Mission: Impossible Franchise (1996-?)

Discussions of specific films and franchises.
Post Reply
Message
Author
User avatar
The Invunche
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 2:43 am
Location: Denmark

#26 Post by The Invunche » Sat Apr 29, 2006 4:23 pm

As lampooned by Stephen Chow in The King of Comedy.

User avatar
cdnchris
Site Admin
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 2:45 pm
Location: Washington
Contact:

#27 Post by cdnchris » Mon May 01, 2006 11:31 pm

hearthesilence wrote:Don't forget the white doves. Boy, that NEVER gets old.... :roll:
I saw the second film with my brother and we actually both started to crack up during the dove sequence. I like Woo's older stuff, and also enjoy Face/Off to an extent, but MI2 just became a parody.

User avatar
ben d banana
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 8:53 pm
Location: Oh Where, Oh Where?

#28 Post by ben d banana » Tue May 02, 2006 12:01 am

cdnchris wrote:...but MI2 just became a parody.
Wait a second, I shouldn't have been giggling as Cruise is suspending himself in a Christ pose at the start?

User avatar
Fletch F. Fletch
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:54 pm
Location: Provo, Utah

#29 Post by Fletch F. Fletch » Tue Nov 14, 2006 1:30 pm

I finally caught the third MI film on DVD and actually enjoyed it quite a bit, even if it did feel like Alias: The Movie... but that was actually what made it easily better than the second film but still lags behind the first one.

J.J. Abrams certainly brings the same sensibility to this movie as he did to his show: how does a covert operative who travels around the globe saving the world also juggle a personal life with loved ones? I also liked how he surrounded Ethan Hunt with a team of operatives to help him out much like in De Palma's film.

Getting an actor like Philip Seymour Hoffman to play the heavy was a nice touch, I thought. His baddie has just the right mix of cocky arrogance and menace that, oddly enough, made me think of his mattress tyrant from Punch-Drunk Love.

I also liked how the film basically asks the question: How does Ethan come home to his significant other and a “normalâ€

User avatar
Matt
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:58 pm

#30 Post by Matt » Tue Nov 14, 2006 1:55 pm

[quote="Fletch F. Fletch"]I also liked how the film basically asks the question: How does Ethan come home to his significant other and a “normalâ€

User avatar
Antoine Doinel
Joined: Sat Mar 04, 2006 1:22 pm
Location: Montreal, Quebec
Contact:

#31 Post by Antoine Doinel » Tue Nov 14, 2006 2:30 pm

Let's not forget The Sopranos which is pretty much the prime example of this kind of extraordinary/illegal job and home life balance. Also, Weeds is quite good as well.

User avatar
Galen Young
Joined: Fri Nov 12, 2004 8:46 pm

#32 Post by Galen Young » Tue Nov 14, 2006 11:18 pm

MI:II is a freakin' art film compared to the third one. For all the empty-headed silliness of the first two, at least De Palma and Woo know how to create memorable images. I can't remember a single thing about the third one, and am ashamed to admit I saw it in a theatre.

User avatar
Fletch F. Fletch
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:54 pm
Location: Provo, Utah

#33 Post by Fletch F. Fletch » Wed Nov 15, 2006 10:03 am

Were you watching the same movie?! MI: II was crap. Admittedly, eye-catching style but it was simply recycled style from Woo's other (superior) movies. The script was gahd-awful and not in a memorable it's so bad it's good way. The bad guy was bland and in no way a viable threat to Cruise's character (unlike Hoffman in MI: III who actually seemed menacing). Just forgettable and boring. I felt that MI: III was vastly superior in every way. That being said, De Palma's film is still my favorite of the series.

User avatar
Antoine Doinel
Joined: Sat Mar 04, 2006 1:22 pm
Location: Montreal, Quebec
Contact:

#34 Post by Antoine Doinel » Fri Apr 06, 2007 12:21 am

Joe Carnahan talks about what his version of M:I III would've been like.

User avatar
Professor Wagstaff
Joined: Tue Aug 24, 2010 11:27 pm

Re: Mission(s) Impossible

#35 Post by Professor Wagstaff » Thu Dec 22, 2011 12:58 am

Anyone else catch up with Brad Bird's entry in the series yet? I have to say that, by a wide margin, it is the most satisfying action film I've seen this year. I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise seeing as Bird had echoes of Bond in The Incredibles, but this film really harkens back to those vibes of Connery-era Bond with cleanly constructed yet elaborate action scenes and exotic location settings that actually feel exotic. Bird shows his desire to delight the audience rather than wear us out with overblown action sequences (Woo's version) or sink us in an Alias-style relationship drama (Abrams version). It really sets the tone from the opening with a prison break set to a Dean Martin song. Every action sequence delivers in the best ways possible.

User avatar
matrixschmatrix
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 11:26 pm

Re: Mission(s) Impossible

#36 Post by matrixschmatrix » Thu Dec 22, 2011 9:27 am

I thought it was a lot of fun- it's a movie that recognizes we're not going to get any meaningful pathos out of Tom Cruise, and runs past exposition and pathos at top speed so it can get to agreeably crazy setpieces. Though I think it may have been a mistake to put the Burj Khalifa scene halfway through the movie; there's nowhere to go but down from there.

I thought was odd that they had Jeremy Renner point out that one of Cruise's clever tricks (lighting a flare and attaching it to a body to draw fire) made no sense, though. It doesn't really lead up to anything, they really don't explain why it did work, and it had the overall effect of reminding me that very little of what I was seeing made any sense. It didn't ruin the movie, but I thought it a curious choice.
Last edited by matrixschmatrix on Thu Dec 22, 2011 1:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
jbeall
Joined: Sat Aug 12, 2006 9:22 am
Location: Atlanta-ish

Re:

#37 Post by jbeall » Thu Dec 22, 2011 10:57 am

cdnchris wrote:
hearthesilence wrote:Don't forget the white doves. Boy, that NEVER gets old.... :roll:
I saw the second film with my brother and we actually both started to crack up during the dove sequence. I like Woo's older stuff, and also enjoy Face/Off to an extent, but MI2 just became a parody.
When I saw MI2, the entire audience cracked up at this scene. At least a 9 on the Unintentional Comedy Scale. Easily the worst of the MI movies.

User avatar
Jeff
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 9:49 pm
Location: Denver, CO

Re: Mission(s) Impossible

#38 Post by Jeff » Thu Dec 22, 2011 1:37 pm

Professor Wagstaff wrote:Anyone else catch up with Brad Bird's entry in the series yet? I have to say that, by a wide margin, it is the most satisfying action film I've seen this year.
It's right up there with Hanna for me. It would have likely ended up on my top ten list if it could have sustained the energy of it's first few sequences throughout the entire run time. I thought it kind of fell apart once they got to Mumbai. It's still enormously entertaining though, and proves Bird's got some live action chops. I think it's absolutely worth seeing on a full size IMAX screen if only for the Burj Khalifa sequence. Exhilarating stuff.

User avatar
jbeall
Joined: Sat Aug 12, 2006 9:22 am
Location: Atlanta-ish

Re: Mission(s): Impossible (DePalma/Woo/Abrams/Bird, 1996-20

#39 Post by jbeall » Sun Dec 25, 2011 9:38 pm

Just caught MI4 today (yeah, I went to a movie theater on Xmas day; I'm a dick), and thought it was the best installment since DePalma's original. Tight script, and Bird does a great job staging elaborate action sequences while giving the audience a great sense of space. If only he were directing the Dark Knight films!. Definitely the best action film I've seen this year, although take that with a grain of salt since I didn't get to see too many in 2011.

User avatar
Jean-Luc Garbo
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 1:55 am
Contact:

Re: Mission(s): Impossible (DePalma/Woo/Abrams/Bird, 1996-20

#40 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Fri Dec 30, 2011 1:33 am

This was a lot of fun. Renner and Pegg were a welcome sight and decent ballast to Cruise showboating so much (often to hilarious effect). The movie is even more enjoyable if you pretend that it's a Max Fischer production.
SpoilerShow
The quiet moment near the end when Cruise and Renner settle their respective pasts was good. The Dean Martin prison break was excellent even if Cruise's stunt double did most of it.

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: Mission(s): Impossible (DePalma/Woo/Abrams/Bird, 1996-20

#41 Post by domino harvey » Fri Nov 28, 2014 4:06 am

Went from having seen none of these films to seeing all of them, so I guess I'm thankful this season that at least one of them was good. Let's start from the bottom and work up: Holy mother of God was Mission: Impossible II awful. Like, how did John Woo still have a career after this-level bad. I appreciate how each of these films are so dissimilar in terms of tone while maintaining the same basic plot / running gags/ &c, but the self-serious, laughably "sensuous" tone here comes off as the worst kind of indulgence in an action film: in love with the things which aren't action, and self-satisfied with its "superior" nature. What a gross film-- the mission to turn the franchise into a perfume commercial circa 1994 should never have been accepted. Not that the first Mission: Impossible was all that great to begin with. I'd seen the show a few times as a kid (late on Nick at Nite, probably) but not enough to carry any emotional baggage, so the utterly telegraphed twists of De Palma's take on the material didn't bother me other than to be disappointed that my guess(es) for the twists and turns pretty early on all materialized. Not that it matters anyways if the presentation is strong enough, but I found this awfully phoned-in from De Palma, and while I'm hardly a fan on the whole, he's certainly capable of doing more with thin material than evidenced here.

As stated, each of these films seems to offer the latest entry in a different film series, and as a result Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol (a title which is one step away from a Braille translation) is pretty much the defacto Bond movie the other entries flirted with. This might explain my general apathy of the fourth entry despite many here and elsewhere finding it the best of the lot (I'd rank it on par with the first, in the "eh" category), as there's little less interesting to me than a Bond film, except perhaps a Bond-ripoff film. For all the praise Brad Bird got for this film, I thought he was the worst of the four directors in the series at directing any of his action. There are a handful of jarring, poorly-executed sequences that made me second-hand embarrassed for the crew that somehow let this go out to the masses with some noticeable deficiencies. I have no idea what y'all are praising here upthread. The fourth film did do a nice switcheroo on me, though, as I watched the first half of it on DVD by accident because Paramount put the Blu-ray behind the digital copy flier and placed the DVD in the main holder. I kept wondering why the transfer looked so lackluster til I paused it and saw "DVD" on my hold screen. I'd have been more upset if it weren't for the fact that my interest in the irony of the situation far outweighed my investment in the film itself.

And yes armchair sleuths, that leaves Mission: Impossible III as the only good film of the lot. Perhaps it is best because it most strongly resembles none of the others in tone (which is a biiig plus if you don't care for the rest). Perhaps because it keeps its set pieces "small" in scope but amps up the complications and resultant chaos. Could be because the film is more serious, with a jarring villain in Philip Seymour Hoffman who is legit unsettling (and the film even denies us the surrogate pleasure of bidding him farewell by eliminating him with a split second exit both funny and frustrating) and some ugly, non-fetishistic violence. Maybe it's because JJ Abrams is good at staging his absurdist action sequences and his background in TV keeps everything moving at a steady clip as if working to cram things in for the commercial break that never comes. I see earlier in the thread that people compare the film to Abrams' own Alias TV series, which I've never seen (and my dad liked it, so how good could it possibly be [or so I thought]), but maybe I should find some more hours in my day for it...

Anyways, there's somehow a fifth entry coming, so the thread title will only get more absurd this time next year!

User avatar
Andre Jurieu
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:38 pm
Location: Back in Milan (Ind.)

Re: Mission(s): Impossible (DePalma/Woo/Abrams/Bird, 1996-20

#42 Post by Andre Jurieu » Fri Nov 28, 2014 3:50 pm

domino harvey wrote: ... so the utterly telegraphed twists of De Palma's take on the material didn't bother me other than to be disappointed that my guess(es) for the twists and turns pretty early on all materialized. Not that it matters anyways if the presentation is strong enough, but I found this awfully phoned-in from De Palma, and while I'm hardly a fan on the whole, he's certainly capable of doing more with thin material than evidenced here.
The rumor was that the version that hit theatres wasn't actually De Palma's cut of the film. While De Palma never removed his name from the project - again, rumor was that it actually wasn't in his contract that he would have final-cut - the general consensus was that Cruise & Wagner did their own edit of the film after test-screenings turned up some lack-luster scores. The mediocre scores were apparently due to confusion in how the plot-twists were revealed, though I'm not sure Cruise or De Palma (or Wagner) have ever publicly acknowledged these problems. The prevailing theory at the time was that Cruise could not risk having his first summer-blockbuster production flop (I'm fairly certain this was one of the first Cruise/Wagner productions), so his edit was supposedly far more linear in narrative and thus easy for a general audience to follow. At the time, it was actually thought to be rather smart business maneuver, because the project reached the (now rather meager) $100 million "blockbuster" threshold, with decent audience reaction, and solid international box-office (which was also - perhaps erroneously - credited to the international cast that Cruise/Wagner had put together).

... aaaaaand I'm repeating myself.
Last edited by Andre Jurieu on Fri Nov 28, 2014 6:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Mission(s): Impossible (DePalma/Woo/Abrams/Bird, 1996-20

#43 Post by knives » Fri Nov 28, 2014 3:55 pm

III is a lot better than Alias personally which suffers from a lot of the post Buffy murk so much of late '90s early '00s television got into. Garner and the guy that plays her dad are pretty fun though.

User avatar
hearthesilence
Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:22 am
Location: NYC

Re: Mission(s): Impossible (DePalma/Woo/Abrams/Bird, 1996-20

#44 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Nov 28, 2014 5:54 pm

I got dragged to each and every one of these. (This is what happens when most of your friends aren't cinephiles, and the only place to hang out is a mall.)

I had already given up on John Woo making any worthwhile American films, but the second one was just terrible. Not only did it feel like an empty exercise in his style (no longer meaningful and reduced to a "brand"), it lifted at least a half dozen scenes from Darkman. (Reason: they really went to town with the fake disguises in this one.)

I'm not a J.J. Abrams fan at all, I despise his daytime soap opera dialogue, and the third manages to have the worst scene he's ever done, the "cat prayer." (No doubt he's done worse, but I really don't want to see any more of his work.) I still remember several strangers in the audience making something like a gag sound when that one character asks if she can teach him that prayer.

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: Mission(s): Impossible (DePalma/Woo/Abrams/Bird, 1996-20

#45 Post by domino harvey » Fri Nov 28, 2014 6:09 pm

I didn't think there was anything wrong with that scene (and all of these films have far worse, on-the-nose moments than that even if I did), but your loss if you gave up on Abrams before the wonderful kids' adventure of Super 8

User avatar
hearthesilence
Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:22 am
Location: NYC

Re: Mission(s): Impossible (DePalma/Woo/Abrams/Bird, 1996-20

#46 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Nov 28, 2014 6:36 pm

That scene was so ridiculously awful. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he wants to do a scene where we see Tom Cruise's secret agent friends (sitting in a van waiting for him) gravely concerned for his safety. That's fine, it probably seemed like a nice idea because how many blockbuster action films dwell on that instead of following the action inside? But it's so contrived and syrupy to the point of condescension: one of the characters starts talking to herself in Chinese, the other asks what she's doing, and she tells him that when she was a little girl, she used to pray in Chinese for her cat to come back whenever it got out, so now she's saying the same exact prayer. And of course, he asks her to teach it to him (right before Tom Cruise comes crashing out of the building). It's like a full-grown adult soldier trapped in a hostage situation clicking her heels together because she thinks it'll send her back to Kansas.

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Mission(s): Impossible (DePalma/Woo/Abrams/Bird, 1996-20

#47 Post by knives » Fri Nov 28, 2014 6:52 pm

That's an odd conclusion to come to. Whether sane or not people do pray in highly intensive situations especially when they can't be actively involved in a rescue at the moment. That doesn't render any of the characters involved children or child like.

User avatar
hearthesilence
Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:22 am
Location: NYC

Re: Mission(s): Impossible (DePalma/Woo/Abrams/Bird, 1996-20

#48 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Nov 28, 2014 7:06 pm

It's not the act of praying, it's the context, and they chose to give a child-like context to her character's motivation. If she prays because she is a person of faith and wants God's help, no problem, but hey this is what I used to do as a kid when my cat was lost? C'mon.

User avatar
thirtyframesasecond
Joined: Mon Apr 02, 2007 1:48 pm

Re: Mission(s): Impossible (DePalma/Woo/Abrams/Bird, 1996-20

#49 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Sat Nov 29, 2014 7:09 am

I've seen films 1,2 and 4. I have a lot of time for the first film. It could be because I cut De Palma a lot of slack, but for me, it's just a straight up, rollicking two hour action movie with some great set pieces, even if the plot's a little wayward. The opening Prague scenes are really well done, and it's a great cast. Pointless trivia alert: the London pub that Cruise and Rhames drink in at the end is also the same pub that Brand and Hill drink in in Get Him To The Greek.

MI:2 is appalling, agree with what everyone has said here. MI:4 is so forgettable I don't have an opinion on it.

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: Mission(s): Impossible (DePalma/Woo/Abrams/Bird, 1996-20

#50 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Nov 30, 2014 9:04 am

I wasn't fond of Mission: Impossible 2 when I first saw it either, although I found it improved a little on a much later viewing when I wasn't getting steadily more infuriated by the lack of action during its long running time and could revel in the longeurs of the overly-embellished individual scenes as little short films in their own right, without giving any thought to the ongoing narrative thrust. I think my main issue is that the second film is a romantic drama under the guise of a spy acton film. It is continually undermining the spy antics for langorous, stylish scenes of lovers coming together and being betrayed, then getting back together, then being pulled apart, and so on. I don't think this is the only John Woo film which has these issues (I find Face/Off's abandonment of the main narrative drive to focus on broadly sketched in family issues similarly grating for example), and it does distinctively mark it as a "John Woo film" in the sense of losing your identity and fighting to regain an unsullied persona again (and perhaps just as much it reflects a kind of 'Hong Kong approach' to action filmmaking in general, in which the saccharine can mingle with the goofy and 'unbelievable' and back again without feeling the need to acknowledge that dissonance), but a focus on a love story doesn't really succeed as an action packed entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise which, like Bond, discards its used up female love interests with each entry.

Post Reply