I want to be clear about this – I am angry – I mean really Really REALLY ANGRY – at Tom Cruise. He and I are the same age.  I wake up every morning kvetching about my various aches and pains. I walk like an old man. I actually thought I was doing pretty good for my age. Tommy-Boy wakes up and decides to hang off a plane upside down. It’s just not fair, and I want him to pay (he can afford it). This is my revenge. Tom – this is your final reckoning.

SPOILER ALERT – To be perfectly clear, it is my absolute intention to ruin this movie, whether you have seen it or not.  The way I figure it, telling you plot points is meaningless – you’re only there for Tom’s Derring Do-s.

We need to start with what is really the “Mission Impossible”.  That’s Nicole Kidman; she appears in a theater announcement thanking you for seeing her ex-husband’s movie. There’s no way that’s plausible, unless he still owes her alimony.

What she should be saying is something like this: “What the hell are you doing here? Why are you seeing this idiot’s movie? For God’s Sake, Go Next Door – See anything else – See Lilo and Stich for Christ’s sake!”

As for the movie, the plot can be summarized as follows: There is an all-powerful, all-knowing Entity that is now self-aware. No one knows the truth as the Entity can use artificial intelligence to change history, put out fake pictures and videos, and bring people into a violent confrontation with their government. The Entity is set on wiping out the human race.

Or as Tom puts it (really) “You’ve been on the internet too much.”  Umm…. Tom….. You’ve not been on the internet enough.  We call it Siri – you know, almost like your daughter – and she’s already won.  In your race with time to save the world from Siri, you’re already about 5 years too late. It truly is an impossible mission. Unless Ving Rhames builds some sort of time machine that Tom can take back to fix this story. Oh, wait, that’s the Terminator. Tom – watch out for Arnold the Governator.

Mind you – that should not surprise anyone here. We all know that the movie is constructed so that Tom, all by his handsome self, will save the world. One. Last. Time.

But here in LarryLand it is our job to point out every single implausible plot twist and logic that makes this such an impossible movie. You’re welcome – someone’s gotta do it.

Start with this – You know that Tom is saving the world is because Tom is running.  He runs in just about every possible scene. By way of example, He’s locked in a cage by the Siri’s henchman (Esai Morales, also looking way too good for his age), and escapes. Rather than flagging down a taxi or hijacking a car, he takes off in full Tom Run Mode all the way across London to another secret location where Ving Rhames is about to be blown up by a nuclear bomb. All that’s fine, but here’s the real point – Tom not only didn’t break a sweat, he’s not even breathing heavily.

Instead, he and Ving have a philosophical conversation about their relationship – WHILE THE NUCLEAR BOMB IS TICKING DOWN TO ZERO. Now, maybe it’s just me, but isn’t the first priority to, oh, I don’t know, maybe Stop The Bomb From Exploding????  Nah, they keep on blabbing away until the clock is near zero and then – you guessed it – Tom goes running back through the tunnels and down London streets to only have the bomb go off with a nanosecond to spare, knocking Tom to the ground.  Mind you, if I was knocked to the ground someone would call 911. But Tom – nah – he just gets up and starts running again. Maybe he’s the Running Man (uh, oh, more Arnold stuff).

Which brings me to the most all-important question – Who Pays for All This Stuff?

Many years ago, I wrote about the Avengers. They’ve got an entire floating navy with hundreds of people, which means they must have middle management somewhere (see The Shield of Middle Management ).  OK, that makes some sense, but the underlying assumption is this – that they have government funding, that they are organized, and that they probably have health care and benefits.

One can argue that the United States is paying for Tom and his Crew. After all, President Angela Bassett gives him unrestricted access to the entire U.S. Navy.  But we never find out what type of pay package the IMF has and perhaps more importantly at Tom’s age, what type of healthcare. 

Consider this – Simon Peg gets shot in a tunnel underground in South Africa, nowhere near civilization. He has Pom Klementieff perform surgery with a bowie knife and a pen so he can keep breathing. He apparently dies, until he is seen just perfectly healthy in London where he can nod meaningfully to Tom and walk off into the sunset (at dark, on Picadilly Square). But what happens in between?

• Let’s see – the emergency medical chopper has to fly from someplace not close by.
• I would presume that he is taken to an emergency ward where they remove the pen and patch him up. The doctor is probably frowning at him like – Not Again, another pen in the lungs?
• I want to see the call to the insurance company when it denies his claim.  “I’m sorry, sir, but your policy does not cover these procedures. As explained in the Explanation of Benefits we provided you, emergency surgery in a tunnel qualifies as an out-of-network benefit under your emergency plan. However, the plan does not cover pen removal from your lungs as it is not a covered procedure. Now if they used an approved respirator, that would be a different type of coverage and…..”  (Note – it’s a wonder Simon survived this call).

All of this may be plausible to you but Esai?  Consider this:

• He has been disavowed by every government on the planet.
• Siri has fired him – he is an ex-henchman and is truly alone. So, no country, no Siri, no funds. Right?
• However, this is apparently not an issue for Esai. He has an entire army of second-level henchman (they applied online) trained and at the ready – in South Africa – with all kinds of trucks, weapons and planes to escape on. That’s a lot of payroll, not to mention time-and-a-half and meals while they wait for Tommy to show up.
• And if that doesn’t cost, Esai has not one, but TWO nuclear bombs.  Plutonium is perhaps the most secure and closely tracked material on earth, and he has apparently no problem procuring it. Twice.

Think about it – after he sets the bomb to blow Tom and crew off the planet, he takes off in not one, but two biplanes. He is Bi-Planer. But that means that the 100 or so henchmen are going to be blasted by a nuclear bomb.  I may not be sure of everything, but I would think they’d complain to the union about their working conditions.

Anyway… Perhaps we should return to the plot. That would be a novel concept – wait is there a novel? OK -turn to page 40, where were we…Ahhh….  Tom’s running, the bomb goes off, Tom starts running again… Oh yes, the Sub.

So, the major plot point is the search for a Soviet Sub that sank in the last episode, in the Bering Sea. I mean, they spend a LOT of time trying to find this, using SOSUS, sled dogs, scuba gear and the entire United States Navy.

I’ll make you a suggestion Tom.  All you really had to do was call Sig Hansen and Johnathan Hillstrand. (As an aside, Sig is younger than Tom). They know everything there is to know about the Bering Sea, and if they can find tiny little crab on the bottom of the ocean in an ice floe a huge submarine ought to be no problem:

• The Time Bandit will scare off the Russian Navy with their illegal fireworks and flare guns.
• Sig’ll cruise around dropping things off the boat “bombing the bottom” until he finds it. Then with a jury-rigged crane, a few chains and some buoys they’ll raise it all the way to the surface.

Problem solved. No Fuss, No Muss. Tom simply needs to board it on the surface, use his key and retrieve Siri.  We can all go home early.

But Tom’s having none of that. The only way to do this is for him to jump off a plane into the freezing cold sea hoping to be picked up by a sub, then swim from that sub to the other sub again in the freezing cold water to get inside and find Siri, AND THEN to swim out of a torpedo tube as the sub is falling to the bottom of the ocean.

Of course, this means that he has to, in 500 feet of ice-water, shed his oxygen tank and his clothes to swim in his skivvies. Not five minutes earlier they told him if he didn’t exhale his lungs would explode. But, Not Tom, he can hold his breath all the way to the surface to be rescued by Hayley Atwell and her sled dog team that have been roving the ice and avoiding polar bears. Sled dogs?  You’d think they’d have a snow-mobile handy.

She, of course, breathes life into Tom in a decompression tent, while wearing a small tank top.  In the Artic.  I asked my wife if she would do that for me. She said yes, but in a parka. Ahhh…. Love.

And now we’re at the “big finale” – Time has expired.  That means that, if Tom doesn’t succeed at the right nanosecond, Prez Angela will have to blow up the world to prevent the world from blowing up.  That includes blowing up a major U.S. City [Sidenote – they never say which city; but given that the Prez lives in Washington D.C. I’m going to guess that this is NOT the city that gets targeted. All other major capitals, sure, but Not-In-My-Back-Yard.] 

As the count ticks down to zero, Prez Angie has a change of heart – Call it off and shut down our arsenal!  Which is when, of course, Ron Swanson gets shot. Now, of course she stops trying to shut down Armageddon to fawn over Ron (really, Ron, it was just a Nick. Get Off-Er-Man and stand up; that’s what Tom would do).  Which means that time expires and she failed to call it off. It’s down to Tom.

Which leaves me with the only non-spoiler of the last 1500 or so words.  Of course, Tom hangs from multiple planes, Of course he manages to poison Siri just as the nukes are about to fly, Of course Haylee grabs Siri in the palm of her hand, Of course the world is, once again, safe.

Or is it?  At the very end, they all meet up in London separately, from different directions. And of course they’re carrying Siri in a protected case.  They vowed to destroy Siri, against all orders to not do so from everyone else in the movie that is NOT Tom Cruise, but what fun would that be?  I wonder – did Siri get to them first?

So, we end our movie with a Ving Rhames monologue while the cinematographer takes shots of rolling fields, majestic mountains and unicorns pooping rainbows.  Since Ving was the only one to actually die, he gets a speech which I’m pretty sure I’ve heard before: “Space…. The Final Frontier…”