My Mission Impossible reservations

OK, just got back from Mission Impossible 7, which has a remarkably high Rottentomatoes score (96%), but a more realistic 80% on Metacritic, and I have to say it was enjoyable enough, but I still wish it wasn't Christopher McQuarrie directing.     

From what I can gather, he is more like a collaborator with Cruise than a mere director, coming up with ideas for whole sequences.   And it's not that he's incompetent, exactly; it's just that, as with the last MI movie (which also was overly praised in reviews), I find myself often thinking that action sequences could have been shot in more interesting ways, to give the audience a better spatial understanding of what is going on, and with longer takes and less choppy editing.   (I doubt it is really the editors fault rather than the director's - and I assume they work closely together anyway.)

This is now the third in the series he has directed, and I'm pretty sure I enjoyed his first (No 5), but I really recall very little of the last one, except for the fact I found myself critiquing the direction and editting.

I think 7 is better than 6, perhaps because of a key likeable new character, and it is a huge relief to have the malevolent danger not a nuclear bomb or virus, but something that is extremely topical and (given the AI doomerism of the last 6 months) actually pretty plausible for a movie of this type.   But it was talkier than I expected, and during those scenes, I also found myself thinking McQuarrie has a touch of the JJ Abrams issue of filling the movie screen with giant faces, as if we were only only looking at a TV screen.    

Gee, I'm sounding more negative than I feel I intended.   It's a good movie, just not a great one.

And I still think the best in the series were the ones most stylishly and creatively directed:  the first (yay, Brian de Palma) and fourth (poor old Brad Bird, who seems to have sunk out of view.)  Pity if McQuarrie had an accident and had to hand over direction to someone else.   Because we all know: Spielberg collaborating with Cruise one last time - what a dream that would be.  Can't Putin arrange a window push if I ask him nicely?   (Just from a first or second floor - no need to actually kill him, a broken leg might be enough.) 

But I guess my nasty imagination won't be fulfilled, and I will be back to see the last MI movie, with McQuarrie at the helm, so I can continue grumbling about his style one more time.  

Update:  I re-watched (for the first time) MI 5 - Rogue Nation last night.   It really was a good film, with a good script (co-written by McQuarrie) and my only persistent reservation being the silliness of the idea that security access information would be stored in a giant water tank.  But the underwater sequence is nonetheless stressful to watch.

I think a large part of the reason I didn't like 6 was due to the whole "been there, done that" scenario of  "we're back to terrorists wanting to let off nuclear bombs, to no clear purpose".    And I still think the helicopter action at the end was poorly edited.