kinoreview

Mission: Impossible - Fallout impressed me, but it did not involve me. The stunts and set pieces are indeed a sight to behold, but the story and characters are so utterly generic that it becomes a rather detached exercise of 'I wonder how they did that?'. It's as if they began by storyboarding the set-pieces and then assembled the hackneyed premise as a perfunctory afterthought.

Again, the set pieces are amongst the best in the business, but sometimes even these fail to impress, especially some of the combat. The problem is that in the world of Mission: Impossible, everyone has superhuman powers of strength, agility and recovery; we see a litany of characters, both men and women, beat the hell out of each other with an absurdly gymnastic style of violence that's so bereft of consequence that it wears thin by the film's second burst of tiresomely frenetic melee. As the The Raid series demonstrates, fighting, even amongst the highly-trained, is a nasty, brutish affair - not a balletic, bloodless spectacle of flying kicks and spinning torsos.

This isn't the film's undoing, however, and neither is the trite plot, the real drag is the character work. Fans of the franchise will no doubt welcome the familiar faces and enjoy their chemistry, but to the uninitiated (i.e. Me), the IMF crew were so-so, and several antagonistic characters, namely Erika Sloane and the White Widow, were smug in a decidedly charmless manner.

Still, despite the negative tone of this review, Mission: Impossible - Fallout is not a bad film, just an overrated one.

Annihilation riffs on Stalker, Predator and The Thing and manages to be worse than all of them, even Stalker, and that was really boring.

The problem is that Garland's script is more interested in the science fiction of 'The Shimmer' rather than the characters, so we end up with Lena (Portman), the bland protagonist; Dr. Ventress (Leigh), the insufferable team leader with a smugly nonchalant demeanour; Anya (Rodriguez), an aggressive, thuggish stock character; and Josie (Thompson), a bookish non-entity. There was one other, I think, but when the characters are this disposable, who cares?

There is little to make up for this dearth of character and chemistry; we get some sense of adventure and a few thrills and scares but in each case they are fleeting and mediocre. Instead, we get a bit of jumped-up B-movie science fiction that's presented in a miserably glum, portentous manner. Also, the CGI has a distinct lack of tangibility and is thoroughly overused.