Rare evenings when the daughters are home before 6pm, have little pressure of submissions and we indulge in a movie. Since the actor is my celebrity crush from my teen years, I choose to hang around. Unfortunately, we end up making the not so right choice – Mission Impossible, 2023.

What a disaster! I cannot even begin to tell you how Tom Cruise looks like a well maintained father at best. But movies support a male actor over better female actors. Nothing has changed in the past five decades. And therefore he gets to date women half his age, 100X better than him at action sequences and yet, die for him one after another. Somewhere on a Venice bridge, my interest has reached rock bottom. But I choose to give company to my girls anyway. As a mark of complete boredom at the extremely predictable storyline and scenes to the tee, I start my own voice over in Hindi for every single subtitle that appears on screen.

From flying off a cliff on a motorcycle and entering the train via crashing the window, to the narrow alley chase in Venice, to using absolutely low tech ways of fist fights with knives, I must say, Bollywood scores at least a hundred points over this movie. Their action scenes have better creativity.

Growing up, I looked up to Hollywood. But Bollywood has come a long way. Now, I prefer Chennai Express over Mission Impossible any day. In hindsight, I get to spend time with my daughters, we poke fun at every single scene and have a hearty laugh at over the top action. The director tried too hard.

P.S. Since the movie came out two years ago, I wouldn’t like to blame it so much. I may have grown a bit to old to call out predictability and stopped enjoying juevinile cinema. Wink, wink.