Still the best one in the franchise

Rating: 9/10 (11 April 2020)

I first saw this movie at its gala premiere, and was blown away. I have watched it several times since, and just rewatched it in 2020. It's far superior to its sequels - which are not bad movies, they're just not as good as the first one. The sequels are by now fairly generic action movies, the ingenuity, which the first movie has in spades, is pretty much out the window by now. In the later sequels I couldn't even tell you what the story is about without cheating, because the story doesn't matter, it's just an excuse to tie action set pieces together. Although I hadn't seen the first one in years I could still tell you what the story is about. I saw the latest one just a few months ago and I couldn't tell you the story if my life depended on it. And for all the sound and fury of the sequels where Cruise et al up the ante with every new installment, no sequence in any of the movies has been as thrilling as the nine minute almost completely silent wire sequence in the first one.