Married reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch the seventh episode in the long-running Tom Cruise vehicle.
SHE SAW
I find 163 minutes to be an audacious length for a movie, especially an action movie. The length of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One alone made me have some uncharitable thoughts about Tom Cruise: late onset midlife crisis? He’s on a crusade to Make Movies Great Again and seems to think the great movies of our time were 90s blow-stuff-up action blockbusters. He and I are just not going to see eye to eye on that. While I respect his commitment to the genre, someone needs to rein him in because I’m never getting those extra 63 self-indulgent minutes of my life back.
I recognise almost every critic disagrees with me. The film has been universally lauded as an incredible accomplishment in filmmaking. An accomplishment? Yes. Incredible? I have some notes.
The film opens on board a Russian submarine where all the actors are speaking English with Russian accents. Some of these minor players have more dialogue in that opening scene alone than the four female characters in the film have combined. I’d love to see a dialogue breakdown. One main female character doesn’t utter a word until the final scene. Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust, a character who appears in the previous two MI films and plays a significant role in this one, only has one real dialogue scene throughout the whole film. Hayley Atwell, Cruise’s new leading lady, has said publicly that she was shooting MI7 for over three months without speaking a word of dialogue. Atwell says learning how to let her physical presence do the talking was a “masterclass in pure cinematic experience” but the men in the movie seem to have plenty of actual words to say; no one seems to be suggesting they rely on sultry expressions to tell their story.