Sixth verse, same as the fifth, more or less.
Fallout is, in some ways, a lot like
Spectre is to
Skyfall - it's a rare consecutive returning director making a direct sequel that's even longer, even vaguer about the baddies' motivations, and largely swaps the glamour and glitz of its predecessor for a barren, stripped-down look.* Yes, the technical direction, stunts, and editing are all first-rate, and I certainly got my $5 AMC Tuesday ticket's worth on a big-ass screen, but I'm
so very tired of all these bland, generic, overwhelming white "arms dealer" antagonists.
To be clear, I have zero problem with evil white villains: make them neo-Nazis, Thanos-style Malthusians, classical paganists, fanatical anti-Islamists, aspiring global rulers, US Presidents,
whatever; but the specific angle of apolitical white arms dealers has been done to death way too many times over. In
M:I-III, the villain was an apolitical American arms dealer. In
Ghost Protocol, the villain was a European white dude who wanted to set off a bunch of nukes to "cleanse the planet," or some sh*t. In
Rogue Nation (which did not, in fact, feature a rogue nation, because that might have been
political), the villain was a white British (I think) baddie who... dealt arms, or something. What's more,
all four Craig 007 films to date have centered around white arms dealers of various kinds; not one has had any discernible ideology; and the same goes for the last few
Fast & Furious villains, though at least
Furious 7 dared to give us an arms dealer of color as well as Statham's arms dealer.
And now, in
Fallout, the villains are largely white baddies who want to set off a trio of nukes because "suffering causes peace." They don't even bother speechifying about
why that might be true; they just repeat it a few times with no elaboration whatsoever, and I am
so very bored. And, to be clear: we aren't getting all these apolitical, motivation-free white arms dealer baddies because the filmmakers have any kind of point to make; we're getting them because that's the easiest way to offend nobody, including the international and Chinese markets. So, given that nobody has anything to
say, we get yanked around with double-crosses, hidden identities, and all that crap for nearly 2.5 hours, and in the end, it all means exactly as much as it did when it began, which is Nothing at All. What's the point of repeatedly saving the (fictional) world if no one in it ever has an
opinion about
anything? Compare this to
Fury Road, which I didn't love as much as many, but at least it had something to
express, and did so boldly.
Grade:
B. It's all very expertly staged, but I really can't see ever watching it again; the characters and plot are just too hopelessly dull. At least
Rogue Nation had considerably more Ferguson and Baldwin to liven up the scenes. And, I'm still waiting for the return of Nyah Nordoff-Hall. Yep, unrepentant fan of
M:I-2 here.
At least
it had actual
characters.
* (Just to clarify, not that anyone cares: I much prefer
Spectre to
Skyfall, but prefer
Rogue Nation to
Fallout.)
