I haven’t seen this (and just one of the Mission Impossible movies), because eh whatevs. But I thought the first season of the Reacher TV series was a lot of fun (and the second was awful), so what the hey.

Yeah, that’s a bad guy, alright.

This starts in a pretty intriguing way?

But then grinds to a complete halt.

Hey! That’s not Thad! We want Thad!

Hey! Did they hire only puny actors, or is Cruise standing on a milk crate this entire movie?

Hey! Cruise is pretty good at doing this guy… He’s got the Thadness.

Man, this is boring. The first five minutes were interesting, and now there’s been over 20 minutes of really dull infodumping.

Fight! Fight!

This is almost like an episode or two of a New Era Of Quality TV series — it feels strangely padded.

Werner!

Well, OK, this has some really inventive action scenes.

Hey, it’s that guy.

I enjoy hypercompetence porn as much as the next person, and those scenes were fun. But oh so many dull moments in between. It could easily have been 30 minutes shorter without dropping any plot elements, really.

Jack Reacher. Christopher McQuarrie. 2012. ⚂

I bought a bunch of movies from Criterion (kinda at random), so I thought it was time I started watching some of them.

Very mysterious!

I’m not sure whether this is a horror movie? Or more of a psycho thriller kind of thing?

Terrific performances all around, and it looks great. It’s just that I’m not really that fond of those “is she insane, or are somebody trying to drive her insane, or ARE THERE GHOSTS!!!!” stories? I’m sitting here and going GET ON WITH IT which is totally the wrong approach and not the movie’s fault at all.

See? Looks awesome.

This movie makes a lot of interesting choices, like making the Kidman character (who is the protagonist) absolutely insufferable — a religious fanatic, somewhat sadistic, stupid almost beyond belief…

But everybody else (including half the children) are evil or ineffective, so it evens out?

OK, if you haven’t seen this movie before, and there’s a chance you will, stop reading now.

I’ll leave you with this gif, but close this tab now!

Are they gone?

Wow, I didn’t see that coming at all! He out-Shyamalaned Shyamalan!

I’m in total awe of that ending, really.

But even so, the first 90 minutes were not fun? But like I said, that might just be me, because I don’t really enjoy the sort of movie er I thought this was, and just because it turned out to be something else, that doesn’t make it more enjoyable. For me.

But it’s certainly well-made.

The Others. Alejandro Amenábar. 2001. ⚃

This has like 20 producers… I kinda thought those days were over, and that Netflix or Amazon would just hand out silly amounts of money to everybody, but not to Cronenberg, I guess?

And this is the second movie of that name Cronenberg has made! The first one was er “eek” I think I would summarise it. And I haven’t really been looking forward to watching this movie, but it Cronenberg, so I have to.

Oops.

Hm, these mechanical-organic things certainly remind you of similar things in eXistenZ — but they looked so much better in that movie. Even slithery things in, say, Videodrome looked 100x better than this plastic thing that can barely move…

OK, I was worried that this was going to be totally gross since I’ve actually read reviews of this movie. But it’s not! Instead it’s totally CGI? I mean, they’ve got all these kinda neat sets, but then they cut to 1995 level CGI for all the surgery shots? And possibly some muppet show stuff.

It’s disturbing, but not because it’s gross. More because even with 20 producers, Cronenberg didn’t have the budget to do effects that look OK.

I’m finding it very hard to keep paying attention to this movie. It’s just… dare I say it… kinda boring? Perhaps viewers who have a surgery fetish would find this thrilling? It’s got all these weird elements that should make this an interesting movie, but instead every thread seem to disintegrate. It’s without focus?

Two repair people are better than no repair people.

Anyway, I’ve seen all of Cronenberg’s movies — some several times. And his movies are by no means all wonderful or anything. But… I didn’t really enjoy this much. And it even ended exactly like I guessed it would.

Crimes of the Future . David Cronenberg. 2022. ⚂