Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018)

There are tons of spy movies out there, but Mission Impossible is done extraordinarily well, with some of the most exciting action scenes there are. Tom Cruise is 56 but he is still a real action star.  He runs so fast on camera and he jumps out of planes (that scene is really impressive); he is unstoppable! Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames are hilarious. They're actually my favorite part of the movie. The story has really excellent bits. The first half of the story works, and the second half of the story works, separately. But then the second half of the story makes the first half irrelevant. A few issues with the plot. It revolves around three nuclear weapons. The original story in the first half has an appropriate use of nuclear weapons, but the second half makes use of the nukes in a conventional way, meaning that it is irrelevant that the weapons are nuclearized since ordinary explosives would have done the same trick. It's also kind of insensitive and tasteless to set your nuclear weapons movie in Kashmir, a region known for nearly starting a nuclear war. Finally Rebecca Ferguson and Michelle Monaghan look exactly the same. They could've dyed someone's hair because I did not know they were separate people until they were on screen together. 

Patriots Day (2016)

Mark Wahlberg continues his collaboration with Peter Berg, following Lone Survivor and Deepwater Horizon. Does that make a trilogy? They obviously feature a different cast of characters, but Wahlberg consistently plays the American hero. The film perhaps focuses on our fictional hero a little too much. I understand that he is the protagonist but you get the sense that the film wants to be about people. The beginning and end feature a cast of characters that are largely missing from the middle of the film, absent from the action. But they should be the focus, a portrait of a strong and resilient city. The great drama of the film is of course the manhunt that captivates the city. But there is a lot of buildup to get to that point. The omniscient point of view perhaps reduces the thrill because we always know what is happening on the other side.  The film stirs up emotion because it's about a close-knit community. It's Boston. The accents won't let you forget it.