Action + Plot = Brilliance. Okay!!!

Rating: Null/10 (20 November 1998)

Am I truly, on the whole of God's green Earth, the only person that understood the plot, ignored the implausibility of the stunts and simply just sat back and enjoyed this film. I guess so and I'm proud of it. This film must finally prove something that I've long suspected, movie audiences are slowly being sucked dry of their brain cells. All the people I've talked to about this film have complained about not being able to follow it. Well I consider myself a normal, average person and I got it. I enjoyed following the twists, loved the way that the writers and director slowly peeled the skin back with flashbacks to reveal the fruit underneath and rejoiced at an action film that wasn't a mindless bloat of special effects but that actually had something inserted into it called a 'storyline'. People that have a problem with this, "ID4" is at your local video store, "Godzilla" isn't far behind. Go look at them for a while. Pretty aren't they. And then of course there are the stunts. Yes, the helicopter thing is impossible. OK, the CIA heist is preposterous. And alright the cafe scene is ridiculous. But, damn, they were exciting!!! The people that ridicule these impossibilities are no-doubt the ones who got narked because their single-digit IQ's could no longer handle the plot and just decided to pick faults at otherwise brilliant scenes. If you can't sit back, get carried away by the stunts and just enjoy a film like this then I don't know what you're doing in the theatre in the first place. The bottom line is that this film is great. It's an action film for fans of "Chinatown", "The Usual Suspects" and "The Godfather". People that didn't like M:I will neither have seen or heard of these. That hardly surprises me.