• Nick loves rice cakes.

• Peter doesn't like rice cakes.

@mechajutaro said:

Also when did Jessica Chastain suffer the same fate as other Oscar winners Adrien Brody and Cuba Gooding Junior and be demoted to making these meaningless action movies?

When she started Tweeting out brain dead drivel such as this 16:04-16:18

Jessica Chastain's tweet:

"When violence against women is used as a plot device to make the characters stronger then we have a problem. It is not empowering to be beaten and raped, yet so many films make it their 'phoenix' moment for women. We don't need abuse in order to be powerful. We already are."

You know, now that I've watched more of this film I can say with confidence that is bad, like really bad. I don't mean your average 4-5/10 bad movie, no I mean Matrix Resurrections level of bad and so far this is the worst movie of 2022 by a wide margin. It's just all around terrible. Watching it feels like a huge chore and I'm barely getting through in small increments and I still got about 40 minutes to go and I'd rather go clean the toilet, and I'm not even talking about my own toilet! The fight scenes are beyond pathetic, the plot has been done a million times except for the macguffin which is so idiotic nobody probably thought putting something like that in a movie was a good idea before, the cast is terrible and the acting sucks and I love how they keep showing scenes of the cast members speaking in their 'native' language just to show how culturally diverse the cast is even though they really have nothing meaningful to say and you could probably cut 30-40 minutes of pointless crap from this movie. How do you even shove so many asinine cliches in a single movie? We have among others "Trust no one", "40 seconds to trace a call", a scene of strategic planning where there is a map and on top of the map there is a gun and bullets for no reason whatsoever, the usual silly terms like calling agents "assets", "safe houses" that are about as safe as a trip on the Titanic, the african(?) hacker who can apparently hack anything in the world except an iphone that has been fingerprint locked to someone, etc. etc. I also love how they did their darndest to appease China even to the point of casting Fan Bingbing who apparently can't speak english at all (so who better to cast in a role that requires some proficiency of english language) and has just about the worst pronunciation I've ever heard, and still China got upset at this piece of garbage for some reason.

Come on guys, it really wasn't that bad. It was fun entertainment. Certainly much better than Chastain's other action film, Ava. Good cast (Kruger was great) and a great concept, just flawed execution.

Yes, there are plot holes (like how @aholejones mentioned about the hacker not being able to hack into a fingerprint phone), clichés (the male lead not being dead) and characters-wouldn't do-that moments (a drug lord in the beginning allowing armed men into their house).

But the one thing that really did get to me was the exchange between Chastain and Cruz's characters about how women always blame themselves when it's the men at fault. That was cringe...and it made sense it came from Kinberg who put probably one of the cringiest lines in history in Dark Phoenix with the "women saving everyone, the team should be called X-women" line.

Also Cruz is generally a good actress but she's absolutely terrible in this!

So actually my criticisms do feel like this is an awful film lol. But it's not, it's an enjoyable action flick.

Just for the record, mechajutaro, that Jordanian was an F-16 (fighter) pilot.

And he suffered a horrible fate-- not to be made light of --in the cause of helping the United States, regardless if one thinks the U.S. should be militarily involved in that part of the world or not.