Here is my ranking of the first six mission impossible movies, based entirely on how much I enjoyed watching them this time around. First thing I will say is I liked all of them. I would not have done this if that weren’t true. I like them because Tom Cruise is very good at physical acting. I don’t know what else to call it. He acts with his body when he runs and jumps and does hilariously exaggerated double takes and that kind of thing. He can be good at dialogue too, sometimes.
Anyway, from most to least enjoyable:
2: I already wrote a bunch about this earlier in the thread. But after watching the others I can confidently say I was more entertained by this than any of them.
6: this one, though, is the best “Mission Impossible” movie. It really feels like the culmination of everything the series does best. The helicopter sequence at the end is one of the most beautiful and weird action movie sequences I’ve ever seen. I hope Christopher Nolan contemplated early retirement when he saw it.
5: Alec Baldwin is so damn funny in these. All the ones before him have some old seasoned actor just being authoritative and giving Ethan instructions in an actorly way. Then he shows up and is just like 95 percent his character from 30 rock and 5 percent his bad Trump impersonation that he can’t shake off. It rules and the only bad part of 6 is when he dies.
4: I earned a grudging respect for this one this time around because Brad Bird movies usually just feel too heavily storyboarded for me. I don’t know if that makes sense. Like you can tell an animator directed them. Some people like that but it’s not my cup of tea. That Tomorrowland movie drove me insane for that reason. This worked better for me, but I still feel it’s kind of overrated. All MI movies except 2 really showcase one crazy stunt, but the secret is all the rest also have tons of other cool stuff after the sequence that shows up in all the ads. In this one everything after the Burj Khalifa sequence just feels half assed.
1: this is a tough one because it’s so different from all the rest tonally, but what surprised me the most is how all the others really owe so much to it. It’s the blueprint, but I think all the filmmakers who made the rest of the movies really had fun figuring out how to punch up all the gags this movie used. The best way to think of it though is in isolation from everything that came after it. When you look at it that way, it looks like a funny experiment in doing a Pakula style paranoia thriller but with American James Bond as the hero. It is such a weird tonal clash and it doesn’t always work, but that’s what makes it charming.
3: I still love this movie OK, but I have to admit the only thing it actually does better than any of the others is have Philip Seymour Hoffman in it. He’s so good in this! RIP to a real one. Both this one and four do the thing where basically everything Our Heroes try to do ends up failing. I actually think this one pulls it off better because Hoffman is so scary and the tone is so grim, in its best moments it’s almost a horror movie more than an action movie. But the action is mostly bad
Im also tempted to type a whole lot about how both MI 1 and GoldenEye attempt to deal with some post cold war end of history crap, then get extremely weird geopolitically in their later entries, before pivoting to “actually… Now it’s personal…” -type stuff where all the sudden were supposed to pretend that we care about like, who James Bond’s parents are or whatever. Idk
Huckabees is actually one of my all time favorite films. I watched it on mushrooms the first time, which I very strongly recommend
