Mission: Impossible should never have gone full sci-fi

The Mission: Impossible film franchise has always dabbled in the, well, impossible. We've seen Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt climb his way up the Burj Khalifa, have a motorcycle joust to prevent the spread of a bioweapon and hang off the side of an airplane. Even the most grounded entry, Brian DePalma's 1996 Mission: Impossible, featured Cruise leaping off of an exploding helicopter onto a train in the Chunnel. But with the previous film, Dead Reckoning, and this year's follow-up Final Reckoning, the series has jumped completely into science-fiction territory with an AI villain called The Entity. It has the power to control anything that touches the internet, manipulate digital information to suit its needs and potentially wipe out humanity through a global nuclear annihilation. Stopping the Entity is a mission Ethan Hunt has no choice but to accept. But as a fan of this series from the start — hell, I even like John Woo's gloriously operatic Mission: Impossible 2 — I can't help but see the ... Read full article.