Sorry couldn’t resist the title. I bet if I did a search I’d find hundreds like it already. What can I say it is a classic line.
Well hats off to Mr Abrams. The best of the franchise so far. I liked the first one but it lacked the team element for most of the film. MI, to me, was very much about the team. The second one didn’t work, which was a shame because John Woo is one of my favourite filmmakers but his take on MI just wasn’t right. This one was twisty, clever, well plotted, beautifully paced and well made. Best of all it used a lot of the MI moves – the new take on the face mask and the exit from the Vatican on the boat was classic MI to name two elements. Lalo Schifrin’s theme still beat any modern dance or metal reimagining in 4/4, 5/4 just gives it an edge like horror films using dissonance. I’m pretty certain some of the incidental music was based on the scores from TV episodes. Bringing in the private life of the MI team members goes against classic MI but worked because it gave you a reason to actually care about Mr Hunt the person rather than the agent archetype. Great use of McGuffin’s too.
Now all I want is for MI 4 to see them dare to do a tense character driven psychological piece set in a small, brutalistic, concrete location in the post Warsaw pact European People’s Republic. Be brave and give at least half the film to cracking the bad guy without once needing an explosion, gadget or a gun. That’s the one MI standard that has yet to be more than alluded to that I really want to see. Of course once they find out what they need to know let every shade of chaos free. For a classic ending leave the bad guy in the hands of his own bosses. Oh and no more IMF agents gone bad: that will start to get old fast.
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