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| Pick his nose, Peter! |
Action packed and full of surprises, number 8 is more than any of the movies that came before it. I have deep respect for Cruise's commitment to giving audiences every penny of their ticket, and creating action sequences that we've never seen before. It's not enough to swim into a sunken submarine to fetch a McGuffin, it has to be 500 feet down, in arctic water, and the sub has to be rolling downhill with torpedoes falling on you. It's not enough to defuse a bomb, you have to do it while falling from the sky. The stakes were as high as possible, which sucked almost all the fun out of this movie, but I feel Cruise felt painted into a corner, stakes-wise. He had to go big!
Stakes Of The Impossible Missions
- List of covert spies ends up in enemy hands
- Global pandemic
- Ethan's wife's life, mysterious McGuffin
- Nuke destroying San Francisco
- Billions of dollars funding terrorism
- Irradiating Asian water supply, billions starve
- and
- Extinction of all humanity
Did this story need to be nearly six hours over two movies? (The first movie, 29 years ago, was 110 minutes!) No, it didn't. How long was it? I went to the bathroom after one hour, and when I had to go again, I checked my watch and discovered another hour had gone by! By the time it was over 50 minutes after that, I had to go again. Rarely do I fantasize about downloading video editing software and making my own cut-down edit of a feature film. I'm pretty sure I could cut 30 minutes out of this and no one would notice.
So it turns out Pom Klementieff's French assassin did not die in the last movie- or they decided later to bring her back? Which brings me to my final point - I wish they'd had the guts to let more of the team die in this movie. The final farewell scene felt like a studio demand and/or a copout. If this movie really is a "final" reckoning, they shouldn't have teased the possibility of more movies.
The movie has ended the series as well as anyone could ask. However, when I want to have fun with an Impossible Mission, I'll always watch the first movie or Ghost Protocol. My grade: A-minus
Other Missions
- Mission: Impossible [1996] gets better after you've seen it a few times.
- Mission: Impossible 2 (the John Woo one) I only saw once on home video, and I've never seen it again, so how good could it have been?
- Mission: Impossible: 3 [2006] Also good, but also only saw it once. Maybe Phillip Seymour Hoffman was too good as the villain? He scared me.
- Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol [2011] is my personal favorite.
- Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation [2015]
- Mission Impossible: Fallout [2018]
- Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning [2023]