Only an improvement on Cherry in that it doesn't actively seem to be undermining the validity of its subject. In this case, its CIA nonsense and its literally impossible to be unfair or offensive toward that particular organization. Even so, this also achieves a kind of breathtaking bewilderment at just how the Russos are able to render everything so ignorable. My take is that they became obsessed with the tech and started to not care at all about the substance or the supposed magic of the movies. We kid about algorithm movies, but no film has felt more like an algorithm than this one. It moves at a clip but there's no rush or thrill to anything. There are jokes, but there's never a sense that any of these characters care about making people laugh, feel joy, or be at ease. In a way, this is just a particularly disposable variation on the familiar efficiency-expert cinema that Disney and Netflix have embraced but as the fight scenes piled up, it started feeling like something far more numbing and alienating. The Russos seem obsessed with creating a movie that feels like no one made it, because if no one made it, you can't really blame anyone for it being bad or cheesy or inert. You can also then be considered a filmmaker, an artist even, by a certain, sizable group of people simply by mastering of a few pieces of software. Their answer to "auteur filmmaking" isn't collectivist cinema or a call for film-worker solidarity of any sort. It's just fealty to the same corporate system that has always been trying to bleed the talent and art out of movies in favor of a highly researched and thoroughly tested recipe to make a hit, one that any idiot's child could follow and make money off of easily, and this is the closest I've seen to something where that feels like the entire creative process. Genuinely dreadful.