Before screenings of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, some cinemas are playing a short video of Tom Cruise where he thanks the audience for coming out to see the film in the cinema. He clearly sees himself as the saviour of the moviegoing experience. But if this is his vision of what he thinks films should be, count me way the fuck out. Watching a man wing-walking on biplanes is very exciting but it’s the exact same kind of lizard-brain spectacle-cinema as we were getting 100 years ago, but in Cruise/McQuarrie’s minds, films haven’t evolved since then. “I even brought a spare plane, just in case” conveniently colour-coded so the audience can keep track of who is who. I felt genuinely insulted at how badly this film was pieced together.

And I’m not even going to start complaining about reverential tones in which almost every character refers to Ethan Hunt. Or the relentless messianic images of a man with a cross fighting the antigod and the fallen angel Gabriel and who dies and comes back to life and whose face is literally 80% of the poster (I measured).

Exhausting.

Tom Cruise retire bitch.

(Tramell Tillman was great though. He fully understood the assignment.)