? Is she the one that killed that guy? Is she married to Ethan? Is she chasing them right now? Why? Only at the very end, when the two women were in the same room, were we certain who was who.

Speaking of character development, none of the allegiances were entirely clear, and thus none of the betrayals were surprising. There’s a scene with Alec Baldwin (who put him in this movie!?!?) representing IMF and Angela Bassett representing CIA and and then a good guy in a literal mask of a bad guy, and at the end of it, you’re still just left assuming that “good” and “bad” are fairly arbitrary designations.

It’s fine; I do not expect stellar writing out of a spy movie. Typically, I just need a handsome lead or two.

But TOM CRUISE IS NOT THAT LEAD. You might have heard that he does his own stunts. I guess that’s cool, but it’s also insane, and ALSO he looks pretty stupid when he’s running. And he runs a lot in this movie. And really, as a child of the nineties, and more importantly a teen of the aughts, I just can’t with Tom Cruise. We’re talking about a man who got this excited about KATIE HOLMES:

I’ll take Melissa McCarthy any day.