Mission Impossible: Fallout, let's see how many cool stunts Tom cruise can do and call it a movie. Unpopular opinion alert, I did not like the new mission Impossible. How can everyone be taken by a series do extreme stunts that are tied together I a loose plot that tried to be clever but is constantly falling all over itself. While it is impressive the amount and type of stunts that Tom cruise performs, a good movie they do not make. Seeing cruise jump out of a plane and high pressure skydive is cool, but it would absolutely not happen when they are jumping into a thunderstorm, no matter how important the objective is. It actually shows how dumb the government is if they are not keeping track of the weather and are suddenly surprised by incliment weather. And another cool stunt is when he so climbing a rope to get to a flying helicopter. When he reaches the copter, just to ad tension, he falls all the way back down to the bottom of the rope so he can climb up again. This is all despite there being a timeline on how saving the world. There seems to be a running theme with this set of films where the directors simply ignore basic passage of time and how long it takes for people to do things. It is also impossible to maintain the suspension of disbelief when the overall theme of this movie is that Ethan Hawke is THE ONLY person who can ever save the world. If he is not around, bad things happen. But the true question is, how many times can the government disavow a man and then take him back after he goes against their orders. I am sorry but that is not how government works. Maybe they do it once or even twice but eventually he would be viewed as expendable and let go. You can't just be Tom Cruise and constantly be given the benefit of the doubt. While this would be a fine action film if you looked at it as a stand alone film with no past or future, one cannot discount all of the baggage the previous films bring into the film. Sadly can only give Mission Impossible a C and hopefully it will be the last of the series.
Adrift: Marketing at its best. Shailene Woodley again shows off why she is becoming one of Hollywood's most underrated actors of her generation. Just like her performance in The Spectacular Now, she undersells the magnitude of her emotions. While the viewer can look at her and see a simple young girl who doesn't truly understand her emotions, Woodley secretly demonstrates how powerful she feels and how it gets her through the emotion trauma of being Adrift on a damaged sailboat for 40 days. Based on the true story about Tami Oldham Ashcraft, who began sailing from Haiti to the San Diego with her boyfriend Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin) when they run into a hurricane. Tami then has to survive on her own with Richard incapacitated and find a way back to land with a broken boat and no electricity. This is one film that skillfully uses the flashback feature that had been beaten to death by Hollywood. The movie opens with Tami awakening with the hurricane over, her boat in shambles and Richard nowhere to be found. It then proceeds to flash back and forth between what lead to her crossing to Pacific and how she is surviving with so little. If Shailene continues with performances like this she will be a staple in Hollywood for years to come. A
Skyscraper: It's no Die Hard but is worth the climb. While many will get hung up on the physics and believitability of Dwayne Johnson jumping from a crane and him being able to climb 100 stories and not be out of breath, they are all forgetting one important thing; He's DWAYNE 'THE ROCK' JOHNSON!!! He can do anything and make it look easy. Any movie he touches automatically starts with a 2 star rating solely based on his innate magnetism. Everything he touches turns to gold. Try to name one movie that he has made that is truly awful. Go ahead I'll wait ... That's because you can't. Sure there are flaws in Skyscraper, mainly almost every scene without Johnson, but so does every blockbuster movie these days. If your looking for a fun exciting crowd pleaser, Skyscraper is for you. B
