Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

The final episode goes to a lot of trouble to tie in characters and storylines from across the previous I-don't-know-how-many movies, and the result is an exhausting first hour of bombast, but once these operatics are out of the way, the action starts - also exhausting (impossible missions, truly, in sunken submarines in subzero temperatures, and high-speed dogfights and plane-hopping at high altitudes) but exhausting in exactly the way fans of the Mission: Impossible movies want.

★★★★☆

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

These Mission Impossible movies have steadily become more bombastic with agents like Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt - old now, his old experienced eyes staring out from under a peculiarly manicured lawn of hair and through impossibly youthful skin - now uttering lines like, "We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close--and those we never meet" - eye roll - but the set-pieces showcasing 'those' stunts and offering visions of near-future tech, plus an entertaining sequence on the Oreint Express and a pretty good snarling, gnashing new villain played by Pom Klementieff, are enough to keep you watching, just not with as much excitement as when you watched episodes 1, 4, 5 and 6.

★★★☆☆

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Hector and the Search For Happiness (2014)

Things momentarily improve when Toni Collette turns up in the last third and shines brightly as the only genuine thing on the screen, but otherwise this is a nauseating affair about a psychiatrist (Simon Pegg) - a sometimes accident-prone Mr Bean, a sometimes naive trenchcoated Monsieur Hulot, an occasionally slapstick Charlie Chaplin, once a midair doctor, and at other times a wide-eyed Walter Mitty fantasist - who zips around the world like that Eat Pray Love person, searching for happiness, which he finds and packages up in fifteen one-line platitudes that appear on the screen occasionally throughout the movie like patronising summary statements of all the nonsense that has come before - cartoon sequences, a brutal kidnapping, mawkish travelogues, cloying romance, slapstick - a series of events seemingly intended as a "wondrous kaleidoscope" of the human condition but just irritating.  

★★☆☆☆

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Mission: Impossible Fallout (2018)

About the only area that could be improved is the likeability of the central characters but otherwise action doesn't get much better than this two-and-a-half-hour string of foot, motorbike, car and helicopter chases filmed so spectacularly every microfacial expression on Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt's face is crystal clear as he careens cars through city streets, dogfights over Kashmir, sprints glamorous European city blocks at roof level and, as is known very well right from the start, saves the world from the dastardly plot of a bamboozling number of counter- and counter-counter-spies in what is essentially the same plot as Rogue Nation.

★★★★☆

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Ready Player One (2018)

The ragtag bunch of best friends has been replaced by a ragtag bunch of avatars of virtual strangers; the Fratelli family is an evil mega-corporation; One-Eyed Willy's treasure is an Easter Egg worth trillions hidden in a virtual world stuffed full of unamusing pop culture references - and the fun is in short supply in Steven Spielberg's busy but soulless millenial update of The Goonies.

★★★☆☆

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Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

Years after its release in 2013, this M:I entry - the better-than-usual fourth in the series - happened to come on TV while I was sitting with the person I'd gone to see it with in the cinema, and neither of us could recall a single plot detail - only that Simon Pegg returns as Benji, that seemingly constipated comic-relief tech guy who bungles every part of the mission (Ethan, does Benji need to be trained up before going into the field?), that Ethan Hunt suction-cups up a Dubai skyscraper, races through a sandstorm, and that there is a stunt in a hotel involving diamonds and Mission: Impossible's clunkiest spy tool yet - a fake arm on a white man in a Chinese waiter uniform (guess who) - which all just goes to show how little bearing plot has on how enjoyable an M:I episode is.

★★★★☆

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Star Trek Beyond (2016)

That scene, barely a second long, showing Sulu when he is not at the helm of the Enterprise is a brilliant addition to a series that at its core is a celebration of universal diversity and inclusion, with this particular episode also succeeding where perhaps Into Darkness didn't, delivering good old reliable Star Trek space exploration, action, humour and philosophy — the franchise doesn't need too many tweaks or new skins or tricks, as its fifty year anniversary this year clearly demonstrates.

★★★★☆

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Hot Fuzz (2007)

This is a hilarious genre-mashing comedy - part Lethal Weapon buddy cop action flick, part Miss Marple English village mystery, and part The Wicker Man - about a very earnest, high-achieving city cop posted to a small English village where the beat is particularly quiet but after a hilarious sequence showing the policeman exerting his zero tolerance on bemused villagers, schoolchildren and geese, a sinister criminal network with creepy ritualistic practices rears its head.

★★★★☆

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Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

A terror attack sets in motion the convoluted events of this 2013 Star Trek episode which eventually ties together a number of plot threads about warheads, cryogenically frozen superhumans and an Enterprise stopover at Kronos where the Klingons live, but in Director J J Abrams' hands, this scifi action is punchy, fun, exciting and full of ace special effects even if it apparently disappointed Trekkies and contains no openly gay Starfleet officers.

★★★☆☆

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