Mission: Impossible

too true - cf. Malkovich, Dennis Hopper, tons of others.

(exception = Pacino in Dick Tracy!)

Terence Stamp?

I liked Malkovich in that Eastwood pic.

Kneel Before Zod = teh classic, of course.

for example, (ignoring the plot) Timothy Dalton & Robert Davi in License to Kill.

xpost Warner is classically trained, right? Also did outstanding voicework in Baldur's Gate 2 as the villain.

also, Peter Cushing in SW

(OK, how about solid actors who get to use more than 5% of their chops playing big baddies? I think Brandauer and Malkovich qualify here.)

we can pretty much rule out sharon stone.

X-Men movies are great, kingfish otm for why too. (next one's gonna BLOOOOOOWWWWWW)

Ming the Merciless
all the bond books were written in the 50s, etc

??? That's the best Bond movie by fucking miles. The "realistic"-not-really acting served the "realistic"-not-really plot perfectly. Wayne Newton as televangelist providing cover for Davi drug op? GREAT.

A character basically hissing "I'm evil" can usu be taken about as seriously as that Colbert critic announcing "I'm a funny guy..."

Next MI: Cruise vs Montalban as Khan. "You will be ber-ried a-li-ive..."

some good, some bad, some retarded plot twists, and some simon pegg(who's good in his two scenes as fumbly britishes computer guy)

otm! the only scene in this movie that actually felt like "mission impossible" was the aforementioned vatican city sequence, which happened to be the most entertaining part of the movie.

many xposts - Irons is great in Die Hard With A Vengeance!

well, the thing is, i don't think you need them to be all that non-descript e.g. Ving Rhames is great in his role, which is admittedly just being a Ving Rhames-type incarnated as an operative. There's plenty of value in a well-contructed team of folks doing something; like a semi-crazy helicopter pilot, a tough mechanic/driver/demolitions expert, a smooth-talkin' chameleon/covert ops type, and a cigar-chomping leader who loves it when a plan comes together.

For instance.

Actually looking at IMDB now it appears he was involved in all three. Still the second one was pretty awful.

i think having sat through part 1 with ever increasing disbelief that _this is the plot_ i could only really ever see myself sitting down to watch part 2 in a atwell_pants fan supercut tbh

theres a lot of talk about what next presuming cruise cant do forever and what is needed imo is a ten part series about sean harris breaking out and starting his next criminal superclub from scratch

the best part of this universe, and no more close ups of the MI crew trying to act, in particular pegg who is better than good in his lane but utterly wet and wretched when called upon to be emotionalbenji.gif

I haven’t watched this yet but I remember thinking how terrible and tedious part 1 was…

i really loved part one, especially on revisit. still, haven’t heard anything about final reckoning that’s made me rush to see it. someday

Sic and VG OTM

I could not in good conscience advise anyone to this see this movie without a bullet list of considerations

Like, there is 60-75 minutes of cool shit in there! But then there’s the wasteland of the rest

If Final Reckoning accomplishes anything, it makes Dead Reckoning seem a little better by comparison

huh i thought final reckoning rocked. submarine behring strait and prop plane chase were two of the best set pieces of the series. rolf saxon and his wife were great

i also found the suggestion that after the film ends ethan is going to fuse his brain with the entity and become an omnipotent benevolent god that rules the world to be a hilariously pure expression of cruise’s megalomania

making half the movie a congratulatory victory lap celebrating and revisiting selected events from the entire series was a bit much

we have a series that does that with regularity: Fast & Furious

xp it's also a fine endpoint of the Ethan Hunt character trajectory of: good spy in a bit over his head -> world's best spy -> superhero -> literal messiah who literally comes back from the dead.

i enjoyed the flashbacks as mcquarrie’s totalitarian desire to rationalize the films before he took over and bring them under his control. but i can’t forgive him for explaining the (hilariously never explained) rabbit’s foot macguffin from iii and shoehorning it into the entity

(feels weird to use spoiler hiders in these movies where the plot is so stupid)

set pieces worked great for me but connective tissue was way below standard for the series.

Also someone please cast Hayley Atwell in more stuff my god

sic otm

this was like the zombified corpses of like, three half-movies stitched together and animated with lightning jolts or whatever
but hey look at our shiny SET PIECES you guys (just dont look at literally anything else like plot, story, dialog (definitely noy dialog) or character)

literally held together w narration (! SO MUCH NARRATION)
flashbacks (at least 50% flashbacks)
and at some points dialogue is even adr’d over actors standing in shadow (esai morales for example) because they clearly didnt have a working script and were just whatevering their way through this massive budget movie wasting a thousand people’s time & good effort because those people thought they were making a movie and not “finding” the story while they were shooting/editing etc

this franchise has always been dumb fun but never so clearly, actually cravenly shitty (imo)

like just scooping out this cobbled together expensive garbage and throwing it on our plates because we the stupid sheeple will pay to see it based on good will that was genuinley earned and now completely wasted

to pull these run and gun b-movie dodges when they have all the fucking money in the world is kind if shameful to me?

cheap movies do these things because they cant AFFORD to do more

I didn't like the last one, and literally couldn't muster the energy to see this one. Like, I want to say three times I was prepared to see it but at the last minute just kind of noped out. And it's not even that long! Just seemed ... exhausting. Even the trailer made me tired.

Did they ever figure out who had the key?

i hate that key

but hey look at our shiny SET PIECES you guys (just dont look at literally anything else like plot, story, dialog (definitely noy dialog) or character)

i didn’t find it exceptionally bad itr relative to the other recent movies in the series tbh

some parts of the plot/story that were enjoyable:

- set up to the behring strait sequence had some good iterations of the classic MI scene where ethan explains his plan to an incredulous audience. “so how are they supposed to know which random 4 square foot circle of ice to cut and collect your near-death hypothermic body from, out of the entire sea?” “by making an educated guess”
- ethan’s in the decompression chamber responding in the most asexual way possible to hayley atwell’s embraces
- showing up at rolf saxon’s house but the russians beat them to it was tense and suspenseful
- the subplot with angela basset and nick offerman actually successfully threw me on some red herrings (i thought offerman was compromised) and succeeded in having some decent jarring plot twists. i love basset so much in this role

one thing i could see being annoying about final reckoning is it relies extremely strongly on the assumption that the audience an emotional connection to the series and characters. but i do (lol) so a lot of that worked

Just struck me how funny it would have been if Tom Cruise's character had died heroically in each installment, but then showed up again in the next with no explanation.

It IS Paramount, go full Kenny-in-South-Park.

Mission Impossibly Long and Poor.

Shea Wigham lookin' like a velociraptor.

This shit is stupid. They are all sitting around talking bout The Thing and what is going to Happen with The Thing and what they will do or need to do because what if AI but oh no. And the first half an hour was basically a Clip Show!

How did they get so many good actors to sign up for this shit. Travis Trammell, Nick Offerman, Mark Gatiss, Hannah Waddingham, I am disappoint. Stop associating with this scientologist POS.

(I am not actively watching it. My bf has a terrible habit of finding THE WORST movies and watching them on weekends, like sub-5 star shit).

I still love 4-6 but I really don't think I'm gonna watch this one.