Sunday, August 2, 2015

Watson is always British, even in the land of the impossible.

While I wouldn't have expected the new movie Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation to be anything on our Sherlockian map, yesterday's trip to the movies turned out to be a little bit of a surprise.

Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt, the main character of the M:I movies, is more of an American James Bond than a Sherlock Holmes, this time around, the film-makers have given him a very definite Dr. Watson in Simon Pegg.

I had seen headlines that suggested their characters made put the movie in the "bromance" category, but was not expecting a Holmes-Watson relationship. Not at all. And yet, there it was. Ethan Hunt is all about action and not necessarily brainwork, but his Dr. Watson, Simon Pegg's character Benji, is a total Dr. Watson. Bringing his own particular skills to the partnership, doing the less main-character tasks, being appropriately astonished as needed -- you could totally see Simon Pegg playing John H. Watson, M.D. after seeing Rogue Nation.

The climax to my Watsonian thoughts about Pegg exploded, however, when . . . .

************  GIANT SPOILER ALERT! ********************
BAIL! BAIL! BAIL!

Benji had an explosive vest strapped to his chest by the bad guy and had a earpiece feeding him dialogue to speak to Ethan. Yes, a complete borrow of the Moriarty technique from season one of Sherlock. No way were the writers not thinking of Watson when putting this movie together.

And like I said, a pretty fair Watsonian actor at that.

1 comment:

  1. Cool. I guess that scene falls under 'great artists steal'?

    Looks like we may not get Mr. Holmes, but MI is playing on all the screens. :-/

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