I didn’t want to see it in a theater. I didn’t want my viewing it to be counted in the box office and add to the money earned by Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams. (To be precise, I didn’t want to earn Tom Cruise money, and be counted in Abrams’ box office.) But someone forced me.

The movie is exactly what you might expect: a neverending Alias episode, that you have to suffer through whole, sitting tight in a cramped room that’s stinking of malfunctioning air conditioning: the prologue showing one of the supposedly most intense scenes from the end of the movie, the Apple Store headquarters complete with mysterious big boss and clumsy geek, the desperate need to live a normal life filled with corny sentimental crap, the location shoots and huge-budget action scenes. Uh, no, wait, Alias does blue screens and cheap tricks (except two weeks ago, when they apparently sent one of the actors to Paris in order to shoot a small, unimportant scene with Elodie Bouchez, who I suppose was stuck in France for work), but the scenes are exactly the same as have only been written for the series, except this time everything’s on film because Abrams can afford to show it for real.

But you do get the whole package: the poorly-written excuse for a script (which wouldn’t be so bad if the rest made up for it), the ridiculous great joys and great sorrows of a big-hearted undercover agent (which wouldn’t be so bad if you could feel any emotional connection to the character — but how could you when Tom Cruise looks so fake playing happy husband? he looks like he’s posing with Katie Holmes), and millions and millions of dollars’ worth of action filmed by someone with little to no experience at that — yeah, they’re jumpy and all, but very confused and a tremendous waste of money that could have been so much better used by a somewhat talented director.

In short, it wholly deserves to fail — and it doesn’t matter if the audience is skipping it because of Tom Cruise’s antics and not intrinsic quality; it’s the result that matters.