tired addition to the franchise

Rating: 1/10 (15 July 2013)

I was actually looking forward to this, right up until the point i actually watched it. I always believed that the object of a film should be to immerse the audience and suspend disbelief, and while the former was possible the latter never happened. Let's leave aside the obvious issue with any law enforcement agency of any type based within the countries known as the "5 eyes" requiring a group of retired criminals to work on their behalf. It would never happen. Lets also ignore the obvious problem within the plot regarding surveillance cameras in London, the most "watched" city in the world being conveniently "down for maintenance". As there are multiple agencies controlling multiple cameras in that country there is no chance that all those agencies would be offline at the same time. "Brian" managing to spend less than 24 hours in a California maximum security prison, "as a favour", after flying there and back seemingly in a couple of days and securing all the information he needed. Anyone who is even remotely aware of the American justice system would find that laughable. The plane chase along a runway that must have been at least 20 miles long for the amount of time it took the C5 Galaxy/ Illyshin IL76 (take your pick of heavy lift aircraft) to not quite take off, making it the longest non existent runway in the world. Street racing in central London lets ignore the fact that this scene had no reason to be in the film at all for a moment, except as justification for the title. It's Impossible! Flat out impossible with traffic calming measures, and some of the most crowded and narrow streets in the world, not to mention enormous police presence. Let's not even discuss the tank! So a film with a very lose series of sequences, based basically in London, i guess because the film grants went that way, because there is no reason any international criminal on every law enforcement radar in the western world would base himself in that city, dialogue that was so poor and so clichéd that it is worth watching only with the sound turned off, and a plot that has absolutely zero possibility of ever being believable and you have this film in a nutshell. Let's hope they give the next part of the franchise to some adults for script writing, because while the 13 year old's had a ball bringing this one to the screen, it can surely only appeal to those with a similar mindset. Dire!