Dear faithful readers (both of you!), welcome to my return to Movies. I promise I didn't forget to write any of these reviews, I just haven't watched any movies lately! And what better way to start back up again than with a review of one of the movies of all time.
Let us begin by imagining that we're some movie studio executives, and the year is 2022. We're forward-thinking, we see the trends, generative AI is finally coming to fruition, we can just feed prompts to the system and it will make it for us, and it will be perfect (computers know everything and don't make mistakes). We pull up the prompt and type:
AI, make me a mashup movie! I want it to be a little Mission Impossible, a lot of John Wick But Now He's a Pacifist, and maybe a dash of the Fast & Furious (nothing is more important than Family, after all). Oh, you know what's cool right now? AI! So throw a little Matrix in there. Great, wow, you nailed it on the first try, let's just go with that and hope it makes a billion dollars.
Oh, was I supposed to say something about the actual movie that they generated? Well, it's a pretty generic spy movie! It has some action scenes and some running and some talking, and some double-crossing. Certainly, if you had a bingo card of Spy Movie Things, you'd be winning a lot of prizes. It's kind of impressive how little original content it has, actually.
I would have mentioned Bourne in my mashup if Mission Impossible wasn't already that by default. He has a John Wick opening - in fact basically identical to the last Wick movie, complete with horseback gunfight in the desert. He John Wicks through random narrow corridors and nightclubs. Randomly, there is an alarming number of stage magic involving physical sleight of hand (probably should have focused on this more, actually). Half of the movie could have been written for Bullet Train instead, except at least Bullet Train tried to be funny. He even has the Architect from the Matrix sequels show up to explain that ergo concordantly vis-a-vis AI, and so on.
I do admit it was kind of funny of ChatGPT to make itself the main character in its own script. It even makes the most generic possible AI sounds! *bwum bwuuum*! Why would it make these sounds out loud?? It can talk it if wants to communicate! But it's all part of the envisioning of an "AI" as some kind of sci-fi pop culture fever dream mashup itself: an immense threat to all humans (for reasons, trust us), self-conception as a weird light orb with bwuum bwuum noises, somehow controlling totally random technology (how exactly does it even connect to most of this stuff?), while also being totally unaware of other obviously exploitable technology like Benji's self-driving car or their laptops. It somehow has infinite computing power to imagine every scenario and control everything, except when the script would immediately fall apart if it had used that power.
Now all this absolute nonsense may make the movie sound kind of cool in a Hackers sort of way, but don't be fooled, because it isn't.
Score: 4/10
IMDb: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
PS: Here's my pitch: keep making these things until Tom literally dies in one of these stunts. The moment it happens you have your final movie in the series; Ethan dies, and it transitions immediately into a documentary-style film in which his surviving pals reflect on Ethan's life in their current world, one in which that movie's villain has won, and completed all his goals, because Ethan died trying to stop him. It will end with Simon Pegg looking directly at the camera and lamenting that unfortunately, this mission did turn out to be impossible.
PPS: Tom Cruise does that weird thing where he flexes his gills a lot in this movie. If you know what I'm talking about, you can't miss it.
