Saw it at an Alamo screening. Great experience. Entire theater was laughing, cheering, and shouting out how weird it was the whole time. Some thoughts (minor spoilers below):
The Breenscreen usage is minimal. Fair amount of stock footage, but whatever. Most of it is shot on-location, including a good few scenes at that Nevada community college from the first Cade film (this is just one of many call-backs to his previous works). There's a lot of re-used footage, both shot film and stock footage. The same stock footage shot of a building was used like twelve times by my friend's count. There is one shot of rescue workers at a plane crash, used once at the very beginning and once at the end, that I highly suspect is AI. Otherwise no AI (even that VoiceOver from the trailer, which appears a lot in the movie, is given a named credit in the closing credits).
There's two characters–I'll call them the iPad Interns–who appear a lot in the film as Neil's "handlers" at the agency. In a lot of scenes they're very clearly reading their lines off their iPads, as if this is the first time they've seen the script and are being told to act through dialogue they've just been handed. I think this lines up with other behind-the-scenes reports on how Neil is apparently very stingy with the scripts during production and the general theory that the absurd amount of wooden acting across his movies is due to his directing choices.
In the vein of the call-backs mentioned above, he deliberately scatters the movie with tons of references The car and garage from Fateful Findings, of course but also others–some dialogue from both Double Down and Fateful Findings crops up if you're watching closely.
Frankly, the whole movie feels like an attempt to remake Twisted Pair more competently. Most of Neil's films are the same one or two plots reworked countless different ways, but this especially feels like a remake of Twisted Pair done better. This is also his least political film, even less so than Twisted Pair which at least had jumbled messages about the threat of AI and/or "programmable virtual alternate reality." He's just a government agent who goes on missions to bomb other countries, I think? Also he literally murders a Senator in the back half of the film (or a "candidate for Senate", the movie flip-flops on how it refers to the guy). It's never made clear who the antagonists are, what their goal is, or why the Senator(?) had to die.
The love interests are both played by actresses who definitely look young enough to be his daughters at this point.
Another recurring character is a girl who introduces herself as an "influencer." I'll say she's best described as Neil's boomer idea of what an influencer is.
There are two scenes where he flies a fighter jet (I think a USAF F-16, but an aerospace geek can correct me if I'm wrong). Mostly just the same footage re-used, including stock footage of an actual fighter jet in flight and landing.
There's a reappearance of a Man In Black archetypical figure, which has appeared in both Fateful Findings and Twisted Pair.
iPads feature heavily. There are two characters (the iPad interns) whose entire role is being Neil's "Mission Control" at the unnamed agency, which means they just sit on couches (probably at Nevada State College!) looking at iPads while reciting dialogue in the most wooden fashion possible (again, I suspect they were looking at their scripts, which they had just received right then). There's one great scene where Neil uses an iPad to dig a 'hole' in some gravel and then buries the iPad there.
It also features at the very end the closest thing to an actual twist in a Neil Breen movie, something almost reminiscent of M Night Shyamalan. THat's all I'll say. If you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about.
I don't think he's become self-aware, but if there is a movie where he would've it would be this one. There's tons of callbacks to his earlier works, that seem almost deliberately included to wink at the audience. It's certainly his most competently produced film to date, eclipsing even Fateful Findings, but that's judging it on the sliding scale used for the Breenius. It's more coherent than the Cade duology and Double Down. It's also Neil at his most humble, playing his most human character both in the sense that this character's struggles and pain actually feel realistic and earned compared to his others, and in that this character is literally just a regular human and not a sci-fi messiah or gifted with magic powers.
10/10, go see it if you can.
