Good Movie, Typical Bad Hollywood Ending

Rating: 8/10 (24 June 2005)

If you haven't seen this movie, then STOP NOW....Spoilers ahead. Let me start off by saying the first half of the movie is taut and suspenseful and is pretty good adult escapism. Not a lot of BS and plenty of atmosphere. Tom Cruise is a very good actor and so is Jamie Foxx. I don't know that either will ever be Robert DeNiro or Denzell Washington, but they both make it look easy to act in a major film. Jada Picket Smith can act too, however she was helped by a limited role in the movie. My complaint about her is the same complaint I have about the movie. In the first half of the movie she plays a serious D.A. focused on her job. In the second half she becomes Olive Oyl. The second half of the movie starts to strain credibility and at the end, it's almost like Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny, shooting at each other but never hitting anything.....The ending of the movie is the worst of Hollywod babble...OK let's see...Tom Cruise is chasing Foxx and Smith at a subway stop, and he jumps on the back of a moving subway train, manages to grab on, and simply opens the back door of the last car to get in. Anyone who has ever been on a train knows that door is always locked...otherwise people would be falling out of the back of a train every day. Moving on - now we have two guys that get on a subway train at 5:00 AM (mostly empty - again not very likely) and they start blasting away at each other. No one appears to be racing off this train when it stops, and since the motorman is enclosed right next to Jamie Foxx, he may even earn himself a bullet or two from Tom Cruise during the shootout. If there is a conductor he doesn't notice or hear anything either. There are no cops around (even though they were hot on the trail 20 minutes earlier), no sirens, nothing...Does it make sense to ANYONE that after a 20 or 30-shot shootout, a dead body is left on the train, and the train just closes it's doors and goes on to the next stop? Who writes this crap??? How stupid are we supposed to be to believe this could really happen?? There are so many continuity and logic problems with this movie It would take an hour just to write it all up. If you're just interested in escapism, or if you're under the age of 18, you're more likely to just take the movie at face value and enjoy it. As for me, I'd just like to sit with the writers and the director and ask them if they are REALLY pleased with this thing...