action. • Mission Impossible 7: Another Redudant Action Movie

      For a family bonding experience, I went to the cinema this summer with my mom and uncle to watch the lastest Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One.

      My mom and uncle both like action movies and don't really care much about the plot as long as the movie is entertaining. As for me, action movies aren't my go-to but I can enjoy some heart-racing action sequences time to time.  

      Admittedly, I don't know much about the Mission Impossible franchise. I've only seen the movie which was filmed in Dubai because that's where I grew up, so naturally I was curious as to how it would be portrayed. Even though I haven't watched all the previous installments, my review on this latest release would remain the same either way. I found it terribly boring and predictable.  

      You find many action movie tropes in this one: car/motorcycle chase, bomb threat, night club or fancy party goes wrong, fast running, train that won't stop, gunfire and knife fight, murder of a loved one and thus desire for revenge... The list goes on. It felt like I've already seen the movie because of the typical action scenes you find in other movies of the genre. For example, picture the protagonist and the antagonist fighting on top of a moving train and while fighting they need to dodge railway infrastructures, lie down while going through a tunnel, or not fall off by hanging on to a part of the train. Very familiar, right?  

      Now there's nothing wrong with using tropes as long as it's combined with something new so it doesn't become repetitive or predictable. What I did find really interesting is a new kind of threat or villain: a sentient AI that is smarter and more powerful than humans. The manipulation of surveillance cameras to "erase" someone, the control of a voice-reactive bomb that recognizes and psychologically toys with the diffuser, the hijacking of communications and immitation of a teammate's voice... These events clearly illustrated the level of intelligence and danger of the "entity". Yet this threat becomes completely passive in the last third of the movie which focused more on Gabriel, one of the (most boring) villains, and the retrieval of a special key.  

      I think it would have been more interesting to see the AI continuously sabotage the protagonists' plans and simultaneously cause havoc in other parts of the world on its own. Yet what the characters were afraid of is letting the key fall into the wrong hands which would lead the AI to be controlled by a government with ill intentions. I would have liked to see the AI growing in power and autonomy, and see the protagonists struggling to overcome such an incredible enemy who is always multiple steps ahead of them.  

      Since this movie is part of a franchise, the plot has to connect with the previous ones. I have to admit that I didn't care about a single character and didn't feel like the characters were really scared of a possible world war or even the end of the world brought by the rogue AI. Even during conversations there was a serious lack of emotions that it felt completely unnatural and robotic.   

      As much as I want to keep ranting about this movie (like why was there a need for a knife fight when they use guns all the time?), I'll wrap this up by saying that Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part one is a very cookie-cutter action movie with an underused potential of an AI trope and dragged out action sequences which made the movie longer than it needed to be. Three hours... and for what? 

      If you want a fun action movie (with lots of blood), I'd recommend watching Bullet Train with Brad Pitt instead.   

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