Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning was filmed on a massive budget of $291 million.

By the way, whenever you go on Wikipedia and read about a movie's budget, always remember that only includes production costs and does NOT include marketing costs.

The production - marketing cost ratio is usually around 1:1. In other words, for every dollar they spent on production, just assume they spent at least $0.80 - $0.90 cent on marketing.

This explains why the movie needed to gross at least $600 million to turn a profit. It didn't, grossing 'only' $567 million.

Tom Cruise's movies, whatever else you may think of him, are usually commercially successful, but this one wasn't.

Despite the massive budget, and despite the "Biggest Stunt in Cinema History".

And after watching it, I know why. It's because this isn't a great movie.

First of all, the plot is very thin. Everyone's after this AI thingy that everyone calls 'The Entity'.

A combination between Skynet and Alexa, this is apparently an all-powerful network that can do anything and make anyone do anything.

They don't explain where it comes from, or how it was created. Or how it managed to become so powerful.

But anyway, the point is Tom Cruise and his team want to destroy it because it's too powerful. So he goes rogue, again, with his old pals, again, and accidentally stumbles into a hot girl that by pure accident is also after 'The Entity'. Without knowing what it is.

This brings us on to the second thing that doesn't work in the movie. Interaction between characters.

At the beginning of the movie, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) exchange veiled nonsensical threats and 1990s catchphrases in a whispered dialogue that makes no sense.

And that sums up the whole movie.

It's a fruit salad of cringey lines no one would ever use in real life. I think Hollywood should stop doing this - Partly because it's getting old but chiefly because I think it just doesn't work anymore.

It's the 'I was born ready' syndrome / paradox.

No one, ever, says 'I was born ready' in real life unless they're being ironic, or unless they're infantile fools.

So why would you use that type of tone in a movie? It doesn't work.

The entire movie, beginning to end, is filled with catchphrases like that. It's so annoying.

If you weren't familiar with Tom Cruise or the Mission: Impossible franchise, you wouldn't watch this movie.

And if you watched it because of that, like I did, you're probably thinking, "what the heck was that supposed to be?"