Mission: Impossible (1996)

Idea. What?

Hello and welcome back to Clear and Present Dudes, the podcast

where you've never seen me very upset.

I am joined as always by my good friends Rory O'Toole and Sonia

Bjorkson. Thank you for listening to

everyone who's listened to this is the podcast and left my

comments and ratings and so on. I just want to start with a

shout out. We, of course, this episode is

covering the 1996 film Mission Impossible, and it would be

remiss of us not to acknowledge that there is another podcast

out there which has covered this film over the course of several

100 episodes called Lights the Fuse, which is as near as you

can get to an official podcast where Mission Impossible start

out with a couple of fans who who's by sheer force of will and

commitments to the franchise have managed to get themselves

incredible access. And they put out hundreds of

hours of really good content about Mission Impossible.

And in the research for this episode, I listened to their

making of documentary episode for Mission Impossible in 1996.

Yeah, I just want to give a shout to that podcast.

Listen to it. If you want more better informed

takes about Mission Impossible, then listen to that.

If you want to hear three guys just just shooting the shit for

a for a couple of hours vaguely around the subject of Mission

Impossible, then yeah, please stay right here.

As I say, we're talking about Mission Impossible, 1996

American spy film directed by Brian De Palma, revisiting the

Brian De Palma well after last week's Touch on the

Untouchables. And it was produced by and stars

Tom Cruise from a screenplay by David Kep.

We'll talk about that in a short while.

And it's a reboot, of course, of the 1966 television series of

the same name. And it's an 88 sequel series.

And it is the first instalment of the the Mission Impossible

franchise, which of course now is a thundering behemoth made

famous known for before it's incredible death defying stunts

performed by Tom Cruise, the unbreakable man.

And no, not less known, a little bit less, I suppose, for it's

it's tight plotting and it's sort of spy thriller

credentials. And it's more just kind of like

an excuse to have a big stunt. But this movie stars the

aforementioned Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Henry Cerny, Emmanuel

Bart, our bet, Sean Renault, Bing Raines who would come back

to be a series regular, Kristen Scott Thomas and Vanessa

Redgrave. And in this film we are

introduced to super spy Ethan Hunt as he seeks to uncover who

framed him for the murders of most of his IMF and possible

Missions Force team. And he becomes disavowed, which

happens to him in every single movie henceforth.

But. The man's an HR nightmare it.

Really is unhirable. Oh God.

Oh, Jesus. OK, cool.

I've done enough talking. Roy.

O'Toole. I will be going around the room.

So how do we? How did you find Mission

Impossible 1966? What's your history of the

movie? Oh God damn.

So I remember watching this film on on VHS literally decades ago.

And at the time I think maybe a lot of it was kind of lost on

me. And I spent most of my rewatch

over there night thinking, Oh my God, how good's this film?

How how how good is this film? Holy crap, dude.

I was enraptured by it when I watched it.

I was blown away by Can I say something?

And no one's going to get all mad.

Yeah, sure, this is safe space mate.

This, this film is incredibly 1970s in a very, very cool way.

It's got a massive, massive amount of shared DNA with

absolute bangers. Things like really is the

Condor, which we've obviously talked about in the pod before,

and I know what you're thinking because there's one particular

line in a particular telephone box, which is absolutely a

massive call back to it. The film is beautifully paced.

It's got extensive amounts of dialogue, which I love.

Some of the writing is absolute bars.

It really is. I mean, like at the risk of

being a total wife guy and mentioned my wife Amber a lot,

but she was a really good like kind of like Balala for films

because there was some lanes and being like physically sit up in

a nest and be like holy shit, bars and and yeah, yeah, she was

a nest man and and like just some of the lanes.

I think something she said to me was on lines of what why why

isn't this line being quoted constantly today?

Because it's so good. When it come to the quotes, I'll

be going able over it. The way it's shot is fantastic.

Yakking's great. It's just well, then kind of

like segment watching the second film and I was like very

different film belly and see in front and just yeah, it's a real

proper, intelligent, well written, twisty, turny spy

thriller. It doesn't rely too much on any

one thing. It doesn't rely too much on

gadgets like some like the late 90s James Bond films did.

It doesn't rely too much on someone being exceptionally good

at fighting and stuff like that. It's just spy craft and

storytelling. It's meant a significant amount

of reviews that like wrote big films like this anymore and they

don't to to to to an extent a greater or less from standard.

It was amazing. Two hours incredibly well spent

for me. Enriching.

Awesome. I've got some stuff to say about

your earlier points about the film we've seen, and it's simply

these vibes and stuff I'll come back to in a second.

Before I do that, let's ask Sonia Bjorks.

And how did you find Mission Impossible in 1996?

I'm just going to call it Mission Impossible.

Just Mission Impossible. How?

Do you find mission? Impossible.

No notes. No notes, Not a dry seat in the

house. Awesome.

Any any advances or just just no notes?

Well, I mean I haven't first watching on VHS is is pretty

much all I can add to that. I have I've been been sinful and

1st watched it digitally not quite not long ago as well.

Content wise, I don't have any anything to add.

I I obviously can't comment on the 70s mives possibly going on

in there, having not really been around all that long.

Not not not, not part of the man an ancient man like.

Like so. Yeah.

Come on. Well, listen, I I am clearly on

a podcast with with someone who who used to be Jesus's body

doable at some point. That's you or nobody looks like

Jesus. OK.

Yes, Mike, when you joined the Navy, did they already have

cars? Fuck me man, what's going on?

Oh my God, it's Sandya Brooks it off the top row.

I mean, there's just frantic fire at this point.

I mean, you guys at least still have hair left, so I think I'm

going to quit doing that for now.

I'm going to I'm going to say we're back to the 1970s stuff

because this is this blends nicely into the chat about the

production of the movie I want to get into.

So Roy O2 did you know that when so it was, it was Tom Cruise

whose idea it was to make this movie.

So he he and his agent, Paula Wagner, forms Cruise.

Wagner Productions, CW Productions, which is the

production company who made the movie with Paramount Power Bar,

owned the property for the Mission Impossible.

And Cruise was a big fan of the TV show growing up, loved it.

And he was looking to get it made.

And off the back of him doing the film in 1993 with Sydney

Pollack, director of of course, Fridy's the Condor.

He was really keen to get Sydney Pollack to direct it.

Pollack kind of said, no, this isn't really my my warehouse.

You know, I make movies like Tootsie, you know, I don't, I

don't do this kind of thing. And then like Cruz was like,

yeah, you do. We just made the we just made

the firm and you made Fridy's the Condor.

This is totally in your warehouse.

What are you talking about? You could absolutely make this

movie. Nonetheless, Pollack

respectfully declined the opportunity to make this movie

and steered him in the direction of Brian De Palma said, have I

got a guy for you? Brian De Palma is a good as a

good guy. And obviously Tom Cruise is a

big film nerd. He already knew and he's in the

industry. Obviously by this point he's,

you know, he's made it. Big role, was respected, huge

actor. Now this is 1995.

We're talking about when the movie production's happening in

93 when they're talking. So he's come off the back of a

few good men and obviously is just wrapped on the firm when

they're having these conversations.

Gets him in touch with Brian De Palma, who he meets Brian De

Palma the same year had just finished Carly.

It was way and obviously had a a long story career doing stuff

like blow out and that kind of thing.

And yeah, he was up for it. So they worked on the the the

sort of the idea for a couple of years and then sort of put it

together. They had some meetings about

who's going to write it, and the first guy who had a crack at the

screenplay was I think Stephen Zillaire, the guy who wrote

Schindler's List, incredibly so. He didn't actually write a

screenplay, though. He had some meetings with Brian

Zapalmer when he talked about it, kind of went through and

kicked some story ideas together, and I've come up with

a rough outline. I didn't commit it.

There was a few of the goes at writing the screenplay.

The guy who finally finished it, though, that was David Kepp and

David Kepp. Let's just take a little canter

through David Kepp's filmography, starting with 991

Toy Soldiers. Sean Astin.

Die hard in a boarding school. Death becomes her.

Jurassic Park, Carlito's Way. Yeah, The Shadow.

OK, then. Mission Impossible.

After this, he does The Lost World.

Jurassic Park, Snake Eyes, Stir of Echoes, Panic Room, Vitamin

with Tobey Maguire. All the Worlds in 2005 for

Steven Spielberg. Holy crap.

Unfortunately, Indiana Jones in the Kingdom of the Crystal

Skull. A bit of a whiff.

Jack Ryan, shallow recruit. Holy crap.

Christopher Pine. Everything comes back to Jack

Ryan, man. Everything comes back from he's

like, he's, he's the wellspring that started this whole thing,

man. 2017's The Mummy with Tom Cruise, 2023's in Jenna Jones

and the Dollar Destiny and he's had two movies with Steven

Soderbergh, Kimmy and Presents, which we talked about last week,

the Ghost movie and his last credit.

So we the last two did. Another one was Stephen sued a

big black bag. And then he did Jurassic Park

Rebirth, which didn't do so well but incredibly versatile.

And his latest project that's upcoming.

I don't know if you guys have seen anything about it yet.

Have you heard of Disclosure Day?

It's Steven Spielberg's, a new UFO movie.

He's doing huge cast. Emily Blunt, Joshua Connor.

It's in post production at the moment, but this was written by

David Kepp. Right.

I've, I've heard a tiny amount of buzz about disclosure there

just from like paranormal podcasts and stuff that I listen

to when I'm on my commute to work and stuff.

But I know very little about it apart from the risk.

Like sort of sort of like a kind of theory among some people that

Steven Spielberg has been kind of contracted to work towards

actual real disclosure of aliens.

And he was started off, he was hired for like the kind of soft

launch with Close Encounters of the Third kind of.

And now he's going on this disclosure day because, you

know. Via ET.

Via AT and I mean, it's you know what as out of the conspiracy

theories, It's an interesting one.

This is not a conspiracy theory podcast, but it's an interesting

one that like that the idea, the yet the idea that a president

could like bring in people from Hollywood to like soften the

blow from when they say, hey, guys, those aliens are real,

especially the knife alien. Watch out for him.

That takes part. Another thing we should talk

about actually is that today we are recording this pod on the

same day the teaser trailer for Alejandro in a Ritos new movie

Digger has just dropped with Tom Cruise in a black comedy role

and you don't even really see him in the trailer, which is

kind of weird. But this is the long totes kind

of return to proper Kino for some Cruise that we've been

talking about for a while, you know, kind of for what was

promised were the end of Mission Impossible.

He was going to come back and do some real movies again.

And like here we are. That sounds really to reductive.

The mission possible movies are real movies, obviously, like,

you know, I mean, I mean like challenging cinema Keno film bro

letterboxed. So, but yeah, if you've seen

that yet, the the the. I've not know.

I've been working like crazy today and I've had a bunch of

crap to do. My life's insane.

This few days and few next days. Fair 1.

It's like about 25 seconds long. I don't have time.

For that time was fucking money that I've gotten on, you see.

Like it's just like a shot pans up as I could put a bluesy riff

plane and you see like a space or dunk on the ground and it's

like digger and then that's amazing.

And. Then you see like him, his legs

come past and he's wearing like these long cowboy boots.

But yeah, shorts, but with like short shorts.

I just like dum dum. And then there's a whole bit

where it cuts to him like on what appears to like appear, it

looks like with like a bollard, like a handrail kind of thing.

And he stands upon it and kind of like does like a some sort of

dance with it, with the, with the digger with a spade.

And it's like Tom Cruise is digger.

That's all it says this is. And it's like, it's like we are

so back. Yes.

So back, Boys cruise, cruise boys cruises.

We are so back. Good morning, Mr Phelps.

This is your mission, should you choose to accept it.

Should you or any member of your IM force be caught or killed,

the secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions.

Ethan Hunt will be your point man, as usual.

Good luck, Jim. This series always.

I miss the voice of the guy. Yeah.

This is, this is like the it's cool, but it's like a, it's

almost like a DVD kind of trailer.

Yeah. Doesn't feel like a trailer

you'd see in the movie there. Yeah.

Yeah, buddy, it's good. But it kind of does like what

all the movies after this would do.

In fact, I think the movie does it.

So the opening credits for each Mission Impossible movie shows

you what's going to happen in the movie you're about to watch.

You see that? Yeah.

Yeah. That was that was crazy.

I noticed that. And it's kind of like that.

It's a little bit like that. It's like, well, here's like

every big explosion. Here's like every cool scene.

Just for a split second, there was.

Definitely a point in the 90s when trailers were just, I mean,

that's got pretty much every big set piece from the film, right?

And there was a point I remember when trailers were just like,

this just sucks, man. This is like this is all the

good bits, the film, the movie. Oh I will say that today I read

the screenplay for the movie as well.

People may or may not know that the the Mission Impossible

movies after this after I would say after the first 3, so from 4

onwards. So Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation,

Fallout and you know, the two dead reckonings or Dead

Reckoning and Final Reckoning from then on they kind of each

of them famously have like 1 humongous stunt that is like the

big stunt that everyone knows about.

It's part of the marketing beforehand.

You, you wind up seeing like making of featurettes about how

they do that stunt before even the movies come out, you know,

and it was very openly discussed by, by by Cruz and Christian

Macquarie, who became like the director of them after the last

few that what they would do is they would get a room and they

would talk like, what's the cool, what's the craziest stunt

we can come up with? Like what's the biggest thing we

can do? And then we're going to do that.

And then they kind of make a movie around it to the point

where, and you'll notice this, if you watch like Dead Reckoning

and Final Reckoning, like they'll have them do all their

dialogue scenes where they talk about like the plot moving

forward and like small rooms like so at films in tight close

up. So that if when they're making

the movie, they decide they want to take it in a slightly

different direction, they can just reshoot those pretty easily

because they're not like on location, looking over a great

Vista on a certain day with certain lighting outside, but

the sun going down like they're in a small room that they can

control the lighting off so they can do that kind of thing.

It's really interesting. So it was kind of interesting to

have a look at this movie, obviously being the first one

and see the screenplay. And it's pretty much like what

they shot, almost like there's there's very few.

This is this is David Kepp's final shooting scripts, to be

fair. So this is what the last, this

is the one they would have taken to them to say, I couldn't get

anything earlier. So this is almost pretty much

exactly what they say. And it probably means that this

is kind of why this story's plot I think holds together pretty

well. Like you were saying earlier on,

this is a pretty tightly plotted thriller.

I I agree with that. I I also think that this movie

is a lot goofier than I remember it being.

I will think of this as being like the serious one at the

start and then I watched it. Like some of this stuff is

fucking dumb as fuck. Like, what the fuck?

Yeah, I mean. It's yeah, some of it's pretty

silly. It's not like, like it's not

insane levels of grit and realism because it kind of

wouldn't be fun. I mean, the the mission of the

TV series itself was, it was, it was fun, you know, like, yeah,

exactly. Yeah.

It was Cold War. It was it disguises, you know,

people clotting about gadgets and things.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

And Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy. This this is not.

So This movie starts with what would become a standard thing in

the Mission Impossible movies. Not every single one of them

does it. But if more than one of them

does it, a scene where they have a ginormous fake out, and that's

a guy being questioned because he's woken up.

What he thinks is a hotel room with like a dead prostitute on

the bed, covered in blood. And he's covered in blood and a

Russian mobster's walked in. He's going to help him clean it

all up. But he needs some information

1st and he slaps it about a little bit.

And then when he gets information he needs someone, a

woman comes in, gives him a shot, and it knocks him out.

And then they do the cool like, Mission Impossible thing where

the Russian gangster pulls off his face mask.

You know, it's Tom Cruise. And then some, some other guys

just come in, like pull the walls apart and, oh, it was just

a pretty fab room. And it's all set up to get the

information they need. And Jack's meaningless of us

sitting there with, like, a search engine open, ready to

type in the name they get so they can get all the information

about the guy. And it's really cool.

Navigator. Awesome.

It does actually make an appearance.

Netscape Navigator does make an appearance in this film.

And I was just I was watching. It's like the Leonardo DiCaprio

meme, you know, like pointing at the TV.

It's like my God, fucking Netscape Navigator.

I remember using that thing. Shut up Sonya, you get a call me

over again. But I loved, I thought it was

really cool. So.

There is. I'm going to get this wrong, I

think. I think it's Mission Impossible.

Fallout has a really similar scene at the beginning.

There's. There's there's a fucking

amazing episode of the lone gunman that starts out with this

kind of like fake out room kind of thing, which which involves a

character for a little older guy doing some just insane.

Why a few shit like flyer on wires to and do martial arts.

It's insane, that's for sure. We should consider at some point

doing a special on because it's bonkers.

It's just it's just silly thriller hastes.

It's so funny. X-Files for people who don't

know it's The X-Files spin off and the the three the three

characters Alun Gunman who help out Mulder sometimes because

they have like big conspiracy theorists vibes and the first

episodes kind of predicted 911 by.

Literally fucking six months. Messed up, very messed up.

Episode 1 of the Lone Gun series involves a government plot to

remotely hijack an airliner and flag it into the World Trade

Centre. So it's not even like kind of

how you could argue that argue that Tom Clancy sort of

predicted with the end of that of an hour on the pilot, flies

as 747 into the Capitol building.

But then like 2 episodes later, there's this like episode that's

like a ridiculous eel in comedy when when Frohicky has like go

undercover as the lost son of a Nazi collaborator lady.

And then I think an episode later there's a whole heist when

they've got like break a monkey that's super intelligent out of

a research facility. Such a fucking good Shorty.

That's amazing, man. We should we should cover that

you wouldn't need. To at this point now, we've kind

of foreshadowed it, yeah. OK, so we have our intro

sequence and then we get their actual mission.

So Jim Phelps is in a plane and the air of his desk comes up to

him with a This is another classic bit of Mission

Impossible stuff with a little video that plays the mission

between term and His mission, should he choose to accept it,

is to stop a rogue agent called Alexander Glitzen from stealing

the CIA's knock non official cover, which reveals the

identities of all the undercover agents in Europe.

And then we. Got a cool little mission

briefing scene where we meet the team and I like a good team

meeting. What do you what do you think of

this one? Remember like when we talked

about the the Op Centre team and how we kind of introduced all

those guys and it seemed really forced in a natural even.

Now I'm just feeling the pain of of of that OP centre team

introduction. I like them.

I liked how it was kind of in the form of like, it's not like

a meeting, like it's just kind of like it felt very natural,

very naturalistic. Someone I thought was, and

obviously because this is, this is a spoiler cast.

So we know that the team's going to essentially be almost

entirely wiped out in in like a few minutes.

So I can say this that we are going to see a lot of them

because they're going to die. But it's it seems a bit ahead of

its time and outside of the 90s that there's more than one woman

on the team. And the one woman on the team

isn't just a really hot infiltrator who was like

technical bondage gear or whatever.

Because I mean, you know, there was there was a lot of kind of

shit, right? And of like women in through

that kind of woman. There still is a bit of a bit.

It was nice to say that there's a team when the chicks outnumber

the dudes, you know, pretty much because I mean like the people

who are doing active stuff and boots on the ground.

There's what there's three women, two dudes, so interesting

to say that there's the unbalance imbalance there.

It's pretty cool. It's interesting to say like the

banter between them, but gives a good it gives a good impression

that they've worked well together in the past.

Some some of the dialogue as well as just what was the one

about my wife's coffee that made me laugh?

Take it easy on my wife's coffee.

Or, or as I said out loud as I watched the film, take it easy

on my concerningly young wife's coffee.

Yeah, yeah, Yeah, I do think. That's a bit kind of thinking.

John Voight's like, if I sign on for this film, but I have a

young wife, I don't need to do a section with her.

I don't need to do anything with her.

I just want to look like I'm still really fucking virile.

You know, I've got a Jon Voight reputation to maintain here.

It's going to be a hot young wife and a good fucking go.

Yeah. Like I say, from that bit of a

go up on this and stuff, I think it's pretty cool.

Like, say team that's like more balanced between the sexes.

It's pretty cool and just, yeah, it's like the the scene, but get

on well with each other and a SEC.

I like these guys already, you know, the writing makes them

interesting. There's no one particularly

annoying in the team because it's it's it's easy.

Not like I'm right up, but I think it's probably an easy

cheesy move to make someone in in the team just be really

fucking irritating. I was like, hey, it's the crazy

guy. It's a guy does the funny, wacky

stuff and it's like they're all, they're all, they're all

professionals, you know? Yeah, they could have done it

with Emilio Estevez, his character, but they kind of pull

themselves back at the last minute, didn't they?

Yeah. He's almost.

Going there. Lasagna don't get any on you.

He has some silly sort of 1 liners and stuff like that, but

he, he's not like Waka Waka, I'm the funny guy, you know, So it's

cool. He's trying to get with

Christian Scott Thomas as well. Yeah.

Yeah. He's not middle wood.

Come on. Yeah, It's interesting.

So that scene, right, is one of the only bits that's different

in the screenplay, right. So there's two bits.

So the the initial bit in Kiev with the the fake room, you

remember that Emmanuel Burt, who plays Claire, she gets

tranquillized. She's drugs so that she can

like, be like a plausibly dead hooker.

Yeah. And then she's been under for a

little bit too long and they wake her up and it's a bit like,

man, this is the last time we do this because that Ethan's like,

this is the last time we do this.

Because I was, I was really worried.

That kind of thing in the screenplay that's a little bit

more seriously, like this is the last time you do that on my

watch kind of thing. And he's like properly like

worked up about it. There's an awkward scene pretty

much straight away between Jim Phelps, Jon Voight and Ethan

Hunt. Straight away, where John Boy is

already kind of accusing Ethan of getting a little bit too

close to his hot young French wife Claire, who's at the

computer behind them, somehow seems to be the reference point

in the following exchange. This is it, Ethan.

How is Chicago Phelps? Wonderful.

Run into a convention of oil dealers at the Drake Hotel.

You hear the one about the astronaut who comes back from

the first manned flight to Mars after two years.

His wife's got a year old kid. So he says, all right.

Who was it? My friend Harry.

She says no. Was it my friend Sammy?

She says it wasn't Sammy. I suppose it was my other friend

Lou. No.

What's the matter? Don't you think I have friends

of my own? That is insanely boomer.

That's like wife bad father. I cannot click the boop.

Yeah, yeah. So straight away they're like

not getting on. Yeah.

And that's just taken and they take.

And I think that I'd been weird if I'd been in the movie because

then like it kind of puts you on this weird on edge thing.

There's a little bit still, right.

Full spoiler cast. We obviously know Jim Phelps

quite controversially turns out to be the bad guy in the movie.

And it's like pretty obvious, like straight away, if you if

you're paying attention to it, like that initial heist at the

beginning, it's really obvious that he's like the one

controlling the lift and stuff. The mission brief is they're

going to intercept this guy Alexander Goetzkin, who's got

the Goetzkin who's got the knock list on a floppy disc at this

embassy party thing in Prague. And they're going to have to go

in there, infiltrate the place, try and swap out the the list

and grab it and be gone. I guess we're into it.

It's the big heist, right? So everyone's got a job.

We're probably should count it through the team quickly so

everyone knows who they are. Not that really matters too much

because we're all going to die. But we've got Ethan Hunt, Tom

Cruise, who's played by played by Tom Cruise.

He's he's your point man on this operation.

We've got Kristen Scott Thomas who plays Sarah, who is like, I

guess his number 2 also on point.

And she's the kind of the one who's already in there is in the

cover mall kind of prepping the guy.

We've got Emmanuel Barr who's who's Claire, who's outside.

She's she's handling transport. She only got that job because

she's married to John Voigt, I think.

John Voy's. Obviously the commander in

charge, Jim Phelps, He's he's obviously rear actual

motherfucker. And and then you've got Hannah,

played by Ingeboro Dappu Kanata, who is the surveillance one

who's got the cool glasses on. Yeah, that was.

Meant that was so cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then, of course, we've got Emilio Estevez's Jack, who's

inside the building. Yeah.

Hacking into the terminals, moving doors and stuff.

And to do this, he has to sit on top of a lift.

Which is just incredibly cool. Something I love about this film

is that it exists in a time, both its setting and the time it

was written and filmed, when the idea of hacking is still kind of

in its infancy. And there's this, there's this

kind of crossover between physically having to be

somewhere to do it and doing things remotely.

And that's just so frigging cool, man.

Like it's digital and analogue at the same time is

electronically hacking things and stuff.

But it's got a deal about sitting on top of a lift.

It's mint. It's awesome when you when you

kind of compare it with just the hacking scenes in the second

film. But it's all very much done like

like remotely in like Wi-Fi kind of thing.

And after just four years, it takes out fair amount of the of

of the tension. The best kind of like electronic

hacking and freaking kind of scenes or ones when there's like

a ticking clock and a sort of dumb plays over the person who's

actually doing the hacking with a lot of properties.

You can't really do it in like kind of how can I put this

right? I'm going to go down weird

fucking rabbit hole here with cyberpunk properties like things

like Shadow Run and stuff like that.

You can have these like plot lines which have these great

concepts of like hacking in from like 20 miles away because

you've got things like dump shock and yeah, you're

physically plugged into the net. And if you're and if the ice

gets yeah, yeah, yeah, you get dub shock and your brain gets

fried. But when you've got a kind of

more modern kind of setup, when you're, well, I'm just going to

hack something from my laptop at a distance, the stakes don't

feel as high as merely W affairs sitting on top of the lift up,

crushed himself against the wall the first time the lift goes

down. I think it's incredibly cool.

You know, it is really. Cool.

And that whole concept is like how the main heist of the movie

kind of works. Yeah.

The whole the whole big deal is it doesn't matter what kind of

crypto you've got, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But here's the worst part. You have to be plugged into the

terminal because it's completely air gapped.

OK, cool. So this this heist kind of

happens. It's pretty cool.

I think it's pretty, pretty slickly done.

Yeah. In terms of in terms of like a

carriage along with it, You don't feel like you're kind of

stagnated anywhere. It flows kind of nicely in my

opinion. Everyone gets their cool little

bit. So, you know, Christmas, Scott

Thomas, like Marks the guy with her little perfume bottle.

You see, you see Hannah like adjusted or very focal lens type

thing. So she can see that, see the

marking on it like tune into the frequency of the the agent kind

of she just goes. Into predator vision, doesn't

she? Yeah.

That's really cool and then you get you.

Obviously we're following the guy.

We got the whole thing where the lift doesn't work as planned and

like Ethan Hunt in his in his big like fix of and drawl is

like talking shit about Jack. He's like within the air shot.

So it all seems to be going really, really well.

The guy gets an oculist because he's got a habit so we can take

off it kind of thing. So he gets an oculist and he's

about to leave the building and then suddenly it all goes to

shit. Like I say, like watching I get

I mean, I've seen this film like, I don't know, like 10

times. So it's pretty obvious that what

what we're seeing on the on the laptop like Jim Phelps has got

is that he's like he's been able to like open doors and stuff,

which has happened in the movie already.

So there's already a bit where Tom's like, I can't get this

door open, open this door so I can get underneath the lift and

he opens the door remotely. So if Jim can open the doors

remotely and Jack is there on site to be opening stuff, that

doesn't make sense immediately, does it?

It's a bit like, well, if Jim can do it, why is Jack even

there Anyway, So we see Jim like basically what he does is he

sets the lift going up with Jack on it and then he clearly just

logs himself out and he's like, and then you have like the

system failure thing pops up, but it's only because he's

logged out, right? So then he's like, I can't stop

at Jack. Jack, you got to cut the power.

Jack cut the power and he's growing up and he's growing up

and he's like got his own knife and he's cutting the wires.

And then, yeah, he's the has a horrible scene.

The horrible. It's pretty brilliant.

The films are PG as well. I was like, fuck yeah.

I mean I'm is like he kind of screams and it goes in his mouth

just for a split second that it's like that would be a 12A if

it came out today. Yeah.

What is it like two or three frames Max?

And it's just like, yeah, that's enough.

Yeah, that is. Enough.

That's like. In the screenplay, he he just

gets crushed by the roof. I guess you can't.

But I suppose when they got to the point where they were

filming that, it's like, well, how do you show that?

Like, where's the camera? Like, if that's just that, you

know, how how do you well, how's that make sense?

So that's probably why I had those things jutting down.

Yeah. So it's like, oh, listen, we can

see him get smooshed by before we hit the has to cut just doing

before that. Then the rest of them are pretty

brutal. Kristen Scott Thomas gets done

day. Yeah, really bad.

And then they all get killed, don't they?

Hannah gets gets gets killed in a car bomb.

Yeah. Jim appears to die and falls off

a bridge. And then finally, Claire also

appears to die in what looks like a car bomb.

Yeah. So Ethan freaking out on the run

from the Czech police in Prague gets onto a into a phone box.

And we have a little homage to three Days of the Condor.

Are you? Intact.

Yeah. Yeah, instead.

Of all you damage, then it's like, damn, that's cinema, baby.

Yeah, that's good. And it's the whole thing, you

get you guys to dial in. He has to give like an

authentication curve when he calls in.

And he obviously doesn't go like, I don't remember a Condor,

but he's like, what? Like BE11, something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, that whole

thing, they're dead. They're all dead.

They're dead. They're all dead.

And that's that's again, that's another like thread.

As the Condor, yeah, it's Condor pilled so.

Yeah, that's really cool. And obviously like Cruz is a big

fan of that movie because he worked with Sydney Pollack, so

he's obviously he's Condor pilled as well at this time.

It's really awesome. But he was interested to meet up

with Kitteridge, played by Henry Henry Cherney from Canada.

We obviously big fans of Jack Ren as we are, we obviously know

this guy as being the the terrible, horrible guy from

Clear and Present Danger, the guy who's behind operational

reciprocity. Robert Ritter is his name in

that. He's good at going scumbag mode.

Yeah, he really is. He really is.

And he's described in the screenplay as being a guy who

looks like he's still living with the Nixon administration.

So when you talk about this movie being like 70s pills as

well, like his, his costuming and his kind of general vibe.

Yeah. The costume especially, it's

like. The.

The trench coat that him and his Mara wear when they're on the

train in in the train sequence on the TJV, it's like that's

just skating close to like anachronistic for the 90s, but

it pulls. But the pull it off and the pull

off through Shia aura alone, through Shia swag alone.

So then we have like the iconic meeting with Kittredge in the

Aquarium restaurant, which is really, really cool.

Some of the. Some of the greatest lines of

the film that I'll probably get into when we get in the quotes

section. But in general that seems

incredible. It's amazing.

Just the camera work when Ethan hunts like kind of recognise and

you know, oh, there's, there's another IMF team here and, and

he's kind of pointing them out, you know, and like you seen the

cameras going between them. Oh, the, the drunk Russian and

all that and so good. So, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the way. It's shot the angles to shoot

Kit Ridge at as well. Like it.

It's like the way it sets up Kit Ridge to be assumed to be the

absolute villain and existential threat, which he is, but he's

not the absolute, absolute villain, you know.

But the the way it sets him up to be absolutely devilish in

this film is excellent. Just the cinema work.

It's like love these. Movies for bringing so they

bring Kittridge back for for the latitude, which is great.

And I like that because first of all, I love like this movie

series. Nobody asked it to, but it has

like a trend. It's not a respect for his own

history. Like it didn't have it didn't

have to do that. It didn't have to go that hard

and bring all these characters back and stuff.

Like no one was no one. No one was keeping track, but

but they did it anyway. And I and I respect him and love

him for that. And it's great because Henry

Journey gets more work and I think he's great.

So and he deserves it because he's he's brilliant in this.

And I like what they do here with the, just as you describe

it, the Dutch. The Dutch angles looking up at

him slightly off kilter, like a certain Vanity Fair photo shoot

this week. Incredibly typical and

incredibly spot on. To yeah, to indicate some sort

of slight deviousness and just show that everything's got off

kilter. So you've got the same thing

shooting back at Ethan as well, because he's he's because he's

getting stressed out and he's a little bit off kilter and

everything's a little bit tensioned and heightened.

That just the language of the images, like shows you like the

relationship and that Kittridge is like becoming an antagonist.

You could watch this movie with the sound off and understand

that the guy he's talking to is is an antagonistic force just

through the storytelling images, which I think is really cool.

We get the payoff for the Chekhovs plastic explosive.

Yes, well, it's the. 1st, I suppose it's the demonstration

of the of the capability of the of of Chekhov's plastic

explosive. The hassle is on you don't get

on you throws at the the aquarium wall.

The aquarium wall explodes and about in the script it says 100

gallons of water. But I think like, I don't know,

like, forget, 100 cubes of water come flying out of the front of

this restaurant like a zillion fish.

And it's pretty, it's pretty mega.

I didn't realise this, but Sonya alerted me earlier in the group

chat to a real life fish tank that this happens to.

Holy crap. I don't think there was an IMF

agent involved, but yeah, a. Hotel in Berlin there used to be

a very large aquarium full of tropical exotic fish and

whatnot, with a whopping height of 25 metres and in Wow,

actually on the steam of December 22.

So three years and two days ago, exactly that randomly collapsed

and suddenly the entire hotel was full of fish.

Mega Darts. 1 1/2 thousand fish. Jesus 100.

Different in in excess of 100 species and a total volume of

980 cubic metres of water. See how?

That's. Yes.

So let me just imagine if you. Like the security guard on duty?

Actually, if you. Were the Latino on duty mayor?

Yeah, yeah. So they.

They got like a civil rescue involved with like cleaning it

up. It says here the majority of the

1500 fish were killed, unsurprisingly I suppose, and

two people were hospitalised with injuries.

Officials noted that the collapse could easily have taken

several lives had it taken place during the hotel's busier

operational hours. Detected by local seismographs,

the collapse sent the water out of the hotel lobby and into

nearby storm drains, but not before damaging several nearby

businesses, including a neighbouring Lynn Chocolate Shop

no and the basement of the adjacent DDR Museum, the letter

of which reopened 3 1/2 months later.

Much of you have been. Parked outside and my kids yeah

8 cars imagine you're. Just just getting out of your

car to check into the the hotel and you're his by an indoors

tsunami and all of Nemo's friends.

You just, you just like take it out by like some incredibly rare

fish that just bombard you just. Pulling up to the hotel, does

this place smell a bit fishy and then you're just hit by a wall

of water? I.

Love that the majority of them died, which means I'm going to

hate that, but I like the fact that some of them therefore must

have survived. I am.

Picturing someone resuscitating a goldfish.

Basically holding it under the, slapping it around.

I can imagine some like Intrepid weight.

I was just opening all like the taps and filling paint glasses,

the water. Just Chuck it fish and they go.

Come on. God damn it.

Yeah, I'm on Intrepid the block. That's saving lives, dude.

The the other, the other one, of course, is that like the fish

may have got the storm drains and then create like kind of

like feral fish population for the city, a feral exotic fish

population. Just these puffer fish, these

fugu and all that. Just like bobbing at the surface

occasionally more valuable than 90% of the people walking round

pound for pound. You know how rare they are.

But I like that. Could you imagine being one of

those fish? The stories.

To tell emits exactly. Yeah, you survived this

ginormous cadastry. Then you, like, find yourself in

like some normal tank in someone's house and you're like,

in the corner, like smoking a cigarette.

And like a new fish comes in and all the other fish are like,

don't talk to him. Don't talk to him, man.

He's got he'll, if he starts, he won't stop.

And it's like, oh, who are you? It's like, oh buddy, did I ever

tell you about the hotel? The Great Dome implosion of 22.

I was there, son. Big, big.

Drag like he's got. Like A5 metres of.

Water 1500 of my buddies dead. Could you imagine that many

fish? Have you ever seen that many

fish, Youngblood? He's and he's and he's got like

and he's got like a snake Pliskin style eye packed like

he's like, like he's like, you know, it is.

He's called Snake, Fishkin, or perhaps even you think you.

Know aquariums? You know nothing, son.

That's so good. Snake fishkin with no.

Suspicion of foul play and prior to formal investigation,

suspected causes included Ethan Hunt.

They they they've played it safe.

By the way, the hotel has reopened this February and they

have replaced the aquarium with a 24 metre vertical garden

consisting of about 2000 plants of two.

My garden has. The potential to do the funniest

thing. I.

I I was going to say it was like holder gets hit by 2000

different branches and one. Like 500 plant pots 4 sadly.

Most of the shrubs died, so essentially afterwards they said

bring me a shrubbery. So we have It's not the first,

but it's an early example of Tom Cruise running as well as he

escapes the restaurant and dashes across the courtyard,

being chased by a wave of water and a load of, I hope, a dead

fish. What happened though was in that

meeting Kittredge, the CIA Director of the IMF, so CIA

based IMF director. So IMF is subordinate to the CIA

in this movie, it would appear. Which means.

We're going to ask a big fucking question at the end of the show

and actually have a not ambivalent answer at this point

and. It does indeed.

Kittridge tells Hunt that they are suspecting a mole in the

IMF. And I think this is legit.

I think they are legitimately expecting, looking for a mole in

the IMF, but they all think that it's Hunt because they're all,

as far as they're concerned, everything's adding up.

There's a Hunt's family's farm is a receivership.

Yeah. This is the one and only time

we'll ever talk about Ethan Hunt's personal life outside of,

like, Rebecca Ferguson in all these movies.

Yeah. And.

And Michelle Monaghan. Sorry.

Yeah. And they think that Hunt is the

mole. He wants to sell the knock list

to get a lot of money so he can buy back his family's farm for

the Muslim like that. That's what they kind of

assumed. And then they tell them that the

knock list at this embassy in this mission was a fake, so it

would have been useless, but also that the person they're

trying to sell it to is this arms dealer Mac Max as part of

Job 314. So under that information, I'm

saying all this because it leads to what happens next.

So Ethan Hunt says right, I'm going to try and back trace who

the mole is by posing as the mole and talking to his Max

instead of going to meet so that I can find out from Max who the

molars. And then it leads us to me to

one of my favourite scenes in the movie, the extended sequence

where we get to watch Ethan Hunt use a laptop.

He is. All of us in this film, he is a

man who was very tired in front of a laptop.

It's extremely sleepy. He's a sleepy boy from that

laptop. He is actually that so top of

films predicting various things. This film generally predicted

the state. A lot of our lives in the year

2025 when we're just tie up in front of a computer, man, we're

just tired in front of a computer, just typing away

tired. He'd be beaten down.

Tell you what, I like this. About this movie is when he

receives an e-mail, the laptop makes the most horrendous sound

to alert him to the e-mail. It's like to say that he has an

e-mail, whilst laptops don't literally make that noise when

you receive an e-mail. To me, in my heart they are

doing that. When I see the other emails

coming in, it is very much like the laptop is going.

Is it is it, man? Hey, Mike.

Hey, Mike, here's a lot of shitstorm for you.

It's ever a good e-mail. Is it like very, very, you know,

I mean, it's I mean it's a special on a good work address,

several good e-mail. It's like a.

Hey, you found another? Random site quest for you to do?

Well, you are already overworked and this is actually not your

job. But would you like to?

Actually, we're not asking, you just just do it.

And why don't we ask you to do it?

We are accompanying it with that horrifying Microsoft Teams

notification sound for your pleasure.

Only for emails. Emails that start with YSA for

your situational awareness. I don't need any more

situationally aware. Everyone is too aware of the

situations right now. If I think we should all have

less. Awareness if anything I want.

I want emails for my situational ignorance.

We must we. Must increase the mystery,

decrease the awareness, more vibes OK.

So if a hunt using a laptop was on a hunt for an Ethan hunt or

use use net forums. And.

He's like job, Job what job what?

Who should I e-mail? And then he emails Max at job

314 and he goes into like he's looking for like a Bible forum.

He managed to find a book of job Bible forum to go on.

And then he attempts to DM someone called Max within that

forum. But even that's that's what I

took from that, Yeah. And man, I'm ancient man here.

I used to hang out on Usenet. I actually was like person use

that. Fuck you Sonya.

I used to hang out on a various usenets and stuff.

I think I was on the old Wesley Crusher dot die die die Usenet

which was pretty good. It was the one where everyone

just fucking hit Wesley Crusher. Shut up, Wesley.

And. And I remember being in one

Usenet group that keep get up. I was I remember being in one

Usenet group that I forgot which reasonable was, but it kept

getting raided by people from the altar Xena dot warrior dot

Princess using that group and I was like the zenith, the back of

the post and things. It was all in brilliant.

Stargate or something? Probably something.

Like that, it was all in good fun.

I actually like I was like Emma, but you don't remember he was

not just like, Yep, it's like OK scars.

It kind of looks like Reddit just from what I've seen before.

That short list of alphabetical Usenet groups and including

Amiga demos and and Amazon women admirers.

That. Was it, but it was like use that

crazy times. I heard you can actually access

them. We should do.

That we should do that. We should the Xeno warrior

Princess Usenet group and maybe they were clear and present

dudes found RAID on it could be very respectful because we've

got nothing against any other fandoms because we're all

chilled out guys who just like to post they're just.

They're just men. They're just innocent men.

Innocent. Man, just.

It's just just an end. It's normal.

Men. Just normal men, normal dudes.

It's normal dudes, just innocent dudes.

Just clear and present dudes. Okey dokey.

So Ethan Hunt. Spends a long night emailing

every possible account it could possibly be on Usenet and it's

works. He gets an e-mail back

suggesting a meet and he gets very detailed instructions about

what to do. Some funky little spy craft

bullshit happens and then he does it.

He approaches a man on a bench whilst holding a packet of

cigarettes and asks for a match and gets builded into a sedan

and is taken to meet the elusive Max who is veteran of stage and

screen vetting. Vanessa Redgrave giving extreme

sultry energy as as our arms dealer.

It's an incredibly horny performance from She Is Like it

is indeed. Hey, Ethan.

Really. Really enjoy that they kind of

bring her back via having Vanessa Kirby play like her,

like granddaughter or something and the later movies she's meant

to be related. I had no.

Idea. The only ones I've seen are the

first one, the second one, and I think some of ghost protocol at

Emma's grandma's house when we were all drinking quite heavily.

Oh, man, my clear and present. Dude, you need to watch Rogue

Nation. I mean, the rest of the world,

right? The Rogue Nation is fun.

It's the one that starts with the A400 thing.

Yeah, cool. Right.

So it meets Max. She he convinces Max that the

knock list he's got that she already has is a fake, and

that's sort of tracking device in it as she puts into a disc

Dr. I like that the floppy disc that she has the knock list on

is like still got like dry blood and stuff on it from being

inside the guy's pocket. He convinces Max that you can

get out of the real 1 is she gives him like a cash advance so

you can like buy the tools he needs.

And then we get like the best, coolest bit of the movie, which

is the the heist to get into Langley and get the real knock

list. I love this.

It's pretty much exactly as it appears in the screenplay.

But before that happens, Ethan meets up again with well, he's

met with Claire already in the Prague safe house and they have

to hire a couple of extra bods to make a team for a heist.

And they hire Sean Renault and Ving Rhames as Krieger and

Luther Stickle have respectively.

And Luther becomes like a series regular.

He's like at every movie after this, which is great.

And I love the meeting with Luther Phineas Freak is his name

is. There's a cool story about about

Ving Rhames here. So Ving Rhames, his character in

the original screenplay before got reworked into the shooting

scripts, was meant to get killed off.

And Ving Rhames asked the question of Tom Cruise.

She was like, why, Why does the black guy die?

And he's like, very good point. And he's like, well, you know,

like lots of people die in the movie, you know, this one

happens to be black. But like, you know, lots of

people die. He's like, yeah, but like, why

is the black guy always going to die in movies?

And he's like, good point. And then so from there on, like

Luther survived and he made it for like another 7 movies, which

was fantastic. Got myself, got myself a good

job for life. You know, he's been getting and

that Mission Impossible for the last 30 years of that.

So good for him. Incredible.

My bands getting out squeaky. Wheel gets the grease indeed.

Cool, right? So this becomes a thing and all

the Mission Impossible is going forward.

There's always like 1 cool big heist and they're always

explained the way they are here. Well, they're kind of odd.

This is this is the first one and it's the kind of the

prototype. So what they do here is they

talk about how difficult it's going to be by describing in

detail the rules of, of, of the security of the place they're

trying to infiltrate. So on this one, they're trying

to access a computer that's in a secure room.

Secure room can only be accessed by one guy who asked to get

through like a door. There's an airlock room, another

door and it's into the room itself.

And the room itself has got a whole bunch of security features

inside as well. So he has to get past like a

code room. It's like it was like a door

code. He has two key cards that have

to be used in tandem. He gets into another door.

He has to get through like an Irish scanner as well.

Once he's into the actual room itself, the room itself is when

it's not being accessed by him. So when it's like armed, there's

pressure plates on the on the deck, There's an alarm links to

like a like decibel microphone. So it goes over a certain amount

of decibels alarms. It has a heat sensitive alarm.

So if the body temperature of somebody is in the room, it will

trigger as well. So it must be cool when they go

in there cool and there's only one vent where the air con comes

in from above and there's like a laser grid over the top of that.

OK, so this room is like, it's impenetrable unless you happen

to be this one guy. Mr Donlow is his name.

He's basically. It's basically several figures

Smasher, isn't he? I mean, like even Eve.

I mean, yeah. I mean, you see, I don't even

have to say work with me. He actually know exactly where

I'm going. I mean, even like the voice

recognition at the start, it's like I'm watching.

It's like Cyril Figures, you know, like he's like, he's like

he is in. I mean, hindsight.

Cyril Figures is totally based on this guy yeah, I also like

how he's inexplicably like fucking dope sick or something

like keeps throwing up. Did I did I did I did I miss

something in which the poison that they still doing the yes,

that's right, just Claire Claire's disguise.

Claire is pretending to be a secretary of some kind.

And I fucking jumped out my seat at this because that's real T

Lane shorthand on a notepad. And I was like, fucking T Lane

shorthand mentioned. I, I, I swear to God, in most

episodes I mentioned a different job I've had, but I used to be a

journalist. I've got a green journalism from

Sunderland University. I used to work for the Sunday

Sun in Newcastle. It's not related to the London

Sun about bailings in the Chronicle and the Journal and

the Sunderland Echo as well. And so I was like, holy shit,

that's a real fucking tail line shorthand.

I was really excited. I couldn't fully comprehend it.

I was like, I think that's in at the start and and and and that's

maybe like a really long M later on.

But yeah, I was, I was buzzing to see it was real tailing

shorthand. That was class.

That was cool. Good insight.

What the rest of the movies do is they show the rules of the

heist that's going to happen. This is a bit like oceans as

well. They show the rules of that

that's going to happen. And then what they what the rest

of the movies do after this is they show like what successfully

beating it would look like as well.

You know, they would show not only how the original guy gets

into the room, it's also like what they're going to do to beat

it and assume it works, you know.

So like you have like the plan that was not going to survive

first contact with the enemy, but you see how the see how the

plan if everything worked would play out as well.

You don't get out on this one. That's fine because it's still

awesome. So, but like real life on this,

on this occasion, no plans about first contact the enemy and it

all starts to go a bit awry. It goes mostly OK.

So in order to get initial access into Langley, they call

in a fire. So they rock up, It's a fire

brigade. They hack into the fire alarms

in the building to make a sensor trip to allow them access into

the building as the fire fire department.

They go in there and obviously they're all dressed in there the

firefighting rig so no one can sneak up the faces and stuff.

And it's Luther who has to be wide into a terminal.

And you've got Ethan Hunt and Krieger are going to go into the

actual vault itself. And then you've got Claire is

gets takes the 500 off, is dressed as a secretary.

And then she just walks out and just blends in with the rest of

the workforce. She goes into a, like, breakout

room, which Mr Donlow is in as well, and he gets out his big

Washington Post and is just sitting there reading.

She says I'm comfortably close to him and then squirts a bit of

poison, like an emetic poison, at the end of her pen where she

drinks into his coffee. And that's what makes him start.

Yeah, yeah. I think I was just like, so

blown away by the fact that I saw a real last tail line short

on that. I was like, I can't even say.

Skip to the fact that she a drug involved just now, but yeah.

But to a seasoned hitman world assassination player that I am,

I saw the emetic poison straight away.

I was like, I know where he's going.

So he gets back to his desk immediately chucked into a bin,

takes a bin into the heads, starts washing out a little bit

of comedy value of him being sick and sick and sick and sick.

And that's what buys them time to to break into the vault.

So yeah, they have this funky little gadget that gets past the

the wire net thing, the laser net over the top of the the

vault. They go in from above a creeping

through the vents. One guy comes to check out where

they are. There's like there's two of you

in here. Where's the third guy?

And like Ethan just kicks him and knocks him out straight

away. It's like, look, look, Krieger's

about to kill him with a knife and he's like no body counts.

Because obviously, you know, Krieger wants to do a high chaos

run. Hunt wants to do a lower chaos

run. I like how Jean Reynolds playing

suspiciously violent Frenchman with a German name clearly used

to set it from some very sketchy French foreign legionnaire who

joined in the 90s and was very good with an MG40 to some

reason. It runs since a family don't

ask. And then we have the an iconic

scene of them lowering Heath Hunt down into the vault.

And then there's the he's obviously meant to get lowered

down. He's just some typi typi has to

get pulled back up again of the rush.

And then the MVP of the movie, a cute little rat comes along and

bothers John Renault and Ethan Hunt gets dropped.

And there's that whole iconic bit rate falls and just it's

just caught before we get to the top of the floor and he's like

wobbling around for ages. Partly when they were shooting

that home crews get hit in his head off the floor.

So to stop him doing that he started putting loads of coins

in the in his shoes to like change the the print of his

body. Can I just say something tells

me is a very short man in Hollywood?

He is. This is not the first time he's

put things in his shoes for the benefit of his film career.

Yeah. Or every occasion where he had

to stand next to his wife, Nicole Cuban.

But yeah, Awesome. Yeah.

So you got all that. What I love about this movie and

in the sequence in particular, is it does everything it does to

make it tense. So you get so you get the

example of like the floor pressure plate sensor going off

on a single drop of water from the guy's ice tea drops on it

during the briefing and you see that happening.

What goes red like it like the anti Billie Jean floor and then

the goes off really bad. And then for like maximum

cinematic like look, you have like an insane thing.

Bear with me here. Even Hunt is wearing spectacles

during this. He doesn't wear spectacles

practically for the rest of the movie, but for some reason these

spectacles during the sequence. OK, I don't know why.

Maybe there's a reason, not sure.

And then a bead of sweat comes from his head onto the outside

of the of the frame, Like the lens of the of the of the

glasses drips across the lens and then is about to drip off

the frame of the glasses. And it looks cinematic as hell.

But nobody sweats outside their glasses.

Yeah, you know what I mean. I think like the glasses thing

is because that's like where they've got their kind of like

cameras, right? Like the like the kind of

glasses comes and like track like it's probably.

Probably probably isn't it going you?

Know like yeah, yeah, but that's a massive sell of the MIC.

That's a massive over sell of the middle industrial complex at

that point. Haven't kind of cameras so

miniaturising when normal ass glasses with them and like you

know, it's it's just totally invisible.

They get the list from the computer Despite that that that

rat. Oh, I like the bit when they're

testing the microphone of the room by saying the word toast

over. Yeah.

I really like that toast. Toast, toast, toast.

I thought you're going kind of fancy some toast does it?

Does it? Does anyone have any insight as

to why? They're using the word toast, by

the way. I don't got any insight.

If I was going to guess, I would say this.

The sibilance of the words of the teeth, yeah.

Yeah, it starts like a plosive at the start and the end, the

toast and then the toast. Yeah.

So it's like a close, close, close and sibilance.

Yeah. Welcome to clear and present.

Dudes. When we deeply, deeply dissect

why they used the word toast in this film, there is a high

possibility that all of us in our childhood arranged toy cars

in a sequence. My God, what?

Are we doing with our lives, Gordon?

Now for something. Completely different.

Yeah, and that thing is close up magic.

So Tom Cruise gives the Nautilus to Krieger and then he goes back

to his hobby of typing into a laptop, trying to something be

seen. It's like he's forgotten which

e-mail address he's going into because he's he's concentrating

way too hard trying to remember the typing it all in and looking

at the Bible and stuff. Krieger's trying to get his

attention. He's like, you've done, I'm

sorry, Mr. Hunt, and he's just getting chinned off and chinned

off and chinned off. Eventually throws the Bible on

the floor and he's like, you're not going to take any meetings

without me because I've got this.

And then Tom Cruise does this incredible close up magic

sequence where he has another disc and he's like doing all

these little things, making it disappear and picking out

Claire's coves and whipping out of his sleeve and throwing it

around. And he convinces Krieger that

Krieger's has got the real list. He's like, do you really think

I'd give you the actual list? So Cricket froze it in the bin

and walks out and then even picked about the bin because it

was the real list. I love that.

That's so good. It's just.

Smart writing at Spycraft. It's fun.

It's it's, I think I may have said this in previous films that

we've talked about. It's just smart people doing

smart things in a smart script, and it's just really cool.

I like this. So this scene they cut straight

from Langley to, like, London during the safe house in London.

Well, I say this movie is goofy. This is the kind of thing.

I mean, there's no explanation about how they've got a safe

house in London. It's just assumed that they're

in a safe house, and I guess they've got one, even though

they're completely disavowed from the rest of the

organisation. So how could they use its

resources? Don't know.

Yeah. He's obviously never had to fill

in a budget control form and talk to the travel cell.

That's fine. I am doing that right now and I

want to die. So having all the all the front

of the feather, I like the scene because it gives a good

humanising moment for Luther and sets him up, I think for the

kind of implies sequel bait that you get at the end of the movie

as well that that Luther's going to be coming and joining the

team because he's like he gives because he gives an Oculus to

Luther and says I'm going to trust you with it.

You know what this means. He's like, I won't let it get

out. So he's like, this guy is like a

annoying hacker, but he's got a heart of gold and a conscience.

Ethan calls up Kittridge to kind of clue out that he's in

England. So he has him on the phone just

long enough that they can trace that he's in England, but not

nothing more. And then one of my favourite

scenes is happens. So Phelps just kind of appears

next to him at the phone box. And we have the the the Ethan

Hunt, Jim Phelps reunion. And.

I love this because Jim Phelps starts telling him his side of

the story about what happened during the botched mission in

Prague, and he's blaming on Kittridge and saying Kittridge

is like, set this whole thing up and Hunt is going, yeah, no, I

totally understand. Yeah, it must have been that.

But then we're seeing what Hunt is thinking.

And he's already said and he's already stressed it out that

it's all Phelps. And there's even one bit where

he's thinking class off that car bomb.

He's like, no, hang on. No, it was it was.

It was Phelps. You have like class.

You have like that bit where it looks like the disaster girl

meme where like the house is on fire and the.

Girl's looking easily at the camera.

Yeah. And she's like, yeah, you have

the same. Thing so she says suffer car

bomb. Then she turns the camera and

looks really evil. Yeah.

And then he's like, oh, it could have been.

Actually, no, it could have been Phelps, you see?

Phelps like, get out together. He cheques his watch and he's

like, ah, it's explosion time, time.

Bang Yeah. So I love that because, again,

it doesn't treat the audience like they're stupid.

Like we could have figured out that Phelps was behind at the

beginning. You see just enough of it to put

that together, and then now it doesn't try to string you along

that Phelps is like the good guy.

Like we know Phelps is a shit because we're seeing like Ethan

figure it out there and then and the the sort of the driving

force from there is actually like, how's how's Hunt going to

get out of this now? Because he's kind of playing

into it. He's going to start playing

along with Phelps and be part of Phelps plan.

So how's he going to outsmart Phelps and Kitteridge and get

out of this? It's kind of like what's what's

left? I don't think the movie like

100% nails it, but it gets pretty close, I think.

What are your? What are your thoughts?

The whole. Station scene is incredible to

me. I think I said out loud a few

times like this is so fucking cool.

Just again, the way it's shot. It's like the whole like

blocking in the scenes where people are even down mechanic,

the coloured reading stuff as like a film from a different

time. It's there's a big theme of

like, I don't know if I've you know, I've this is a theme that

probably is going to appear or not these films out here.

But the cold wars ended. There's your garden, the second

new garden. There's like leg the crossover

between them, like in like in the state how a few opening

beats of any to see it or like a thriller from like the 70s.

Then it goes in like it's like super kinetic late 90s mood.

But in this it's it's shot in a very sedate kind of way.

That is from another time. And you've got this conversation

between an old cold warrior and his young protege and it's just

like you're watching the terminus of two worlds at a

literal terminus at A at a station.

I think that's incredibly cool. It's, it's liminal stage really

in both their relationship in, in like the world's political

situation and in the future of espionage and what people are

going to do and how and stuff, you know.

It's a theme that we're going to see in a lot of these movies,

which is intelligence agencies suddenly no longer having the

influence they had on central government that they used to,

and then certain members of those agencies whipping up stuff

so that they can reclaim a bit of triangle.

Land. Grabbing again for their their

respective agencies and there's. There's that fantastic line for,

you know, the president of the United States is running the

country without your permission. How dare he?

And it's like, yeah, how dare he?

Yeah. Exactly.

That isn't it? It's and it reflects something

that that kind of happened in real life, which is Cold War

drew to a close and then there was a moment where everyone was

like, great, thank fuck. This is an opportunity for us

all now to reduce our defence spending so our countries have a

fucking fighting chance of making it through the

economically shitstorm of the 1980s after the after the

previous economic shitstorm of the 1970s.

You know, so I think everybody willed into existence a little

bit, didn't they? And then people in the military,

people in the intelligence community were all still very

much saying like, yeah, yeah, I get it.

The focus is shifting away from Russia.

I get it. But the threat hasn't really

gone away. It's just kind of developing and

changing. And now we're in a situation

where weirdly and almost nostalgically, we are back very

much on the front foot looking, looking towards.

Russia is our primary adversary. And China obviously is a big

concern for the United Kingdom. China is probably America's

primary adversary at the minute, and their relationship brochure

is deeply contested, contentious and deeply.

Sterning as well. Indeed, this movie happens in a

moment where. And we talked about this with

Enemy of the State and we talked about it with OP Centre as well.

Yeah. Where the adversary wasn't as

pleased to find. Yeah.

And what would happen a couple years after this was that

everything would become vaguely Middle Eastern, which would get

hammered to him after 911, and then it would become the Middle

East as the big bad. And then it become any

insurgency and then any terrorist organisation after a

while. And now we're back to a good old

peer conflict. Yeah.

So I think. Like before, but before

everything like swung like vehicle in Middle East and the

Electra properties, the focus was kind of on like, Oh well,

Eastern Eastern Europe. Now it's been like days.

So of your eyes, there's going to be this like powder keg and.

You have all these uniformed countries are still massively

under the influence of the old garden.

I remember all. These, like, breathless

newspaper articles talking about the proliferation of these like,

surmised Soviet briefcase nukes. The newspapers like the

Telegraph and stuff forgetting themselves and tried to be

lubricated about. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Crazy times.

Yeah, right. Indeed.

Well, we're actually kind of near the end of the movie now.

This movie bounces along by the way it is, it is swift and I

think, I think as they go on, I think they all get progressed a

little bit longer, don't they? There's a lot of blokes you

haven't seen Dead Reckoning and Final Reckon yet, but mate,

those films are at least twice as long as they need to be.

Yeah, each, I think. Mission Impossible Two could

have had 20 minutes cut out of it, yeah.

Or an hour in 20 minutes kind of it.

It could have been a. Metallica music video.

Basically, they could have what I'm.

Sorry I was just just trying to not cut in but the the whole

Liverpool Street scene sort of us giving me noir vibes.

Just importantly colour ish. I guess I was mostly irritated

by just the absolute downpour of rain.

Now it's just like like rainy London at that extent.

It's just such a detective novel.

Cliche. But every time I've been in

London, no matter the time of year, I've just absolutely been

scorched. There's been no rain whatsoever.

But yeah. It's a foggy London town or

rainy London town, and it's like.

Yeah, there's a scene towards the end where I had cops and

lands on a helipad opposite Tower Bridge where it's like,

still a nice day, but you're right.

Like that is the trip, isn't it? It's like we dug up Conan Doyle

and put him in front of the camera and and he did a thing

and, and now it's it's raining. Yeah, but all you.

Hit really good point about like that being like quite in war

scene and you're totally right. I think a lot of it as well

comes like obviously the camera fan environment.

Yeah, upstairs. Room as well, yeah.

And like, of course, with noir, like I mean, it's something like

the Lords, Rory Ganders bullshit, like the city is the

star of the of the film war, you know, and like the architecture

that you say and stuff. And that's very worse.

There's not a very war scene later on that will get there

when probably a few minutes because this film does that run

at quite appears later on in the train in in the kind of like and

like cargo part of the train where the lighting is just

incredibly noir. Yeah, big time.

I'll queue it up a little bit. Some pretend to be Phelps and

arranges to exchange the list, the actual knock list with Max

on board the the IT says TGV, but it's like you're a star,

isn't it? Yeah, Paris.

So. You know the the trains

mentioned. Transports it is really into.

Transportation. Guys, so the so the so the TJV,

the Tran Grande Vitesse at Centrica French like in a city

fast train. It's not the Eurostar, which is

a totally different trains. The TJV doesn't leave France

and. And yes, they're about to go for

the channel, Yeah. I mean I I'm maybe wrong.

I'm sure the TJV doesn't actually leave.

No, I think you're right. The.

Eurostars Europe. Express.

Rendezvous on the shops, Elise Seminole, German banned

Kraftwerk and Sanyo was just staring blankly at the camera.

Like I don't want to react to to these men mentioning my

countrymen. Are you old?

Enough to know who Kraftwerka. Would you like me to get my mum,

Sanya? Isn't your mum like a year older

than me? Shut up.

Just say. Yes, just say it.

It is a threat, surprisingly. Buttery.

Isn't Sanya Sanya me saying your moms a year older than me isn't

a threat? By the way I am happily married

and so is your mom but I'm just saying this is making me feel

old. If you say any going to recruit

your mom to talk about craft for I don't want to be.

On a podcast where I was sharing it with a son and his stepdad.

That's not that's not a friendship dynamic I want to be

part of. Yeah, this is.

This take police. Help.

They are arguing in the living room.

OK, you see. This right, this is where the

podcast shifts to a really bad sitcom, a sit pod, a sit pod com

sit pod. We have, we have we have just

willed the horror that is a sit pod into being.

By the way, that's an awful idea and hope no one ever does this.

The next day, Max and Ethan arranged to meet on board the

TJV on board on route to Paris, with Claire and Luther on board

to provide backup. Kitteridge is also on board,

having recently arrived in London and received tickets to

the TJV and a video watch from Hunts.

And in the train, Ethan delivers the supposed knocklist to Max

remotely. He gives her a call and she's

got it. Like, it's like, it's like being

on Oprah. It's like, oh, if you look under

your chair, everybody gets an knocklist.

You get an knocklist. And she's like, oh great.

Oh God, I hope this doesn't preclude an in person meeting

because she's like super horny for him.

Wonderful. And then her and a little dweeb

and nerd guy. A little it, really.

Wasn't a great time for like a dweebie sidekick, wasn't it?

Yeah, and he's. Like I can't seem to log on.

Yeah, I've not connected to the. Mode she's like struggling to

because she has to like upload it somewhere to verify I think

is the purpose of that and Lisa's there with some kind of

like like short range Jana which he like has on his like table

which is like just along from hers and he tries to like leave

it on the table yeah and get up and walk away but it's.

Inexplicably fucking flashing and shaped like a mobile phone

as well. So a train attendant just picks

it up and gives him. It's like, yeah.

That's it. You left this behind him, Sir.

It's. Like.

You could have. Built it into like any shape,

right? You could have built it in like

anything you know, have trained, probably smoked on trains back

then. It's France to probably still

do, you know, I don't, I don't. Understand why he he doesn't

like obviously you've got like a train has a little Symphony has

a little tray table. I think he had an actual table.

I'm not sure but like is there not like a little pouch You

could have like hit it in on the chair in front or something like

an aeroplanes. I mean I.

Mean, you literally just said show in the upholstery, couldn't

you? Just like you could have.

Yeah. Or like put it like in the

little move ahead baggage compartment.

Yeah. So it's also incredibly obvious.

Yeah. I mean like, it's not.

Like a metro train when you've got like the Titan we are metro

train when you've got like the the upholstery, then like some

metal so you can't push anything under it.

Like when when the pure checkies come on or.

Flash of. Yellow.

It's our. Read just just.

On the subject of trains, I've just checked on and technically

they are the same train. So Eurostar and the French

National Rail line used the same stock.

The same. Stock right they used.

The same engines and it used to be initially the same TGV models

running through the channel from that will go.

Yeah, because as you can see, it's in, it's in tasty delivery.

Yeah, but. Eurostar was founded together

with the opening of the Channel, so while technically

mechanically ATGV, you probably wouldn't have found one with a

French National Rail service TGV livery on it.

Yeah, does. This mean that we're all right,

that we're all correct. No, it means I'm wrong.

I'm happy to kick me out, Goodwin said.

Well, yes. And no, you are correct in that

the the TGV livery seems to be a SNCF thing applied only

nationally, but it is still the same train.

Yeah. You realise did.

Did you just? See, Noah, but there or a yes.

And because I think you did, I think it did this.

Is. The moment that the podcast

started arguing among because itself.

Yes, we will never. Never become an improv podcast,

by the way, I'm going to write you down the barrel of the

camera at this, just in case anyone thinks This Is Us trying

to foreshadow anything for some second fucking season when we

start like just we're all standing together on some poorly

lit stage and someone's like, oh, Barber shopping Byzantium.

Oh, so was it Barber shopping Byzantium?

OK, cool. And, and, and, and I'm a, I'm a

oh, professional shit farmer. Awesome.

Yes, and. Took the last can of wax Claire

observing. Kit Rich's presence on board the

train, it's her seat and to meet with Phelps in the luggage car,

confirming her part in the conspiracy is silent.

Phelps slowly peels away his mask, revealing himself as Ethan

the betrayal Claire was in on it.

And then Phelps appears. I right.

This is when I this is when you know, I was saying earlier on

like this movie is goofy as fuck.

This is this is what I mean. So where does Ethan get that of

a mask of Phelps from to be sat there as Phelps?

And how long was he sat in that car as Phelps?

Whilst Phelps is also concealed in the same car it it's.

It's wild to me they should have given.

Phelps a Ethan Hunt mask. Yeah.

Oh, this is what I said. I said, right.

I was watching it with Fisher earlier and I said Ethan had the

Phelps mask. Claire should have had an Ethan

mask, and then Phelps should have had a Claire mask.

They all should have like, like it was who?

I don't know. Who was it the?

Only explanation that makes sense and it barely makes sense

is that the mask is reversible and has an Ethan Hunt face on

the inside. So Ethan just walks walks around

with with his face on his face. And that's.

The only way it can be, you know.

You know what would have been even better?

Phelps with a Hunt mask. With a Phelps mask over it, he

could have revealed himself as Ethan Hunt.

Yes, to do a. Loyalty test on his wife, yes,

and then gone. Fuck you, it was me.

It was me. All in double blade.

Double bask bitch. He absolutely.

Seems that kind of guy who would like do do loyalty tests on his

suspiciously young wife, wouldn't he?

Like you'd like, you'd like kind of kind of like get like younger

guys, you know, like send out texts and stuff.

And then it's like, I see you continue to pass your lightly

tests. Well done.

They don't see that. I don't know what the show is.

It's like Gordon Ramsay had a show where he was like, put on

these really elaborate disguises and then go out in the world and

like one of them is where you. It's like 1 video clip where

it's got like horrible horrible mask that.

Giant mask. He's like a giant head.

He's like an airline pilot with a giant head.

Like they should do. They should have had like,

that's what the masks look like in the movie.

They should have been like that, ridiculous like.

But then like have. Like the felt spask just do it

was giant ridiculous ones like if you got if you got bloaty

head disease from theme hospital.

It just turns up look like something from fucking Roblox.

Something like that I guess. What we haven't seen in the

background is that Ethan has figured out a little part of

attack with Kittridge. So they've become like, secret

allies because then he puts on his glasses so you can see

Phelps is alive and well. Yeah.

And then he's, like, saying to Kittridge, like, it's not me,

just fucking guy. Yeah.

This guy who faked his own death.

Pretty suspicious. Yeah.

And that is that says to Ethan the whole thing about Al shot

Boss covered my neighbour's wife, which is foreshadowed a

little bit. So I talked about the deleted

bit from the screenplay. There is another scene where,

and it's in the safe house in London, Claire goes up to Ethan

and gives him like a Peck on the cheek.

And then Ethan kind of does this thing where he holds it with his

finger for a second and he kind of doesn't.

Then he kind of doesn't know what to think.

And then he kind of walks away for a second.

Then he goes and speaks to Luther, and there's a bit like

he doesn't really know how to feel about that.

Like, oh, what? Well, I love Claire, but I

don't. I shouldn't have Claire.

It's bad. Yeah.

Well, I mean, when when she, when she comes to the safe house

in Prague, like, obviously there's the scene when they're

kind of all yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Something boils my piss about that scene, actually.

When he draws his gun on her and obviously he thinks she's a

threat and then immediately turns his back on her to see if

there's any other threats in the room.

It's like, fucking come on, dude.

Come on man. What do you mean sexually

charged? Do you not randomly put your

hands into your Co workers faces while talking to them?

Yeah, I know, right? No, I don't know.

We have rules about that shoots Claire, which I thought was so

uncalled for, but I guess it just made sense for she's and

and presumably she dies because we don't see her again.

So that's pretty brutal. And that's just hear out the

movie now. And then we have the on top of

the train fight sequence. So this is interesting.

So we also, we talked about, you know, touchables and how that

had a train fight sequence cut from the movie because for

budget and stuff, this is this is I guess a train fight

sequence that we never got. It's pretty good.

It's a combination of miniature, but a green screen.

Yeah. I liked it better when it was a

fight on top of a train between two guys.

As ridiculous as that is, it's a it's a pretty well trodden

troop. People get on top of trains and

having fights. That's.

One of the. Bond films, right?

Yeah, it's in that new Indiana Jones movie as well.

Captain America, Captain America, it's also in it's in

another Mission Impossible movie as well, so.

And like in in the Bond film, another vehicle is involved.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a bit right.

This is what it's going to come onto.

So I this might be controversial, but I am not a

big fan of Krieger flying the helicopter.

You mentioned that you can fly a helicopter earlier on.

I get it. That's that's not the thing that

annoys me. I'm just annoys about the

helicopter sequence in general. Like the whole like planned

exhale via helicopter. Yeah, that's a bit over the top

and. Then it going into the the

tunnel and I'm just thinking like I don't think the

helicopter would have been able to fly I.

Think it would have? I am having the the strong

suspicion that this is being. This is a small commercial

helicopter. I don't think it could go as

fast as the train, even without being attached to it.

I think it just snap its rotor blades the the second it starts

being pulled around. Yeah, I think.

Would simply not be able to I imagine.

Not a pilot, not an aeronautical engineer, just a guy who got

really upset when he was the kid that the colours on the spot.

The dogs beach ball with the wrong order at the end of the

book. But but I wonder if like.

Due to. Due like the essentially jet

wash from from from like the train, the kind of turbulence

that I've generated maybe as well what a helicopter be able

to even like sustain lift. And I was going to say.

I don't, I don't think I don't get to sustain lift because

obviously it's reliant on downwash, pushing up kind of

thing, the force created by you pushing it down.

And if that force is then being disappeared around in a circle

around the helicopter, then surely it just becomes a

turbulent fuck about and it immediately loses control.

Another thing that annoyed me about that is so they have the

fight, they kind of fight their way along the back of the train.

You get to the point where the very end of the train, the

helicopters here Phelps has jumped onto like the bonding

skid bits of the helicopter and Krieger like goes.

Oh, I know. It would be really fun if while

I'm flying this helicopter through the Channel Tunnel,

which incidentally means you're flying this helicopter in a

tunnel for miles and miles and miles now.

Yeah, whilst attached to the back of a train.

Insane. I know what I'll do.

I'll also decapitate Ethan Hunt with the rotor blades because

obviously these rotor blades getting the slightest bit

resistance is now exactly what I need.

Yeah. Like.

Like this isn't going to make us all die.

You are all. Going to die, Sir?

Yeah, yeah. So that was pretty fucking

goofy. Also, there's a bit of a cameo

here by David Schneider. Yeah, who at this point in time

I think was just in the Friday Night Armistice and other bits

of Armando Nichi, but who wasn't in.

He would have been in the original Island Partridge I

series as well by this point. I'm sure he.

Had some appearances in the day-to-day, the day-to-day jam,

which wasn't out at that point. Yeah.

And then I'm. Alan Partridge after this, which

he was in as Tony has the commissioning editor of the BBC

and. Of course, a couple a couple of

years later in me, more a couple years later in 28 days later as

he it's pure rage guy at the the lab.

Yeah, that. Guy gets his face eating.

Straight away, yeah buddy, yeah. So yeah, I thought it was good

for you as fuck. One of the things that you would

see in the 90s movie, but I don't you'd see now is like,

maybe you'd get in a Bond movie, but it wouldn't be as on the

nose as this. The whole bit where he stands up

and then faints again. It's like Jesus Christ, I've

got. Another issue.

So even the first model of Eurostar train was electrified.

So how do you fly a helicopter through that?

Where's this thing getting its power up from?

What's going on there? Yeah.

Do you mean like, are we are we talking like a hot rail or we're

talking like power, power supply in the ceiling and we're.

Talking overhead wiring Overhead wiring.

Shit, Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I.

Think, I think basically it is for the whole movie in the bin,

Yeah, yeah. So the train guys say no, it's

bullshit waste. Time bucked it.

Yeah, I had to. Have one job, man So much.

Potential could have been a good movie as well.

That's a real shame. Fuck bullshit.

All right, cool. Well, good night.

We've been with clear presentations.

That's your spike. Just take it easy.

Yeah, yeah. Of course.

That's not where it ends, yeah. So.

Yeah, man. So pretty much where it ends,

so, so inevitably, like helicopter crashes, spins and

spins and spins. You got a really comical little

bit where the Ethan Hunt's lying back on the remaining bit of the

train cab, which is stopping and the blades like slowly, slowly

rest on their final resting place, which is really sharp

knackered ruler blades putting directly these throat.

It was pretty cool. That was cool.

And then we get probably the least believable scene in the

movie, which is the bit at the very end wrapping it up, where

Tom Cruise appears to be at the end of a pint.

Yeah. That was I was really impressed

at how unbelievable that was. Fact.

No, he's no, that's just unbelievable that he could have,

you know, drunk in general. Even when you see him like drink

it like it's like, you know, that fluid is not touching his

fucking mouth. I know what I like about it is,

and I obviously it's impossible to confirm what beer it was.

It looks a bit like maybe Boddington's or something, which

is one of those beers that's like a mild in Britain but is

weirdly popular in America. Yeah.

Or like London Pride or something like that.

Yeah. I don't know if this follows.

Did the fullest supremacy exists in 1996?

Maybe. Yeah.

Follows, follows was, still was was a player at that point, I'm

sure. What I like about this is this

is culturally around the same moment as, but probably precedes

the moment of lager. Just like obliterating the beer

market, yeah. So it's nice seeing them

drinking like real, you know, Martin Clunes hasn't won that in

from that sort of men behaving badly with two pints of Colin in

his hand and just ruined the whole thing.

Just fucking biffed it. No, yeah, no, it's it is it is a

good scene and it's nice to see American characters drinking

that. You you got the warm British

Beer there, son. Sit my down, man.

Everybody be cool. It takes all sorts a lot.

Yeah, it's very cool. Yeah, we have that final bit, so

I didn't even mention it. So the helicopters exploded by

the final use of the gum. So Chekhov's cool, cool plastic

gum is used to do that. Axe is caught up with by

Kitteridge. Yeah, he's about to threaten.

And she's like, oh, my lawyers will have a field day with this

jurisdictional overreach and entrapment.

And she's like, hang on a minute, Let's let's try and keep

the lawyers out of this. It's like, I must have something

you want. And it's like corruption.

Ha ha. We have the final scene in the

pub where Luther is kind of like expunged of all his crimes.

He's a free man. What's he going to do with his

life? Obviously join the IMF.

So it's kind of like a, a prototype for like getting the

choice kind of scene that will happen in the later movies.

And then final scene is some perfect sequel bait where Tom

Cruise is on a a British Airways flight.

I wonder if they were good back in the 90s.

They aren't now, but I have. But yeah, agreed.

And then we got like a kind of a, a, a re reprise of the of the

Jim Phelps introduction sequence.

What? Attendance.

What the movie? Would you like to watch this?

And she's like, he's like, I don't know.

I was like perhaps the cinema of the Caribbean, Aruba perhaps.

So that kind of takes us to the end of the movie.

I only had a couple of things I want to point out before we

break for categories, which is music by Danny Elfman, mostly.

OK, the scores. To fucking wild it is.

It is mostly OK. Like it hits a few, it hits a

few, like kind of not so perfect bits.

But I think, I think I commented at the time, it's nice to see a

film with a fucking score with a real last score by a real last

composer. Melodic and yeah, so it isn't

just like a bunch of noises or a load of bad music, yeah.

Yeah, because that's what yeah, shit composers like me do.

No, but it became. Like a an easy thing for Action

Cinema to do is just like, well, we'll just bang a little drums

on it and nothing else. Well, yeah.

Yeah, like so just like for these scenes like like lively

woodwinds and strings interacting with them and stuff

and it's and it's like a camera and it's and it's real hour.

It doesn't doesn't need to have that in it, yet it does and.

I like it. It pays homage, I think, to Lola

Shifrin's original iconic theme tune.

Obviously the theme tune's reprised because it has to be.

But the rest of the school, I mean, kind of is in that similar

sort of vein. You know, you got the bongos and

the. Yeah.

Flutes and all. Kind of.

Stuff going crazy, yeah. I like that.

There's something called this where it kind of fell a bit flat

for me, which is there's a really weird triumphant bit when

Ethan makes the jump from the back of the train onto the

helicopter. Yeah, that.

That wasn't. And it was like that was weirdly

kind of like, it was like triumphant and very major and

kind of like, yeah, in your face and well.

I mean, the scores, Danny Elfman isn't it?

And I think, yeah. His.

Wheelhouse is doing things a bit kind of weird and a bit off kill

and so if you want him so if you want to get and Danny Elfman to

do something like hero gets like perfectly, you know, so Danny.

Elfman is obviously very famous for working with Tim Bird and

shit and it's probably his best work.

My personal opinion is when he was working on the Batman movies

Right. If I'm if I'm home to ensure

that is definitely him. I think it is, but Batman.

Batman returns the. Simpsons theme tune as well.

Yeah, yeah. So that was interesting editing

was the same editor who did the Untouchable, a lot of the same

cat, the crew that from from the Untouchables that Brent Palmer

brought with him. So it's Paul Hirsch who did the

editing. Same same as Untouchables.

Stephen Burum is is DP also same as untouchables.

Obviously the big difference is is the producers.

So obviously Cruz and and Paula Wagner did the did the

production. I did like the cool extra credit

for special makeup effects, which is pretty good by Rob

Botton special makeup effects. Obviously his his background is

in special effects before that, before he did this movie, his

kind of big career hits or makeup effects for Rubio cop and

total recall that explains. A lot.

And and the thing as well that really.

Explains a lot actually. Was like the general yeah these

bringing that yeah holy shit. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So an incredible, incredible

crew on this movie as well. That's that's all kind of what I

talk about really. Just just kind of highlight some

some of the some of the awesome kind of pedigree of the crew.

Yeah, yeah. No, definitely.

Cool. Welcome back.

We're just going to go through the categories now as we always

do, starting with casting. Kristian Scott Thomas has a very

small role to start this movie, but she's obviously like a

tremendous actress, very well known, I think, but worth worth

highlighting anyway, around this sort of time.

She's just done. I think her big break might just

come from 4 Weddings and a funeral couple of years before

this. So that was pretty cool.

And then she'd go on to do The English Patient after this I

think the next year. So that's obviously a big moment

for her. Of course, now she's she's

currently in Slow Horses as second desk Diana Tavana at MI

5. So she's stuck with a spy game,

but cool. The main one I want to bring up

is he's easy to miss if you're not looking out for him.

Dale Dye is the guy who plays Kittridges like #2 like his sort

of guy he's always bitching off orders to.

Yeah. And Dale, Dale Die is like a

great character actor. I mentioned it earlier on, but

I'll go through his career properly.

So he is plays Frank Barnes in this movie, but he's, he's

known. He's in Platoon, he's in Spy

game. He's also in, it's going to

scale all the way back to the beginning.

So some context. He does an absolute tonne of

military consultancy work. So he's, he's got a special

thanks and loads of stuff. So.

And filled us from Mars. Technical advisor Platoon

Technical advisor, Casualties of war gone on the 4th of July.

So you can see that's maybe how like Tom Cruise met him and gone

the job. Jacob's ladder stockade

dogfight, JFK technical advisor again, last number Higgins,

technical advisor, Forrest Gump, Natural Born Killers absolute

turn and then his actual credits as an AXA also just as just as

many as lose. So again, he's an infantry

Colonel and born on the 4th of July.

He's in the fourth war. He's in again, he's JFK like I

mentioned, under siege, he's in as well.

He's also in bought a band of brothers.

He is Colonel Robert F Sync. He's in seven episodes of that.

So he also come I think he also comes out to visit them in

during the Battle of the Bulls sequence.

Do you remember that? Yeah.

He got he's done so much video game voice acting work.

Medal of Honour rattles Medal of Honour.

Allied Assault, The utterly batshit Medal of Honour Rising

Sun, which is just crazy as as Medal of Honour games go.

Holy crap. Battlefield 2 Modern Combat.

The one absolute the one absolute not good film.

And this appears to be snipe, our special OPS one of one of

well, it's a Steven Seagal film. It's not one of the limited 5 or

6 Steven Seagal films that are cool.

There's a guy in. Here called a German actor

called Andreas Wisniski. I want to say I don't

recognitions will be terrible. He's the long haired blonde guy

who's wearing the ginormous coat, so he's got the humongous

shoulders. Who's Max's bodyguards?

He's the guy who's sitting on the bench during that bit.

He's in Die Hard, he's in The Living Daylights as Necross.

He's in obviously This Mission Impossible, but he also returns

in Mission Possible, Ghost Protocol, as well as a different

character, The Fog's Contact. So he's Max's companion and then

he's the Fog's contact as well. He's in Scorpion King and then

Around All That. He's also in two episodes of The

Bill. Incredible.

That's fantastic. Great journey.

I mentioned before, I'm going to mention him again.

Obviously he's Robert Ritter in favour of Prison Danger.

He's also in the Pink Panther in 2006.

He obviously makes a return to the Mission Impossible

franchise. In the meantime, he's also done

one of those Netflix holiday movies.

He was in Schitt's Creek and he's in Scream 6.

He's also in This is Pretty cool.

You know, they made a bunch of Blade Runner, you know, remember

like you know their Animatrix. They did like a similar thing

for Blade Runner 2049 where they made a bunch of animated shorts

and he's in one of those as well.

Quotes. You've definitely got some

quotes, my friend. Absolute.

Bar An absolute bar is you want to shake hands with the devil.

That's fine with me. I just want to make sure you do

it in hell. That's what what a lane that's

up there with like there's, there's, there's there's no way

you can kill me that matters or something.

It's not me And but said you can't kill me in any way that

matters. It's bars, absolute bars.

It's it's a cold fucking lane. It's a film with some excellent

quotes in it. But that one's, that one's one

of the best of them. Definitely.

Yeah. And the one about the just just

just Jim Phelps's cold bit. Will you think about anything

that was inevitable? No more Cold War, no more

secrets to keep from yourself and set a new one but yourself?

Then you wake up 1 morning and find out the president is

running the country without your permission.

The son of a bitch, How dare he. Then you realise so far you're

an obsolete piece of hardware and not worth upgrading.

You got a lousy marriage and 62 grand a year.

Counterpoint though, is his marriage that lousy?

I mean, he's, he's really punching with his wife, you

know, He's, he's. Tremendously punching, yeah.

So I mean. He's yeah.

So marriage isn't that bad. I mean, he's, I mean, I mean,

he's concerned that she's having sex with Ethan.

I mean also. Adjusted for inflation as well,

that's 60 grand a year is probably significantly more now,

yeah. And and like, you could

literally just set yourself up doing any kind of like private

security consultant work, you know, which will be easier and

lower stakes than IMF stuff as well.

You know, you could kind of just say chill and like run, run like

security for like Pricewaterhouse Coopus or

something for the rest of your career and then and then retire

with your, you know, suspiciously young wife.

It's fine. You don't need to do this stupid

shit, man. Come on buddy, I love.

I I mentioned it earlier, I like.

I like when even hunts giving Jack shit during the during the

heist at the beginning, yes. When he's when he's got the he's

got the big Foghorn Leghorn voice on Go and go like Jack.

I believe we did have a Jack, an unreliable fellow as I recall,

constantly behind in his work. I was forced to tie him behind

one of my best aliens and drag him around my barn for a few

days because I love I. Was for a few days like and

quickly pivots from a bit of a lock to the destruction of a

human. Yeah, yeah, All right.

I mean it's. A driver for for a few days.

The body was The body was fed to the pigs.

Sorry, go on hassle. Lasagna so I'm good any any

anymore coats you never even Kittridge you've never seen me

very upset. I really like.

That my mom was a little confused how the DEA can mistake

her Uncle Donald for a couple of dope smugglers in the Florida

case. Because not only is it a quite

funny line that things about the live out, but also neatly ties

up how the kind of got the family out of this like, ah, you

see those this little mistake, you know, and it's like, and

it's like a neat little sentence that kind of chaos up plot

holes. And I like that.

I like that both as a quote, which is funny and well

delivered, and his writing which which clears plot holes up in a

really unobtrusive kind of fun way.

It's a weird bit of plot motivation for Ethan Hunt.

I don't know if we needed it. Yeah, I think him just being on

the run because he's assumed guilty and he's a clear his name

is probably enough We don't need to have because we don't see the

family apart from in one news report I.

Want dying slowly? Dying slowly in America, after

all, can be a very expensive proposition.

Yeah, get rich. Yeah, that's a, that's a good

one. Shit cold ass lanes man

Incredibly cold, poor, relevant. His writing.

Is this fire cool? Right, needle drops.

There's only one needle drop for me in this movie.

I don't know if you spot anymore, it's in the pub at the

very end. Dreams by you have.

Cranberries, yeah, yes. Awesome.

Quite. A few that a boxed reviews

reference that song and and that's to you, Evergreen.

Absolutely, absolutely fantastic.

Total tune. Absolutely Bob.

And that's not just because the Miller Little and me talking

trivia. OK, I've been peppering a little

bit of trivia throughout the movie, but there's there's some

good ones here from IM Duba. So not only is this the only

film in the franchise where Ethan Hunt doesn't fire a gun,

it is the only one not to have any shootouts or gunfights at

all. Right, that's a very.

Good point. I mean, yeah.

Yeah, all the all the combat is hand to hand and there's not

much of it, actually. Tom Cruise deferred his 20

million fee for a percentage of the box office takings instead

and ended up ended up earning 70 million.

So yeah, incredibly wise, indeed.

This is weird. And racially charged.

The producers, IE Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner, cast V Rhames as

Luther because they felt he was the opposite of what a hacker

normally looks like. I suppose if you were to say

what does a hacker normally look like if you're looking at

cinema, you'd have to say Matthew Lillard.

Yeah. Or what's his name from Element

Elementary. Yeah.

Jesus tip my tongue and shallow grave John Lee Miller.

Yeah, when did? Hackers come out 95 so so so I

guess I mean I am pretty sure that yeah, there were the there

were there were non white people in the team in hackers.

I love that also. If you're going to look at that

right, another move that came out 995 that had hackers in was

the net. Yeah, sorry.

Sandra Bullock, I suppose. I suppose Ving Rhames is the

opposite of Sandra Bullock. What does that even mean?

How do we even? How?

How do we even come to these, to these, to these like decisions?

The platonic opposite of her is Ving.

How I'm actually wearing this is weird.

I'm actually wearing AT shirt that celebrates the film

Practical Magic and Nicole Kidman.

It's incredible. I've got Charling down.

We yeah, we still fiction. Yeah, yeah, I've just hold up

some trivia of my own. I've just found a transcription

of the tailing shorthand from the cafeteria scene, it reads.

Remember to telephone Mr. Smith to clear all security files.

Combinations lock in slash 4 filing cabinet make lunch

arrangements with William Pugh for next Tuesday check through

dot dot dot make dot dot dot for next you see someone says yeah

well done from using real shorthand Pittman's instead of

some props department scribble this looked like T Lane to me

this is this really looked like T Lane to me while you're while

you're. Talking about that the our

company didn't touch on this and casting.

I didn't realise this, but Emilio Estevez isn't accredited

in this film. Yeah.

So that whole thing is 1 big uncredited cameo.

Yeah. And I don't have we talked about

this already before, but Tom Cruise does lots of cameos in

the Midwestern films. Yeah.

I'm sure you mentioned it at some point, maybe, maybe not on

the part, but maybe in like our our group chat possibly.

Yeah, so there's a sequence in Young Guns where Tom Cruise is

in the background in Young Guns during like a shootout scene and

stuff for like a while. This is quite cool.

According to Emilio Estevez, the scene of the IMF team gathered

around discussing the mission that opens the movie was added

at the suggestion of George Lucas.

So I said it was different from the screenplay out of the

suggestion of George Lucas, who said the movie needed a

spaghetti scene, a scene where they are all sitting around

discussing what's next. The cast was brought back during

reshoots to film the scene Right.

And I agree. With that, I think they do need

a little bit at the beginning where there's no tension on, so

you understand who the people are, the dynamics.

Use PALS before they're straight into work mode.

Yeah. Mix.

It makes you more vested when most of them get horribly

mercked in the next like 15 minutes too, so you know.

Exactly. Yeah, totally.

Jim Phelps is the only character from the original TV series in

here in this movie. Apparently there's quite a

blowback from fans of the TV show when they kind of took,

like, the beloved main character of the TV series and turn them

into like, a bad guy who gets who gets mercked at the time.

I cannot kind of understand that.

Quite a ballsy move by yeah, let's face it, Tom Cruise to

make that happen. Let's do.

The oversaw oversaw of them in industrial complex haven't there

in a while, but this one and this one really fits our we're

bringing it back from the dead guys.

They're bringing it back the most egregious oversaw of the

military industrial complex with this film that really does put a

large amount of Mustang on the MIC.

Oh yeah. Big time.

This is like, it's probably more it's a fantasy movie, isn't it?

It's even more egregious than like enemy of the state.

But any of this mistake was meant to make you believe it was

kind of vaguely realistic. But this is like, this is

ridiculous fidelity of the cameras, this tiny little pin

button, all cameras, they've got the interfaces and all the

tracking software they've got for the little tracking devices.

It's like it's. Wild because the chewing.

Gum. Yeah, the gum the.

The only gum my government gives me is to to do the opposite of

Constipation after a field week. The net exclusive fantasy of

that gum, technically. Probably counts as an explosive.

An interesting thing, but this film and it's a kind of

relationship with technology is that it both acknowledges the

fact that things like use Nets and Netscape Navigator because

you do see Netscape Navigate being used exist.

But also you've got it's a drum I've beaten earlier tonight.

But these these glasses that have miniaturised cameras in

them so small that they're completely unobtrusive and and

can't be seen at all in the slightest and have these picture

perfect images. I mean, you, you would struggle

to do that like today, like like like right now, like tiny little

fuck ass 1990s wireframe glasses, essentially incredibly

dad coded with just like there's just an invisible camera that

gets perfect quality shots. That's definitely one of the

biggest, biggest of our cells. Yeah, I'm not quite sure how the

polarised lenses of the sunglasses worked either, Swami.

With. The spray agent that showed up

on them, yeah, yeah. So it's like, what?

I can't tell. Yeah, go on.

I was going to say. Yes, it's some kind of like, is

it some sort of radiation I'll expect?

From it arrow something it's like because I'm I know it's

that kind of just predator vision, isn't it really?

But it's like but yeah, like, I mean the idea of like the kind

of perfume kind of chemical spray Mark and someone's really

cool, obviously, but they're like, you've got these like just

really normal ass kind of glasses that just show show this

like non visible height spectrum, I guess.

Or, or or consider stop trying to assess this film.

Rory, shut up, shut up. Go for Hollywood.

But it's like, yeah, the vaults. That they have for specifically

for the one terminal that that still stores the knock list on,

Yeah, that's over the top, yeah. It's obviously.

And it's great for like, the heist of the movie.

And I get it. And like, and you know, we have

to have a bit of context here. Pardon me like has to exist in

order for a lot of the film will work, but it's yeah, it's also a

big role oversell sort of a. Donkey dunk I have.

Two of these rooms and I use them to store my cheese.

The. I think the biggest 1, and I

hate to say it, but it's the masks, man, isn't it?

The masks are too good. Yeah, but that's like that's

that's a classic Mission Impossible thing.

We're going to see it through like nearly all the other

movies. Yeah.

So, yeah, no good good Calgary, though, because yeah, there's a

big, big oversell. But you know, it's like it's

like oversell of the military just so complex in Lord of the

Rings, isn't it? Like you might as well be like

grand who's got who's got the money for a grand right as.

Saruman's head ORC clearly noted we do not have the Smith output

to generate the roots. To generate.

Armour and handheld weaponry. So how are we going to

manufacture such a several multi million complex projects such as

grand think? I think the introduction of the

Grand Strike Group has overstretched the capacity of

the Royal Navy to the breaking point and I, I.

I think, I think I, I, I think Sauron's procurement of a grand

is a great what's the word look for metaphor for military

procurement, Like, right, OK, what do we need?

We need a battering ram. Yes, but but but.

I think it should be in the shape of a giant wolf that

breathes fire. It's clearly a.

Symptom of something larger. After the breaching of Helms

Deep, we have seen discussion after discussion whether the

battering ram has become obsolete with the introduction

of explosive powder. Yet even the Dark Lord himself

clearly thinks that the battering ram still has value.

Problem is right. Is that a lot of a lot of

Mordor's economy is based on the battering ram building business.

So and the and the and the problem is not bigger battering

Rams or smaller battering Rams, it's mass.

We need more battering Rams, OK? And that's the only way to we're

going to be able to stop all these refugees coming into

Mordor, OK? So, and that's maybe you, maybe

if we take this, this is just another authoritarian regime

desperately trying to create jobs.

I think that's what it is, yeah. Yeah.

There's obviously not enough jobs going for the native there.

Apparently is a vast need for for large amount of jobs that

are unskilled labour. And clearly, swinging a giant

battering ram is not an academic job.

You know what? And and do you know what's that

that swinging that that big growing power.

And it wasn't just the giant trolls guys.

It was some of the ordinary orcs because they had to prove that

the troll guys went like a DI here higher you.

Got involved for that one like the orc union got involved and

they're like listen, but think we'll see what you're doing

here. So we're going to, you know,

going to make sure that, you know, you can get, you're taking

quarters on of our guys as well, you know, but it's like, I mean,

yeah, you totally write like the idea.

It's like they've got like the whole like flame throwing aspect

of Bron means like, you know, the like the because of because,

because like I said, it's it's that's a battering round plus

shit burns, right. And it's like the because

they've got like just bring in as many contractors on it as the

can. I mean, the design process took

ages. They brought in loads different

like teams, various shamans, Wizards and freaks.

There's coming to odd things on it.

You know, there was like 6 Yeah, like when there was there was

there was I was out of the time. There was a whole or six months

when they were fighting over the size of various ridges and like

nodules and knobs on it and stuff.

So, you know, but like I said, it's all about just maintaining

the economy at this point. Do you want all these orcs and

and whatever unemployed? No, because at this point

they're going to start listening to that fucking Hobbit music,

right? They're going to start smoking

the Hobbit's pipe weed. It's going to warp the mains and

all of a sudden great Ban Orc orcs rise up against you and

you're hanging from a lamp post. Nobody wants to.

Nobody wants to fight anymore. But he was looking ahead.

He's like, like once, once the White City is gone, what am I

going to have my guys do? Yeah, but.

Once again, this is an ongoing problem.

Clearly the Dark Lord does not even want to pay for orcs,

because why else what do you have needs to involve men from

the east. Apparently he has to get the

perundrum involved because they're just cheaper unpaid

foreign labour. It's like than that it's.

It's pirates as well, actually. Honest to go to pirates, you

know, unscrupulous. Stealing.

Stealing mortar Orcs jobs. Shocking.

Shocking the state of a man take.

Mortal Grid Again, would this movie have been better with

Doctor Jack Ryan, Doctor Richard Kimble, or President James

Marshall? Well, I think the answer is

pretty obvious. It's Doctor Jack Ryan.

Who else is going to face off against Kittridge again?

Or in this case, Rissa? Yeah.

And actually Jack Ryan. Absolutely.

Fair one. Yeah, I can.

Hear Harrison Ford's going. You've never seen me very upset

as well. I can hear him.

He. Could he could easily be folded

in with as as someone who assists Ethan Hunt in like the

kind of end game of the film? Easily, easily him, him and him

and Ding Chavez and John Clark just fucking swaggering in and

just like, you know, I heard you were making.

A movie that had no guns in it, Yeah.

I'm going to fucking change that million chronically underused

Domingo Chavez and even more cromley underused John fucking

Clark. We are going to change that

dude. Two person body count.

Fuck that man. Streets are going to run red

with blood. I think that's, yeah, I think

that's it for those guys. Weird little guy played by Peter

Falk. Yes, he could have been.

I want. I want you to focus.

Ethan Hunt. Yes.

And and and doing all like the horny stuff as well.

And like Vanessa Redgraves, just like proper, like trying to Mack

on him and he's like. So.

Jim, I just have one more question.

Yes. Just just imagine him taking off

weird masks, yeah? Like he pulls off his Peter Falk

mask and is another Peter Falk in the knee.

Exactly. I.

Was going to say like the ultimate the ultimate like

twisters Peter Falk Texas Peter Falk mask off and it's just like

still Peter Falk and it's like you thought I was pretending to

be Colombo the whole time. No, I'm actually star of stage

and screen. Peter Falk making an but you

have never seen. Me upset What's?

It's Columbo, PFR grips off his mask, and it's the granddad from

The Princess Bride. Bit of fork underneath.

Incredible. Incredible scenes.

He could have. He could have played Phelps.

He could have played Kit Rich could have played a character's

buddy. Yeah.

Hi. God, Craig.

I love her. Krieg is the.

One Krieg is there's a supposed. To be a 0 body count mission

perhaps? He's.

With a nice and the and the right and the oh man, the comedy

of him like trying to like pull even back up again from the rope

and everything yeah, imagine. Him flying the helicopter, yeah,

with like a. Cigar like sticking out his

mouth and yeah, I can. I mean, I mean, I know that we

fucking idolise Colombo on this pod, but I can imagine him

flying the helicopter adeptly better than anybody else in that

film. He'd be.

He's given me like 18 vibes, yeah.

As like I'm, I'm like the last to hear this something, but I

was really amazed and really pumped to hear the like as a

dirty mark that he was in Colombo was his own court that

he provided. That's amazing.

I think that's. Meant that's like, that's the

platonic opposite of Steven Seagal bringing what appears to

be his own site on the Water's film.

Still not being able to shoot properly with it, you know.

Have you seen? The but once again, I'll see it.

Watch the Steven Seagal film. He clearly brings his own old

busted ass 1911 and he blinks when he shoots this.

I will ban the fucking drum about this for a long time.

We're never going to do a Steven Seagal film Was none of them

really fit the kind of vibe of the show.

Yeah, OK. Have you seen the Columbus

statue they've got in Budapest? No, but that's.

Best there's like a. There's like a translates to

like Folk St. So they've got like a big so

they've got like a bronze statue of Columbo, like scratching his

head and his dog in front of him like a little Beagle.

Jeffrey Wright. Could he be in this movie

somewhere? Undoubtedly, beware.

He fits with the vibe he fits with, fits with it's American

centre of obviously kind of story comedy plays that.

He plays a great, like, conflicted American, you know?

Yeah. The If they wanted to make

Kittridge less of a just a company man, they could have

made it give him a bit of a few more, a few more, a few more

dimensions. Which if you write, yeah.

He wouldn't have made sense, claim Krieger, that's for sure.

No, absolutely not. No, no, he's he's got to be like

yeah, conflicted guy or someone with a quiet dignity.

Have you watched the new nice that movie?

Oh really worth it. It's really good movie If he

writes in it for like probably 5 minutes tall.

He's got like a scene at the start of the movie and a scene

at the end of the movie. But he's fantastic.

Just absolutely just comes in bosses the scenes walks out

again. Brilliant.

I love the guy. All right, the question that

we've all been waiting to ask is this movie Prue or Auntie?

The Central Agency? I'm finished.

This isn't the end. Samuel Jackson.

Oh, you. Want to talk?

Commander U.S. Navy, the Lieutenant.

Commander Samuel Jackson, U.S. Navy work in this movie.

What do you think we could? We possibly replace cartridge

with him. I can see him telling telling a

hunt to go to hell. I'll tell you what you would

have to have if you were going to have Samuel Jackson do a heel

face turn in this movie. He would demand he had a scene

with Hunt at the end of the movie where they like, resolved

their differences and like, shook hands so that Samuel

Jackson got to walk away a hero at the end of the movie.

That's not that's not a slide against Samuel Jackson.

That's just the kind of role I think you'd want to have in the

movie. Yeah, well, it would make it a

very different film, but it wouldn't be a deal breaker.

It wouldn't be a film room now, I could definitely say at work,

and it'll be a different film. They could fit him in easier

into the sequels, I think. Yeah.

Well, as Kitteridge still or is it or like a different rule?

Different rule I think. Different rule, I think.

Yeah, yeah. That's a very good question.

That's a really. Fucking good one.

Christ, that's absolutely. Eyes.

Yeah, I didn't thought about that.

Yeah. Where else could he be?

Because at this time was this 1996?

So this is like post Pulp Fiction.

Yeah. So he's.

Yeah. So what?

We're near deep blue sea. OK, I could have been.

Hey, I'll tell you what he could have been Phelps.

He could have been. Phelps, that would have been a.

Slightly different vibe, but yeah.

I'll tell you what though, it would have been a bit awkward

when Tom Cruise pulled off the Phelps mask because I was like,

it was like, it was like, shit. It was like, was that, was that

blackface? Yeah, I probably did.

Probably. Did.

Yeah. No.

That's probably not right. No, we can't do that.

Yeah. What if he does?

Luther well and losing. Rhames well, exchange Marcellus

Wallace for whoever the Timur Jackson's name wasn't.

Perfection does my. Laptop look like a bitch.

Instead of Job 314, it's Ezekiel.

He could. I mean, he could play Kriga.

He could play Kriga. Yeah, that'd be cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm.

I hate motherfucking rat. I've had it with these

motherfucking rats in my in my ventilation shaft.

Motherfucker. What are you saying?

Toast, motherfucker. Toast.

Toast. The sound.

Check is just him going motherfucker, a different

motherfucker. Motherfucker, motherfucker this

this. The sound cheques just him doing

is like Rogal with cheese bit from Pulp Fiction.

Do you know what? They call a rat in Paris a chef.

A ratatouille? Yes, people have got there.

A chef. God Any.

Motherfucker can cook who, right?

OK, Will Samuel L Jackson have improved the 2008 Pixar film

Ratatouille? Right?

I hate to. Say this, but we could replace

my boy Peter O'Toole no relation with with I think anyway, who

who fucking knows, right? So.

He's the food critic, right? Yeah.

Yeah, So. Replace him with Samuel L

Jackson as Anton Ego, the food critic.

I would just kind of like to see that happen.

That would be awesome, yeah. Jesus Christ, you're telling.

Me a shrimp fried this rice this.

Is some motherfucking good ratatouille.

He comes in with this fucking purple lecture we do.

Not do not grant you access to the kitchen.

Worldwide. To me, be better with Doctor

Jack Ryan, Doctor Richard Kimble, our President, James

Marshall. Half.

Halfway to the film, President James Marshall declares war on

the French. Oh amazing, I haven't seen

Ryatui in too long. There was a joke I saw on

threads of like like linguine like turning up to work for late

for the fifth time in a row, screaming I'm sorry for lakes.

Like what was ratchet in my hair?

Fuck. Me, Jesus Christ.

What's this movie Mission Impossible?

Is it pro anti CIA? It's anti.

I think they were all in a way anti because they pitched the

IMF at odds with the CIA. And they're constantly, I don't

know how many more of these movies you've seen, Roy, but

like they are, there's always like congressional hearings

where they're having to defend themselves to like an oversight

committee for their funding and everything.

A bit like how they do at the end, like all the Bourne movies.

Yeah, and there's a really like there's a brilliant like running

gag of like of Alec Baldwin is always there like justifying

like. So I think one of them he starts

by saying like the IMF is needs to be cut away.

It's ridiculous. It's like in the in the age of

modern intelligence gathering in and singing etcetera, we don't

need human sources with like these ridiculous gadgets and

stuff to be doing crazy emissions.

And then at the end of the movie he's like, and that's why I

think the investor of the IMF is critical to this safety of this

nation, why we need it. And it's like you've just done

like a 180 from the yeah, it's brilliant.

Anyway, yeah, it's anti CIA which makes it seven to three

against I think 7:00 to 3:00. Against.

Cool, right? Ding Chavez Award for missed

opportunity of this movie. Well, there's one.

There is one now. I know the movie starts with the

whole very cool, very effective sequence of the team that we

think we're going to get to know all getting wiped out.

The latest season of It's Welcome to Derry, there's a very

similar thing. And it's very.

And it's very cool, very fun. But man, I love me some Kristen

Scott Thomas. And I think she should have been

in this movie a bit longer. Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe she should have survived

and maybe Claire shouldn't have. Yeah.

Miss. Opportunity is clearly the size

of the aquarium, as discussed earlier.

Roughly 1497 fish short of something actually intriguing.

All I've seen on the floor was a handful of lobsters.

I think a missed opportunity for me is I've just had a quick

Google for the funny news nest and News Group names We could

have seen along obviously was so like the Amiga demos one and the

the Amazon women enthusiast stuff.

Look about alt dot Swedish dot chef dot book dot book dot book.

And of course, as the legendary, as I mentioned them off dot

Wesley dot Crusha dot die dot die dot die alt alt dot fan dot

Carl Dash Malden dot nose, some absolute total bangers out

there. And I'm just pulling up some

more alls dot alien dot vampire dot flunk, flunk, flunk.

That one actually appears in the film.

If if you have a look at the film, if you pause, that

actually does appear in US. That is that is referenced

there. See how they go this there.

There are there are so many that could have the could have been

of like a use net deep dive. You could have got in some use

net drama with people and people like Oh my God, that Ethan guy's

posting again. Let's take this threat to

emails, which is what they would do.

Someone was being irritating in a thread.

Amazing. Hey Royal, so final thing before

we wrap this bad boy up, have you got any notes from the

peanut gallery? It's taking my.

Glasses off so that the IMF can't see me look at the phone.

So there's some excellent reviews of this film on our

friend of the podcast. Not quite sponsored, but it

makes my life a lot easier finding funny things.

That is a letter boxed. Some great ones and lots of

great ones and ones don't make too much sense.

And some ones do make a fair amount of sense.

Four stars. No Sir.

Three stars. Fake news.

This was like not good in my opinion.

It's I made justice like action movies though brackets.

But it was entertaining and explodes in the high campy vibes

of that helicopter scene. There were single snippets of

this that were hilarious and ways I don't know were intended

to be like what Ethan is in disguise, but it's not a mask at

all. And then he'll whip his face off

like magic and it's him. And I like the part where the

government were descending on a hotel room or whatever it was to

capture Max and Ethan and there was a little old lady vacuuming

outside and they threatened her with a gun and she just kept

vacuuming. I will not be watching war

Mission Impossible movies unless I made to.

Also, I hope Tom Cruise dies for real.

Damn right. Yeah, 2 1/2 stars.

Sometimes I felt like I was watching a bunch of people speak

gibberish in tones that insinuated they must be talking

about important stuff like an hour and a half straight.

But also I had fun. 4 1/2 stars by Ophelia.

I pitched this by going Tom Cruise is so hot in this he

looks like a child. Which wasn't.

The greatest choice of words in my life.

But we did end up watching it and enjoying it, so I'm counting

it. Yes, yes.

Officer, this letter. You right there.

Absolutely. I can't believe I finally

watched this. Midterms have eaten me the fuck

alive. Jesus, it's been a week since I

watched a film. Last night I promised myself I'd

watch no less than 200 this year. 29 left.

I'm going to have to lock in this mud guys, pray for me. 3

1/2 stars a one that hits the hits.

A good point here. I love how 90s it is.

I'm not bombarded with background music.

The silence, slowness, dullness, and daily life sounds as opposed

to a music score in a music score.

Insert one right after the other.

They don't make movies like this anymore.

It's jarring watching this after the Ministry of Ungentlemanly

Warfare and someone just puts 4 1/2 stars.

Love Tom Cruise, Devastating. We have a very time.

Relevant 112th of December 2025. Three stars.

Bad news for any Portsmouth fans watching this.

Southampton did escape relegation.

Low key confused but they gagged me sometimes.

So and another one of five stars. 10 out of 10 banger and a

classic. Suspenseful, conniving and small

not saving the world in the best way.

Everything is a little off kilt are the acting is a bit more

unrestricted. People scream things not just

drop cliche lines. These weird close-ups from below

when Hunt and Kitteridge are reacting to things.

It just fucking works. Side note, I never noticed my

3,000,000 watches. There's a sequence where Ethan

spends the whole night sending little emails and seems more

spent from doing this than any other physical task, and I don't

know how it hasn't become a meme.

Cool on it me. Amazing stuff.

We're almost through these door. It does.

I can't stop thinking about Brian de Palma split diopter

shots. My wife left me, she took the

kids. I couldn't give up Brian de

Palma split diopter shots. Nothing makes me feel the way

they do, said Sydney with a 4 1/2 star review.

Quick Siska. 5 stars. The happiest movie ending in

history. It's 1996 and you're having a

pint outside with Ving Rhames as Dreams by the Cranberries plays

in the background. I cannot imagine anything better

on God's green earth than that. 3 1/2 stars.

Tom Cruise has so many good films.

It's a shame he's such a weirdo, says Haley.

And I think that's a lot of people's opinion on On Time.

You see the other time you say not Tom Clancy, but in fact Tom

Cruise, There you go, top cat. Cool, right that be.

The end of an episode of Clear and Present Dudes before we sign

off any final points that he would like to make about the

movie. I've been thinking we've we've

brought up soundtrack and general ambience.

And so I found a very quiet volume wise I've I've rewatched

it today on my laptop and I had to hook it up to to the stereo

to actually be able to follow the dialogue in places.

Yeah. And that's.

Really good call actually, especially.

In comparison to the later Mission Impossible and

especially the latest one, it's a very quiet film for action

thriller. Interesting.

Cool. Anything any any final comments

about the lasting impact of this mission?

Mission movie? You gonna watch the rest of

them? Yeah, it's been determined that

MRI are gonna watch the the rest of them.

I mean, like I said, I did say right, number 2 was a completely

different kettle of fish and but yeah, what?

We are going to watch the whole of my thing and report back to

you, but you are. In for a treat.

The next one, three is one of the best ones I think.

Sweet. Cut in.

Looking forward to a man looking forward to it, Philip.

Seymour Hoffman, Philip Seymour. Hoffman yes.

Yeah. Is is there any film he couldn't

make better by his presence there?

Is not cool, right? I guess a little parish notice

to our listeners. We're probably going to take a

little break over the festive period, so it's not going to be

bang on two weeks for the next episode like usual.

It might be 3 weeks. Yeah, maybe. 4 weeks and we have

to kind of have a discussion about what we're going to do for

that movie and we're going to come back in the what I will say

is that January, at some point in January, we're going to

celebrate Michael Mannuri. So there's bound to be a Michael

Mann movie in there. Which one it is?

You can say I don't, I don't think we're going to go with

Heat straight away, but hey, we might.

It's all it's all to play for. It could be black hits hits.

Really, Really. The brass ring, isn't it?

I mean, we've got to bring the A game.

We've got to take pre workout before we go for heat.

We've got to go on a vision quest and climb mountains and

shit. You know, it's like, yeah.

Exactly. And there are plenty of options

out there before we get to Heat. There's Miami Vice, there's

Black Hat Public Enemies. I'd like to be.

Manhunter. Manhunter yeah, big time.

The Keep question mark. Last of the Mohicans Don't know.

Technically isn't Spirit with this podcast, but it's a Michael

Mann movie. Ellies coming back into frame

now, by the way, guys. Okay then.

And he's like, right, okay, the cat obviously wants to pod over.

Okay, cool guys to our listeners, we have a peaceful

festive period and we'll catch up with you in the new year.

If you'd like to give us any suggestions for ongoing so for

us at [email protected].

You can find me on threads at Mike T 2049 and you can find the

podcast on Instagram at clear and present dudes, Rory.

Yeah, you can. Find me on Twitter.com at Rory

O'Toole, OK? Cool and and Sonya off the grid

still somewhere deep in the Black Forest.

If if. If you if you manage to find me

anywhere, I will be equally I'm impressed and concerned he's.

Escaping over the Austrian Swiss border this this Christmas with

the rest of the Vontra family. In which case, see you guys in

the year we have been clear. And.

Present, dude. Yeah.

Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.

Guys, have a great one. Peace out.

Stay on the flip side.

Mission: Impossible (1996)

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