Alias: The Movie

Rating: 2/10 (31 October 2006)

Whatever this was, it was not "Mission: Impossible". It felt more like "Alias: The Movie". It's clear that no one involved has ever seen or understood the concept of the grand old 60s spy series. The original dealt with intelligent people conning intelligent bad people into a corner which they couldn't escape. The keyword is "intelligent". The heroes were normal people, each with a distinct specialty, and they planned everything carefully. And no matter what happened or what we, the audience, thought had happened, the heroes (and the writers) were always ahead and in control.
In this movie, physical superheroes stumble from one impossible situation to the next, and survive by sheer luck, like rolling in front of a taxi (or was it a bus) while fighting the bad guy, conveniently killing him.
The direction was quite awful. What, please, was the purpose of the pre-credit sequence? The movie would have worked better without it. Way better. Things like this work in a TV show, where there's no time, but not in a two-hour movie. The camera was used in the nowadays so prevalent, but still awful, shaky-cam-close-up style. Which reduced it pretty much in a mediocre mess. What's the point of setting a story all over the world and making the movie look like it was filmed on a back lot? Considering the talent available to Abrams (Vic Armstrong as stunt coordinator? The Vic Armstrong?), nothing ended up being shown. Gone seem the times when directors appreciated the talent of stunt people, location scouts and casting director. Speaking of casting, this movie was one of the most sexist I've seen. All kinds of male body shapes, but ALL the females were of the extreme skinny model type. Frankly, I want to see shapely women. To me, no hotness here. (There was scene, when the 'hot' heroine pulled out something strapped to her thigh. Classical gratuitous sexy scene, right? Not with this stick figure. Shudder.)
I have a very bad feeling for "Star Trek XI".