Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation - I don't have much of a history with this series, but this was really well made. For instance, the opera scene is particularly well directed, including all of the spy stuff you could possibly want as well as questions and turns in character intentions and you don't really have a sense of what's going to happen. I have not seen Rebecca Ferguson in anything before, but she is kind of a badass and she holds her own as Tom Cruise's equal, which is refreshing. If anything, Simon Pegg's character is the one who is damselized. He and Cruise work really well together (almost making Cruise seem human, which is a feat). The movie is over two hours long but it felt really well paced, with no one set piece overstaying its welcome. The plot itself is mostly fine but does a good job of making the stakes personal rather than about saving the world, and I tend to like those kinds of stories more.
*Tom Cruise's spine must have shattered into a billion pieces after bouncing in a car a billion times but Cruise just jumps out and does a Cruise run (you know the one) to a motorcycle.
*This movie has the line "Ethan Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny" which is absurd and I couldn't stop giggling. .
*Villain is kind of weird, I guess he's set up to be Hunt's foil and an equal but you don't really get that impression. The dude's voice is kind of weird, and I wonder if that's his actual voice or something put on.
*There's at least one Tom Cruise is short joke.
*Cruise's final plans to deal with the big bad was pretty well done, I thought.
*Tom Cruise himself is such a weird dude but he does do this style of action film very well, and I don't begrudge him doing these while he can (dude's like 50?). It makes me wonder what his post action career is going to be like.
People talk up Ghost Protocol, which was pretty good, but this amps up the stakes a lot more effectively and has a stronger supporting cast and villain (I don't even remember who Ghost Protocol's villain was).
The Gift - I don't know exactly what to feel about this. It's fairly well made, and I was surprised that Joel Edgerton was the director on it. It's pretty well acted and does a good job of creating tension and playing with your expectations (Jason Bateman has to be a nice guy, right?). However, it didn't really come together for me in the end since it does a lot of exposition. Like, everything is explained, leaving little about character motivation to the imagination.
The plot becomes very Oldboy-esque in the end. I did like how it plays on your sympathies and expectations, since the "stranger comes in and terrorizes a family unit" thing has been done so many times, and in the end it kind of still is that, but not quite in the way that you expect coming in. Bateman's character is pretty much unredeemable, and maybe that's kind of the point in a morality play like this, but he reverts to stereotypical bully behavior for no good reason (ACCEPT MY APOLOGY). Maybe he's just at a boiling point or something, but I think it works a little better if he does try to apologize in earnest and still gets what is coming to him. As is, he's completely irredeemable and I guess that is set up so we don't feel that bad when his life is completely fucked in the end? Your sympathies aren't really with Gordo either, since he's just an odd, creepy presence, and what he (might) have done is completely monstrous.
*Bateman is the shittiest at security, leaving physical files in a drawer where the key is in another compartment of the drawer.
*Bateman's reaction to meeting Gordo is really undersized given what he did to him. This makes some of the earlier scenes a little weird, like why would he even accept a dinner party invitation from him?
*Rebecca Hall does a pretty decent job and is pretty much the only sympathetic character but then is thrown aside in the last act. "I'm pregnant and have no more role but to be a pawn in this scheme!"
*The two jump scares are admittedly effective but really cheap. The shower scenes are Hitchcockian, playing on the expectation that nothing good can come of when a woman showers
