Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning: According to star Tom Cruise, who also produces this movie, this will be the last installment in this series. The series has a total of eight movies, including this one and dates back to 1996. Twenty-nine years with Ethan Hunt and his outrageous endings for movies. This last in the series does its best to bring all of the previous movies together, and works somewhat for me, but not entirely. There is a lot of exposition early on that does its level best to explain what is the global threat that seemingly only Ethan Hunt can address. In short, there is an online “entity” which is a self-replicating AI virus which has manged to infiltrate governments around the world and their respective nuclear arsenals. The job of Ethan Hunt and his team is to find the source code for this entity, and then utilize a self-made poison pill (made by Hunt’s friend Luther, played by Ving Rhames, who has put on considerable weight over the past 30 years.

Hunt is challenged to undertake a series of missions which increasingly are more and more risky and dangerous. For me, there were a number of eye-rolling moments, but most especially when dealing with the retrieval of the source code from an abandoned and damaged Russian submarine at the bottom of the ocean. How does one manage to do that exactly? Well, in short, you must get onto a US submarine near the location, and then find a way to get yourself onto that submarine and track down the elusive source code. Oh, by the way, you would be going down 300 feet, in jet black ocean that is extremely cold, and required to get back to the surface so quickly that you would suffer from the bends (nitrogen bubbles in the blood stream). Now I am no diver, but I don’t think that the explanation for it is very plausible. The source code, which exists in a computer program, naturally is in a self-contained plastic container which looks a lot like an eight-track tape, but with a convenient receptical area to allow for a supplemental thumb drive to be added. No explanation for this is ever given. No one ever said that it had to make sense! Overall, it doesn’t so if you are inclined like me to see some realism in this, then you will be sadly disappointed. It is entertainment and mind candy. Pure and simple. But is it effective?

In short, I think so. I was entertained. There were enough suspenseful moments that kept my attention, along with the risk to Hunt and his team. For those who saw Dead Reckoning Part One (where is Part Two?) you saw that a character like Ilsa Faust (played by Rebecca Ferguson) could be eliminated. I had actually wondered too whether this movie would give Ethan Hunt the James Bond treatment in No Time to Die. Do you need to see and know all the previous movies to follow this one? Certainly early on in the talking phase it likely may help. But truthfully I don’t think anyone spoke about “an entity” until most recently. The bad guys and quasi-good intentioned government types who THINK that they are good, like Eugene Kittridge (played by Canadian Henry Czerny) make appearances. Angela Bassett plays the US President, and we are all reminded how a level-headed, logical leader of the free world is no longer in place any more in reality. One cringes to think what the current sitting President would do in the same position as she in the movie. For the record, I don’t like the longer Cruise hair for this version of Ethan Hunt. He looks better in a more military haircut to me. To summarize, it is long. It doesn’t suck. It had some genuinely suspenseful moments, including the now almost required airplane sequence which Cruise seems to want, even though inexplicably one wonders why they choose to use open air biplanes. The answer is revealed through the stunt sequence. I especially liked flying an airplane with your foot! Again, it doesn’t need to make sense! For what it is, this is a movie to see in the theatre on the big screen like only Tom Cruise it seems is able to do these days.

The Lost City of Z: This Amazon original was released back in 2016, and I hadn’t heard of it until I saw it listed on Netflix. Part of me thought this was in some way a zombie movie, but that was Brad Pitt in World War Z, back in 2013. Ironically and interestingly I found out that Brad Pitt was originally slated to play the lead role of real-life British explorer Percy Fawcett in the early 1900s. Instead he had a conflict and the role is played by Charlie Hunnam (from The Gentlemen, Papillon etc). His loyal sidekick is Henry Costin played by Robert Pattinson, and his son Jack (older) was played by Tom Holland. Fawcett’s UK based wife is played by Sienna Miller. It is a good cast. The story based on real events, was that the governments in Brazil and Bolivia had a boundary dispute, and they asked an independent neutral third party (Britain) to intercede and map out the boundary between their two countries. Fawcett was requested to be the representative to do it. While doing this mapping, Fawcett comes across evidence of an ancient civilization in Bolivia that he felt was worth exploring further. It became a lifelong obsession for him.

Fawcett and his team make presentations to find investors, as opposed to educational institutions, in order to finance these trips to South America. Naturally along the way, there are unknown dangers like the local indiginous people and natural challenges like piranha and panthers. Yet, however much it sounds like an Indiana Jones adventure with a city of gold, it isn’t. The adventurous scenes and moments are few and far between. Rather it is a story of the quest, and cutting through the red tape, as well as a troublesome wanna-be adventurer and the relationship with Fawcett’s wife and kids. While Mission Impossible is one action sequence after another, this was one journey into the jungle followed by discussions with bureaucrats and a wife at home to decide whether to explore further. I won’t reveal the ending, but suffice it to say that it is historically accurate. For me, this was a story of a part of the world that I know very little about. I can only imagine how it would have appeared (Bolivia) in the early 1900s, and the means it took to get there in the first place. Fawcett was a man of vision and determination, including the necessary sacrifices to get to that position. This was interesting. I was introduced to a story and part of the world that was new. It’s not a spy or superhero movie. It was worth a viewing. Part of me thinks that if Pitt could have made it work that it would have had more box office success, but we will never know.