marcicat | movie review: Mission Impossible Rogue Nation

At first I was all ‘yes I want to watch it!’ because I actually thought Ghost Protocol was pretty good and left things at an interesting point. And then I was all ‘no thanks’ because really, the ‘there’s only one woman in each movie and she’s completely interchangeable’ is just not cool.

And then I watched it anyway, because I have a cold and I wanted an action movie, and Jeremy Renner (as far as I can tell) plays exactly the same character in every movie he’s in, which I enjoy. Somewhat similar to Ghost Protocol, he appeared to be the only person in this movie to realize what a total human disaster Ethan Hunt is.

I actually thought at one point that this movie was taking a dark turn — in many ways it presented itself as the story of an IMF agent having a complete mental breakdown. (It reminded me a lot of the Batman movie with Bane, in that it made a lot more sense if you assume that the whole thing was some kind of dreamsharing psychological intervention intended to shore up the crumbling psyche of a highly unstable individual.)

It’s the same story we keep getting again and again: the Syndicate, Bane, Hydra, SPECTRE, Moriarty — secret super-smart supervillain pulls the strings behind the scenes. Who can stop them? Only one man! Super-strong, super-smart, crosses every line to get the bad guy, only to become the very enemy he was trying to defeat. Lose-lose.

And I honestly can’t tell if these stories are intended as cautionary tales, or if movie-makers actually think they’re churning out feel-good action flicks.

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.