Tag Archive: macguffin


The guilty pleasure of Mission Impossible 7

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February 15, 2025

Mission Impossible 7 – Dead Reckoning Part One directed by Christopher McQuarrie (USA, 2023)

In MI7, multiple MacGuffins are imbedded within 163 minutes of action-packed nonsense which is designed to keep even the most severe ADHD sufferer fully engaged.

Its elaborate and deliberately confusing plot taps into two modern day fears : 1. That one day soon AI will come to dominate the world and,  2. That one day soon you won’t just misplace your house keys but lose them for good.

The mission for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise)  should he decide to accept it (when has he not?) is to retrieve one part of two-piece cruciform key that looks like it might unlock a  papal vault in Vatican City but  which, when united with its other half,  will allegedly enable access to world dominance. [Spoiler alert : you have to take preposterous premises of this kind of on trust].

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CHANNEL FOUR IN UTOPIA

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January 24, 2013

Jessica Hyde (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) is a blast in Utopia

There are plenty of things to admire in Channel 4’s slick new drama Utopia written by Dennis Kelly. I won’t attempt a plot summary; suffice to say it involves a ‘MacGuffin‘ of global proportions and plenty of fuel for conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Episode 1 opened with two cold-blooded killers in a comic shop and closed with a gruesome torture scene. This level of brutality will put off the squeamish but this is really nothing we haven’t seen in any Tarantino movie or in The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men. I don’t really see what all the fuss it about. It’s shocking, of course, but that’s the nature of violence whether on or off-screen. If it’s right for the story, and it is here, then it is justified. Continue reading →

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PLOT HOLES IN THE SNOW

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April 10, 2012

SMILLA’S SENSE OF SNOW directed by Bille August (1997)

Despite the cool title this is strange and ultimately stupid film. 

The MacGuffin surrounds an energy producing meteorite which we see coming to earth in 19th Century Greenland at the start.

In the present day, white-haired Richard Harris is the enigmatic chief baddie of a secretive organisation which is planning to harness this power as a first step to world domination. Continue reading →

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INTERNATIONAL RESCUE

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August 19, 2009

In the passable thriller ,The International, directed by Tom Tykwer, the events may be far fetched but anyone who has read Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’ with know that the MacGuffin is credible enough. High powered international bank seeks to engineer a third world political and economic crisis so that they are uniquely placed to bale out the financially distressed.

The problem is compounded here by the fact that only Clive Owen can save us from this deadly peril. Anyone familiar with his previous work will know that this means we’re effectively fucked.  He covers his usual bases which range from slightly miffed rugged action man to seriously pissed rugged action man.

The centre piece of the movie is a shoot out in New York’s Guggenheim Museum that goes on for ever and calls into serious question the NYPD response times.

The best scene is where Owen confronts one of the villains in chief and in the course of the why-are-you-such-a-bad-man confrontation, the baddie comes out with the great line: “that’s the difference between the truth and fiction – fiction has to make sense”.

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Bologna Broker

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March 9, 2008
The Broker by John Grisham
Joel Backman – the ex high flying, skirt chasing broker of the title is given a hard time of it by Grisham. Not only does he have to endure 6 years in solitary confinement, get chased by competing teams of hit men but he doesn’t even have the consolation of getting laid.
A half assed love interest with a mature but good looking language teacher only just gets past the warm handshake stage.
The MacGuffin is built around an unconvincing satellite software snatch which Grisham has the grace to concede as far fetched – in his author’s note he says “if something in this novel approaches accuracy, it’s probably a mistake”.
The main – and I would venture, the only – reason for reading it is for anyone wanting to learn a few key Italian phrases, ideally to be used in the city of Bologna where most of the action takes place.Grisham is clearly smitten with the city and there’s a fair bit about its history and an enthusiastic endorsement of the excellence of the food to be found there.
If you skip the boring bits on political double dealing and cover ups (yawn) the novel passes the time painlessly.
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