“Mission: Impossible 2” is a good movie, but I issue this warning: Do not see it with a stupid person.
I saw the film on opening night at the Wynnsong in Provo. This theater was already on my bad list, due to a problem we’d had a few weeks earlier with an advance screening of “Shanghai Noon,” at which a manager refused to let me or the Disney representative in to see the movie because we didn’t have passes.
The Disney rep tried to explain that it was she who had arranged (and paid for) the screening, and that the people waiting in line wouldn’t even HAVE passes if she hadn’t printed them up and distributed them herself. But the manager refused to understand. You know how with most dumb people, if you talk to them long enough, they’ll finally cave in because they’ll realize they’re never going to grasp what you’re saying, and they’ll assume you must know what you’re talking about?
Not this woman. She wouldn’t budge. She wasn’t just dumb; she was aggressively dumb. She insisted that, in order to see the screening of this movie that we had arranged and that was especially for us, we would have to have tickets. This is approximately like checking Hugh Hefner’s ID before letting him into the Playboy mansion, or running DNA tests on Walt Disney’s frozen corpse before allowing him entrance to Disneyland.
Wynnsong has not been my theater of choice lately anyway, ever since the Cinemark at Provo Towne Centre openede a few monthes agoe, and the “Shanghai Noon” incident just solidified my feelings.
Then there was the “Mission: Impossible 2” incident, which was not really the theater’s fault, but which I am blaming on the theater out of spite. I was sitting next to a guy who had seen the movie already that day, and was now seeing it again with a girl. Because of his foreknowledge of the intricacies of this very uncomplicated movie, he felt compelled, every five minutes, to tell his date, “Watch this.” Never mind that she’d been watching the whole time and wasn’t liable to stop watching now: He was going to tell her, “Watch this,” every time something worth watching happened.
I began to wonder if perhaps she only watched the movie when he told her to, because it turns out this gal was probably no brighter than the aforementioned stubborn manager, who in turn was no brighter than your common sack of apples. After every scene, she would turn to the guy and say, “What?” And then he would explain to her what just happened, in a conversational voice, while everyone in the vicinity wished death upon him for talking so much during the movie.
The movie would say something very, very simple, like, “This is the bad guy, and he’s going to do this, so we need to stop him.” Often, the scenes would have charts and graphs and subtitles in order to make it so incredibly clear what was going on that only the tiniest-brained animal life on the planet, such as slugs and Freddie Prinze Jr., would fail to grasp it. And yet no matter how clearly things were laid out for us, the girl would look puzzled and say, “What?,” and the guy would tell her what the scene just said. And the girl would continue not understanding, until the scene ended, at which point she would forget all about that scene and concentrate on not understanding the next one.
These two get into the theater, apparently, with no problems; I have to undergo a body-cavity search to be let in to the free “Shanghai Noon” screening. The universe is indeed a strange and wonderful place.