WARNING: SPOILERS

Really? No one on the internet—meaning everyone in the world—has mentioned Pom Klementieff going full Adam Ant in the latest “Mission: Impossible”? I had to create this image myself? C’mon, kids, don’t make the old man do the heavy lifting. I’m Tom Cruise’s age.

I hate to say it but I was bored again. Bored with the last one, bored with this one. As Elton sang, I’ve seen this movie, too.

I went with friends who dug it, who feel “M:I” movies are “a cut above,” and they’re not wrong: great stunts, slam-bang action, exotic locales. They ratchet all that up to make it pop. It’s the same but bigger.

At least this time the plot doesn’t revolve around an IMF traitor: Jon Voight, Dougray Scott, Billy Cruddup, Henry Cavill—they all betrayed us. Now not. Maybe because IMF barely exists? It’s a skeleton crew, just Tom, Ving, Simon and maybe Rebecca as longtime love interest Ilsa Faust. Wait, did I say longtime? I was thinking of Michelle Monaghan as Julia, the nurse to whom he was engaged back in III, and who shows up in IV and maybe V, and anyway this movie reveals an even earlier love interest, Marie (Mariela Garriga), whom Ethan can’t protect and who dies. There’s so much vague love/vague tragedy in Ethan’s life—all with tall leggy brunettes—it’s hard to keep up. His stunts get bigger and his love gets vaguer.

Two halves of a doohickey
Most of the M:I rules that I laid out last time still apply. No matter how many times Ethan saves the world, he always begins the next movie under suspicion by replaceable bureaucratic types. There’s a crazy man (Gabriel, Esai Morales) with crazy terrorist plans (liaison to a sentient AI called “The Entity”), and he makes it personal with Ethan (Gabriel is the guy who killed Marie). Ethan runs through exotic cities in his super upright motion, does crazy stunts, saves the day. Well, in this one he saves the morning, since it's To Be Continued. It’s two and a half hours but “Part One.” That was part of the weight I felt watching. Five hours of this?

It didn’t help that last month I saw the latest “Indiana Jones,” which begins with a battle atop a moving train and concerns a worldwide search for two halves of a doohickey that can end life as we know it. “M:I7”? It concerns a worldwide search for two halves of a doohickey that can end life as we know it and ends with a battle atop a moving train. Completely different. 

The two halves here are keys, and together they form a cruciform key, and it unlocks … what again? Early on, there’s a top-level intelligence briefing between Denlinger (Cary Elwes) and great supporting TV players like Mycroft Holmes (Mark Gatiss, NSA), Ellaria Sand (Indira Varma, DIA) and DA Buckner (Charles Parnell, NRO). This is when the boredom first hit me. Not because it was expository but because it felt fake. It wasn’t one person bringing Denlinger up to speed with a PowerPoint but everyone in the room taking turns, as coordinated as an Astaire-Rogers routine. “That’s not how it goes,” I thought. By trying to make it exciting, they made it dull. For me anyway.

I forget—did Ethan get one of the keys from Ilsa in the desert? I think he did. You could’ve lost that scene. The other key he’s planning to intercept at the Dubai Airport, but then, oops, international pickpocket and leggy brunette Grace (Hayley Atwell) takes it first, and there’s a lot of back and forth, and flirting, and masks coming off, and all the while Ethan is also being pursued by U.S. agents led by Nucky’s brother (Shea Whigham playing Briggs), while “the Entity” toys with Luther and Benji with a fake bomb scare. Then it’s Rome, then Venice, and there’s car chases and foot races, and masks coming off. That’s where Ilsa sacrifices herself to save Grace, and where Ethan vows revenge against Gabriel, her killer. Except he can’t vow too much revenge since only Gabriel knows what is the what with the cruciform key—although apparently everyone knows it’s the only thing that can save the world. We don’t know what it’s for but it’s the only thing that matters! 

The final set piece is on the Orient Express. By now Grace has been recruited to IMF and her mission is to sneak on disguised as Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby, reprising her role as the White Widow) and buy or sell half the key—I already forget which. There’s a moment, I guess, where she’s tempted to take the money and run, but it only would’ve been interesting if she’d taken the money and run. She doesn’t. She’s a true soldier. The untrue soldier is Denlinger, who shows up and wants a meet-and-greet with the Entity, but he plays all his cards right away, telling Gabriel that the key unlocks a chamber in the Russian sub we saw at the beginning of the movie, the Sevastopol, which contains the Beta version of the Entity (or something), so it can be used to get at the Entity (or something). Job done, Denlinger is killed.

The point is, Ethan can’t get on the train, so he has to hang glide into it, and does at the exact moment Grace is about to be killed by Gabriel. Gabriel and Ethan then play “find the sausage,” or, I guess, “the key.” Gabriel leaves thinking he has it, but … psych!

The stunt with the train is great—car by slow car crashing into a valley below, with Grace and Ethan escaping by the skin of their teeth each time. In the end they’re saved by Paris (Klementieff), the superhot assassin in Gabriel’s employ, whom Ethan chose not to kill in Venice.

“Why did you save me?” she asks, dying.

“Because you’re superhot,” he answers.

Kidding. He has no answer. No masks come off.

Pink is the new green
I’ll toss this out now: I think Gabriel is the Entity. That’s how Gabriel is so superefficient, and how he knew Paris would betray him. He’s sentient AI. It’s also how Esai Morales looks so good after all these decades. Seriously, bro, looking good. 

Throughout, we get a lot of dull friend/family talk, like in one of the godawful Fast/Furious movies. Benji says friends are the most important thing to him, by which he means colleagues (Luther and Ethan), since he has no other life; Ethan tells newly indoctrinated Grace that her life means more to him than his own. Etc. 

Is it all metaphor? IMF is like Cruise’s production team, and the doubting replaceable bureaucrats are like studio heads who don’t know if Cruise can do it again, so each time he has to prove himself. Ethan has to save the world and Tom has to save the box office.

He didn’t. This was supposed to be another summer of Tom, after last year's “Top Gun” triumph, but the seventh “M:I” and the fifth “Indiana” and the last of the DCEU (“The Flash”) all underperformed. This is the summer of Barbie, boys. Pink is the new green. 

I guess half a billion worldwide is nothing to sneeze at but the previous one nearly did $800 million:

Look at the domestic hit Tom took in 2006 from his couch jumping, Brooke diatribe, and general weirdness. Talk about a mask coming off.

Wouldn’t it be great if Ethan let us down in the finale next summer? He can’t save the world, all his friends die, and AI wins? Imagine the betrayal on the faces shuffling out of the theater. Or if Ethan is the IMF betrayer this time—the way Jim Phelps/Jon Voight was in the first? Wow. That would be Tom Cruise’s most daring stunt ever.