Dude, Mission Impossible 1 is cool. Mission 2 is horrible, horrible, horrible.
3 is worth it, though. You should really check it out. I’d rank them like this:
First: Mission Impossible 4 - easily the best in the series
Second: Mission Impossible 1 - I enjoyed the heck out of it, but I did see it when it was new.
Third: Mission 3 - Fun. Really worth it if you liked 4.
Last: Mission 2: Terrible. I’ve heard the final cut of this movie is not what John Woo wanted and that a better version exists(at least in the editing room of his mind).
Jeremy Renner had to correct the team when they said that Tom Cruise’s wife had left him. She was dead, you see, and he was the only one who knew because he was there, man. An hour later, Tom Cruise said that everyone had to think she was dead so that she wouldn’t be a target. Really? Then how come nobody knew she was dead? Bang up job, there.
I usually don’t like just-so action movies, where the heroes get themselves into terrible situations and then happen to extricate themselves using Equipment X that they just happened to have just in case they got themselves into that situation. I especially don’t like it if they pretend that was the plan all along. The only thing that kept MI4 from going down that road was that the characters seemed to frequently comment on the fact that their equipment was faulty, they had no home support so their plans were rubbish, and they admitted when they screwed up. Part of me liked watching them flounder, and part of me
[spoiler] got sick of it when their plan boiled down to “get super lucky.”
I can see why the president might disavow the IMF after the Kremlin bombing, but when they weren’t able to stop the big nuke code exchange, it would have been time to get the president on the phone and say “look dude, we tried to clean up our mess but shit’s about to get real. Better to get a black eye in international diplomacy, apologize like hell to Russia, get the Indian government on board and shut down the satellite using a massive international police and military force rather than crossing our fingers that we can somehow seduce some media mogul at a party and blah blah blah.” Especially given that simply launching the missile would have started a nuclear war. (The NORAD guys must be going crazy watching that scene unfold while the US just sits on its hands.)[/spoiler]
Anyway, I understand I have a tendency to ruin movies by overthinking them, but I think that would have been a great conclusion. After floundering for half the movie, the IMF gets its shit together, there’s a massive influx of technology and intelligence, and we get to see them work like the badass team they’ve trained to be, rather than seeing more punching and kicking.
why that one bad dude was wearing the face mask of the other bad dude? Were they the same dude? The characters hadn’t made enough of an impact on me at that point to figure out the significance of the whole ripping off the mask thing.
And I enjoyed the movie overall, lest anyone think I’m a grump.
Good question. I guess because there was some urgency in blowing up the world, and by both cutting out a middle man and adding an element of subterfuge/misdirection to the whole thing would be beneficial to Cobalt.
a) He wanted to be able to control the situation during the hand off without anybody knowing he’s there, and/or
b) He didn’t trust anybody in his organization to be in possession of the codes. It is a criminal enterprise, after all.
From a screenwriting perspective, I suppose it is to give an ironic twinge to it all, in that if they’d just gone with Renner’s plan of capturing/killing everybody at the handoff it would have all been over with.
I think it also provided a bit of a laugh (at least, it did to my brother and I, but we can be goofy sometimes) in light of the complete failure of the magic-mask-making machine. Since the good guys wanted to use masks due to concerns that they’d be recognized but couldn’t, it’s kinda funny that the bad guy used a mask.
Also, reinforces the Power of Friendship[sup]TM[/sup] - the bad guys didn’t trust each other and they failed in their goals while the good guys came together as a team and had Success[sup]TM[/sup].
We saw the movie last night. All in all, it was pretty good (certainly above average) for the genre.
I managed to suspend my disbelief until I got to the part about the sub-launched ballistic missile “surely having a self-destruct button” [paraphrased].
Why exactly do film makers have this idea that missiles have the ability to self-destruct? Adding such a capability makes the weapons much less reliable. After all, if an enemy gets your self-destruct codes, you would never know it until it was too late.
(The Hunt for Red October [film version] made the same mistake by having a non-wire guided torpedo erroneously self-destruct.)
Resurrecting an old thread here, finally watched this On Demand, enjoyed it for what it was.
But when Cruise was climbing the outside of the skyscraper, and one of his gloves malfunctioned, he came upon another identical glove higher up. And then it was never mentioned again. Anyone know what was up with it?
thanks
It’s been a while since we watched it, and I haven’t really been thinking about it since. But I seem to recall he lost a glove or throw away the malfunctioning one. Isn’t that the one he came across? Found the same one again?
