June 3, 2025 âą 16 mins
đ„đŹ This message wonât self-destructâbut Ethan Hunt just might! In this explosive episode of The Rank Podcast, John takes on the 2025 action blockbuster Mission: Impossible â The Final Reckoning, the highly anticipated (and possibly final?) chapter in the legendary spy saga.
With Tom Cruise once again risking life and limb as the unstoppable Ethan Hunt, this installment promises globe-trotting stunts, double-crosses, and heart-pounding suspense. John breaks down the action, the twists, and how it stacks up in his Action Movie Rankings. Is The Final Reckoning a fitting sendoffâor has the fuse finally fizzled?
E-mail your fan questions, comments, and suggestions to TheRankwithJohnandZac@protonmail.com.
Support the show by becoming a patron at â â â â â â â Patreon.com/TheRankPodcastâ â â â â â â .
For up-to-date rankings, check out The Rank's website at â â â â â â â TheRankwithJohnandZac.comâ â â â â â â .
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Tom Cruise has said he's going to keep making movies quote into
his hundreds and that he will quote never stop doing action.
I for one am looking forward to 100 year old Tom Cruise doing
action. Why would anyone want that?
(00:32):
Welcome back to the rank. I'm John and today we're going
to be ranking Mission Impossiblethe final reckoning starring Tom
Cruise, written by Eric Genderson and Christopher
Mcquarrie, who also directed it.If you're enjoying these
rankings or you just like the idea of getting a review of an
action movie based on it being an action movie, please consider
subscribing and or following, liking, reviewing all that happy
(00:52):
stuff. And please put any of your
questions, comments, or suggestions into the comments or
e-mail the show. And if you super duper like it,
consider becoming a Patreon at patreon.com/the Rank Podcasts.
OK, so this movie was originallygoing to be Part 2.
So there was a Dead Reckoning Mission Impossible Dead
Reckoning Part 1 which came out two years ago.
And then there was going to be aDead Mission Impossible Dead
(01:14):
Reckoning Part 2. But marketing was like that
didn't go well because of it being Part 1.
So let's just not have a part init and then it'll be better.
I don't know if they're right ornot, but they changed the name
because of that. So instead of it being Dead
Reckoning Part 2, we get the final Reckoning because it's
essentially A2 parter. I felt like I had to rank Dead
(01:35):
Reckoning Part 1 as well. I have ranked Mission
Impossible, the original from 1996.
We've also ranked Mission Impossible 2 which is haven't
done 3 Ghost Protocol or Rogue Nation, but we will now.
This is a brand new movie so I am going to do my very best to
avoid spoilers. So this is a warning for
spoilers in the sense that I'm going to do my best, but
(01:56):
sometimes something slips and hopefully it won't just be
forewarned, there might be a spoiler.
Let's let's go into the movie. Let's find out how it did,
starting with the potent notables.
As always, we start the potent notables with the movies,
financials. Now, it came out this past
weekend for me. It'll be two weekends ago for
you listening to this or watching it.
But it came out on Memorial Day.It made for the Memorial Day
(02:20):
weekend, $79 million. That's domestically, by the way,
pretty darn good if you ask me. It also made 127 million
internationally. So in that first Memorial Day
weekend, the three day weekend, it made $206 million worldwide.
Is that a lot? Good job, Mission Impossible,
Tom Cruise, whatever, that's a lot of money.
(02:42):
The other cool thing to note is that this past Memorial Day
weekend was the biggest box office Memorial Day in history.
That's exciting. It was $330 million for the box
office total for the three day weekend.
Gives me hope that maybe, you know, the cinema is making a
little bit of a we'll see. Hopefully it is Now that all
(03:02):
being said about the exciting amount of money that it made, if
it were to end right now, it would have lost money because
apparently the budget was and wait for it, $400 million.
That is a lot of money. That's too much money to spend
on making a movie. As much as I like the Mission
Impossible movies, that seems wasteful.
But you know, whatever, I'm not in charge.
(03:23):
I'm glad I'm not, so I would notwant to be responsible for a
$400 million piece of entertainment.
Anyway, Tom Cruise and Guy Morales performed their own
stunts while in the flying biplane.
I'm not worried about that beinga spoiler because that was in
the trailers. If you feel like you don't want
to hear any details about this, I don't give a ton, but just,
you know, maybe this will be spoiling something.
Including when Tom Cruise holds on to the wings of the aircraft
(03:46):
as it spins upside down. Meanwhile, the pilot of the
plane wore a suit made out of green screen material so they
could be digitally removed to make it look like nobody was in
the cockpit. It's just crazy.
Tom Cruise is a crazy person. Anyway, speaking biplane
sequence, this movie is a culmination of all the stunt
sequences that they just couldn't get into the other
movies. So as Christopher Mcquarrie
(04:08):
said, quote, we've been talking about a biplane sequence for
years. We've been talking about a
submarine for years. They find their way in there
eventually. End Quote.
It seems like what they do is they go I'd like to do this
stunt and I'd like to do this stuff and they just have like a
list of stunts and they're like,OK, let's build a movie around.
Now in regards to the runtime, which was a lot, 2 hours and 49
(04:28):
minutes, Mcquarrie said. Quote, interestingly enough,
post Dead Reckoning, we had a complete rethink of this movie,
tried to make a nonlinear movie,tried to make something that was
shorter, and the movie just wentright back to the way it wanted.
It's that way. It was always headed to this
point. Now if that makes you curious
how long this movie is with deleted scenes back to Macquarie
(04:49):
again, quote. There was a four hour cut of
this movie, which I thankfully never saw.
End Quote. I am also thankful that I did
not see that 4 hour cut. OK, so now it's time to do a
little discussion on how crazy Tom Cruise is.
So I'm going to let Macquarie once again do the talking for
us. But here he goes.
Quote. The really terrifying part of
(05:09):
that is that when Tom climbs outonto the wing of that plane,
he's immediately being hit with wind, going 140 miles an hour.
You can't breathe. I'm saying this from experience.
I did it as well, and it's pretty extraordinary.
But what would happen is we'd have a timer.
Mary Bolding, my assistant director, would be sitting next
to me in the helicopter, counting off every minute that
he was on the wing. So imagine you're hearing in
(05:30):
your headphones as you're watching the sequence, one
minute on the wing, 2 minutes onthe wing.
We knew at 12 minutes between the physical exertion and the
lack of oxygen, but Tom was starting to lose strength
rapidly. There were times when Tom wanted
to complete the, but I've gone way past the 12 minute mark and
was so physically exhausted he couldn't get back into the
plane. You can't land the plane if Tom
(05:52):
is on the wing of the plane. And there were times we were up
there long enough that there wasnot enough fuel in the plane.
Fuel was running out and Tom waslaying on the wing and it was
like watching a Mission Impossible movie of is he going
to get back into the cockpit in time for them to land the plane.
Those were pretty intense days. And cool.
Tom, you're in your 60s, man. Stop it.
Actually, keep doing it. It's fun to watch, but stop it
(06:13):
now. If you're wondering how they
could have possibly spent $400 million, well how about the
submarine seats? They needed a giant tank that
didn't exist, so they built an 8and a half million liter tank.
Then they had two giant Derrick cranes that could be used to
raise and lower a gimbal. I didn't know what a gimbal was,
but apparently it's a device that allows you to rotate or
(06:34):
pivot something, in this case a massive tank set.
Their gimbal was a 60 foot diameter cylinder that allowed
for 360° rotation and it could pitch 45° in both directions.
Oh, when it weighed 100 tons, ittook them 2 1/2 years to build
it. As we've said before on this
show, if you want to truly engineer fusion energy, have Tom
(06:57):
Cruise make a movie about he'll,he'll get it done.
All right, so last potent auto. As everyone may know, this is
the last Mission Impossible withTom Cruise is Ethan.
Does that mean that Ethan will go the James Bond route?
Will they continue Mission Impossible with another
character? We don't know.
What we do know is that Tom Cruise has said he's going to
keep making movies quote into his hundreds and that he will
(07:20):
quote, never stop doing action. I, for one, am looking forward
to 100 year old Tom Cruise doingaction.
Why would anyone want that? All right, well, those are all
the potent notables. Let's go to the movie overview.
So let's start out here by saying that the Mission
Impossible series is undeniably a fun and excellent series of
movies. The fact that Tom Cruise at 62
years old is still doing this stuff is incredible, and he
(07:42):
looks pretty good about doing it.
It does make me wonder if we'll ever have someone take up that
mantle, as I was just talking about with these and not, but
just in general. It's funny because I actually
had an epiphany several years ago, maybe a decade ago at this
point, and it's sort of falling in line with the Tom Cruise's a
weirdo conversation, jumping on couches, yelling at Matt Lauer
about psychiatry, Scientology nonsense.
(08:05):
By the way, that all still holdstrue.
But what I realized is that I don't know that I've ever seen a
bad Tom Cruise movie or a Tom Cruise movie that I didn't least
enjoy or feel entertained. Now I will say I've never
watched Tom Cruises version of The Mummy.
So before the comments start pouring in that he has done bad
movies, The Mummy is one of them.
I haven't seen it. I'm not saying that it is bad,
(08:26):
I've never seen it. Maybe I should do it.
We'll find out, but either way, that was the that was the one
that I think of that people go that was a bad movie.
Anyway, let's get to the movie in hand.
So right off the RIP, they're trying to fill us in on the plot
line from the previous movie with like these dreamlike voice
overs. And this isn't going to be a
consistent thing throughout the movie.
Not the dreamlike voice overs, but the filling us in on the
(08:48):
plot. We get a lot of flashbacks to
the previous movie to help people understand the plot, but
then we also get a ton of flashbacks to older movies in
the series. So there's a lot, I mean a lot
of flashbacks to the point of interaction.
At times they even flashback to moments in this movie that
haven't been seen, which is alsodisorienting because you're
like, wait, is this is this now?This story was so conceptual
(09:09):
that it required a ton of exposition, but Even so, they
probably overdid it a bit. That being said, they were also
hurrying it along because of theexhaustive runtime.
And yet they had no problem withstaying on some scenes that
didn't advance plot for a long time.
I would say that they weren't economical with their
filmmaking. Now that all makes it sound like
I didn't like it. I definitely did.
The movie puts in a a lot of effort to entertain you for
(09:31):
nearly three hours, and it does an excellent job of that.
I never felt like I had been there too long, which is pretty
awesome when you consider it wasnearly three hours.
There's another aspect of the movie that I found overly
convoluted and and unnecessary, and that is that they tried to
wrap everything around Ethan Hunt.
They definitely made him larger than life within his own
universe, and they just kept raising the stakes and
explaining the stakes ad nauseam.
(09:52):
And the stakes were all Ethan's fault and on Ethan's shoulders.
I mean, we get lines like everything you've done,
everything you want has come to this.
It's like, OK, slow your roll a little bit here.
And we don't get these lines just once.
We get them throughout and oftenstill though, there are some fun
surprises and unexpected appearances and and the tension
they build is fantastic. It's no doubt an edge of your
(10:15):
seat movie and the action scenesand stunts will not let you down
from what you've come to expect from these series of movies.
Before we go to the rank, I justwant to share this silly thing.
I overheard a family talking about the movie in front of me.
It was just like I'm leaving thetheater there in front of me and
I overhear them talking about it.
And the woman, presumably reallythe wife and mother was talking
(10:36):
about the plane scene and sayinghow you know, he's in his 60s
He's crazy. I don't know how he how he can
do it. And the guy, presumably the
father slash husband says, oh, Icould do it.
It sounded pretty earnest. This is a guy, by the way,
probably in his 50s. He's not necessarily in bad
shape or anything, but come on, the pride, the hubris of just
men are stupid. We're dumb animals.
(10:57):
Yes, clearly some more than other.
So anyway, that's it. Let's go to the rank A wank.
So the rank is where I ranked the movie based on 10
categories, Story, acting, originality, action sequences,
film coherence, euro appeal, villain appeal, slash hatred,
supporting characters appeal, the final showdown, and my rank.
So I rank it on a scale of one to five, one being the worst,
(11:19):
five being the best. In the first category is story,
which I gave a 3.25. My main issue with it is it's
overly complicated. They took a simple concept,
which is admittedly probably a little too conceptual and just
decided to make it complicated. Now, Mission Impossible Possible
movies are known to do that, so this is not like a new thing,
but their decision to try to encapsulate all of the previous
(11:40):
movie plots into this one doesn't really do it any
service. Why not just make it its own
thing? You could have still had the
unexpected appearances and surprises without trying to make
every plot from every Mission Impossible fit into this one.
That being said, I did give it a3.25, so I'm not saying it's a
bad story. I just think they overcompeted.
So let's go to acting, which I gave a 3.75.
The acting is really good, but they were asked to deliver some
(12:03):
tough lines on this. Like I mentioned before, so many
stakes, so much exposition. The guy who played Gabriel at
times looked like he was trying to learn ventriloquism.
For some reason. He would keep his teeth girded
together for whole scenes and hewasn't even expressing anger.
I don't know what was with that choice, but whatever.
Plus, the fawning over Ethan wasa lot, which is fine, but it
(12:26):
makes for some tough lines. So let's go to originality,
which I gave a 3 1/2. It's really hard to call this
original. Do you need to have seen the
previous movies to understand what's happening in this one?
Probably not, but that's becausethey painstakingly point out
everything from previous movies keep you up to speed, which
again, didn't need to happen. It's also Part 2 even though
(12:46):
it's not called that anymore, which detracts from the
originality of it. That being said, the originality
being a 3 1/2 and not lower is because of the uniqueness of its
action sequences. It's impressive how unique and
creative they've always been able to to be with the stunt
work, stunt coordination, all that stuff.
Action sequences in these movies.
(13:06):
So that leads us directly to action sequences.
Our next category, which I gave A5.
They always pull out all the stops for these movies and the
action sequences are always insanely impressive.
I thought about giving it like a4.754.85, something like that,
and I just like, you know what it deserves A5 I'm giving them.
So let's go to the next category, which is film
coherence, which I gave a 2 1/2.I don't know that they that I
(13:27):
need to keep beating this horse,but why did they decide to
complicate this story so much? I actually still don't really
know what MI three had to do with this movie MI 3 being
Mission Impossible 3, even though they spent a bunch of
time and flashbacks trying to explain it to me.
I'm trying to avoid spoilers so I'm I'm not going to go super in
depth here, but yeah coherence is its weakest category and it's
(13:49):
because they tried to do too much.
So let's go to hero appeal. I gave hero appeal 4 1/2.
Now at this point Ethan Hunt is iconic and as much as I found it
annoying at times how much they had characters fawning over him
and how everyone seemed to act like he was the only man that
could do anything, I still foundmyself rooting for him.
That being said, the fawning andother stuff like that knocked it
down from A5. So let's go to villain Appeal
(14:11):
Slash Hatred, which I gave a 2 1/2.
So is the villain Gabriel or theEntity?
Either way it's 2 1/2 but the Entity and Gabriel are both
blocked. That's OK though because the
story doesn't need them to be fantastic to be fun and
entertained. So let's go to supporting
characters appeal, which I gave a foreign act.
There are so many supporting characters in this and they're
all enjoyable. I would have liked to maybe
(14:32):
spend more time with Grace, and I missed having more of Benji's
Comic Relief, but I still enjoyed spending time.
So the next category's final showdown, which I gave a 4.75,
not a 5 because it went on too long.
Still fantastic though, just a little too long.
It was actually a dual scene final showdown where the tension
was really high on one side and not as high on the other, but
(14:53):
mostly because I was just staring at the stunt work from
Tommy. 4.75 is a great score, bythe way, it's just not a 5.
So let's go to my rank. I gave it a 3.85.
I really enjoyed it. There are definitely aspects
that I thought could have been done better, but there are
things that I mostly thought about after the movie while I
was in it. I was just playing entertained,
you know, for the most part 3.85I think kind of fits perfectly
(15:15):
there. So that puts the total for
Mission Impossible Final Reckoning at 38, which puts it
in the tier. And watch it again.
This puts it just .1 points above Cliffhanger and .65 points
below Hero and The Expendable 2.Where does it rank with the
other Mission Impossible movies that have already been ranked?
It fell 4 points below the original Mission Impossible from
(15:36):
1996, which is in the Supreme Cinema tier, but it beat Mission
Impossible 2 by 5 1/2 points because that one's in the Myth
the Ogre tier. I will definitely be ranking
Mission Impossible 3, Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and
Fallout at some point so be on the lookout for those and we can
find out which Mission Impossible movie was the best.
So thanks for listening and or watching everyone.
(15:57):
If you'd like to see list of ourrankings up to date, you can do
that on our website at the rank with John and zach.com.
Remember to subscribe, review, comment.
Please consider supporting us onour Patreon site at
patreon.com/the Rank Podcast where you can get exclusive
perks and Auvois. So thanks for listening slash
(16:27):
watching everyone. If you'd like to see a list of
our son of a bitch.
Tom Cruise has said he's going to keep making movies quote into
his hundreds and that he will quote never stop doing action.
I for one am looking forward to 100 year old Tom Cruise doing
action. Why would anyone want that?
(00:32):
Welcome back to the rank. I'm John and today we're going
to be ranking Mission Impossiblethe final reckoning starring Tom
Cruise, written by Eric Genderson and Christopher
Mcquarrie, who also directed it.If you're enjoying these
rankings or you just like the idea of getting a review of an
action movie based on it being an action movie, please consider
subscribing and or following, liking, reviewing all that happy
(00:52):
stuff. And please put any of your
questions, comments, or suggestions into the comments or
e-mail the show. And if you super duper like it,
consider becoming a Patreon at patreon.com/the Rank Podcasts.
OK, so this movie was originallygoing to be Part 2.
So there was a Dead Reckoning Mission Impossible Dead
Reckoning Part 1 which came out two years ago.
And then there was going to be aDead Mission Impossible Dead
(01:14):
Reckoning Part 2. But marketing was like that
didn't go well because of it being Part 1.
So let's just not have a part init and then it'll be better.
I don't know if they're right ornot, but they changed the name
because of that. So instead of it being Dead
Reckoning Part 2, we get the final Reckoning because it's
essentially A2 parter. I felt like I had to rank Dead
(01:35):
Reckoning Part 1 as well. I have ranked Mission
Impossible, the original from 1996.
We've also ranked Mission Impossible 2 which is haven't
done 3 Ghost Protocol or Rogue Nation, but we will now.
This is a brand new movie so I am going to do my very best to
avoid spoilers. So this is a warning for
spoilers in the sense that I'm going to do my best, but
(01:56):
sometimes something slips and hopefully it won't just be
forewarned, there might be a spoiler.
Let's let's go into the movie. Let's find out how it did,
starting with the potent notables.
As always, we start the potent notables with the movies,
financials. Now, it came out this past
weekend for me. It'll be two weekends ago for
you listening to this or watching it.
But it came out on Memorial Day.It made for the Memorial Day
(02:20):
weekend, $79 million. That's domestically, by the way,
pretty darn good if you ask me. It also made 127 million
internationally. So in that first Memorial Day
weekend, the three day weekend, it made $206 million worldwide.
Is that a lot? Good job, Mission Impossible,
Tom Cruise, whatever, that's a lot of money.
(02:42):
The other cool thing to note is that this past Memorial Day
weekend was the biggest box office Memorial Day in history.
That's exciting. It was $330 million for the box
office total for the three day weekend.
Gives me hope that maybe, you know, the cinema is making a
little bit of a we'll see. Hopefully it is Now that all
(03:02):
being said about the exciting amount of money that it made, if
it were to end right now, it would have lost money because
apparently the budget was and wait for it, $400 million.
That is a lot of money. That's too much money to spend
on making a movie. As much as I like the Mission
Impossible movies, that seems wasteful.
But you know, whatever, I'm not in charge.
(03:23):
I'm glad I'm not, so I would notwant to be responsible for a
$400 million piece of entertainment.
Anyway, Tom Cruise and Guy Morales performed their own
stunts while in the flying biplane.
I'm not worried about that beinga spoiler because that was in
the trailers. If you feel like you don't want
to hear any details about this, I don't give a ton, but just,
you know, maybe this will be spoiling something.
Including when Tom Cruise holds on to the wings of the aircraft
(03:46):
as it spins upside down. Meanwhile, the pilot of the
plane wore a suit made out of green screen material so they
could be digitally removed to make it look like nobody was in
the cockpit. It's just crazy.
Tom Cruise is a crazy person. Anyway, speaking biplane
sequence, this movie is a culmination of all the stunt
sequences that they just couldn't get into the other
movies. So as Christopher Mcquarrie
(04:08):
said, quote, we've been talking about a biplane sequence for
years. We've been talking about a
submarine for years. They find their way in there
eventually. End Quote.
It seems like what they do is they go I'd like to do this
stunt and I'd like to do this stuff and they just have like a
list of stunts and they're like,OK, let's build a movie around.
Now in regards to the runtime, which was a lot, 2 hours and 49
(04:28):
minutes, Mcquarrie said. Quote, interestingly enough,
post Dead Reckoning, we had a complete rethink of this movie,
tried to make a nonlinear movie,tried to make something that was
shorter, and the movie just wentright back to the way it wanted.
It's that way. It was always headed to this
point. Now if that makes you curious
how long this movie is with deleted scenes back to Macquarie
(04:49):
again, quote. There was a four hour cut of
this movie, which I thankfully never saw.
End Quote. I am also thankful that I did
not see that 4 hour cut. OK, so now it's time to do a
little discussion on how crazy Tom Cruise is.
So I'm going to let Macquarie once again do the talking for
us. But here he goes.
Quote. The really terrifying part of
(05:09):
that is that when Tom climbs outonto the wing of that plane,
he's immediately being hit with wind, going 140 miles an hour.
You can't breathe. I'm saying this from experience.
I did it as well, and it's pretty extraordinary.
But what would happen is we'd have a timer.
Mary Bolding, my assistant director, would be sitting next
to me in the helicopter, counting off every minute that
he was on the wing. So imagine you're hearing in
(05:30):
your headphones as you're watching the sequence, one
minute on the wing, 2 minutes onthe wing.
We knew at 12 minutes between the physical exertion and the
lack of oxygen, but Tom was starting to lose strength
rapidly. There were times when Tom wanted
to complete the, but I've gone way past the 12 minute mark and
was so physically exhausted he couldn't get back into the
plane. You can't land the plane if Tom
(05:52):
is on the wing of the plane. And there were times we were up
there long enough that there wasnot enough fuel in the plane.
Fuel was running out and Tom waslaying on the wing and it was
like watching a Mission Impossible movie of is he going
to get back into the cockpit in time for them to land the plane.
Those were pretty intense days. And cool.
Tom, you're in your 60s, man. Stop it.
Actually, keep doing it. It's fun to watch, but stop it
(06:13):
now. If you're wondering how they
could have possibly spent $400 million, well how about the
submarine seats? They needed a giant tank that
didn't exist, so they built an 8and a half million liter tank.
Then they had two giant Derrick cranes that could be used to
raise and lower a gimbal. I didn't know what a gimbal was,
but apparently it's a device that allows you to rotate or
(06:34):
pivot something, in this case a massive tank set.
Their gimbal was a 60 foot diameter cylinder that allowed
for 360° rotation and it could pitch 45° in both directions.
Oh, when it weighed 100 tons, ittook them 2 1/2 years to build
it. As we've said before on this
show, if you want to truly engineer fusion energy, have Tom
(06:57):
Cruise make a movie about he'll,he'll get it done.
All right, so last potent auto. As everyone may know, this is
the last Mission Impossible withTom Cruise is Ethan.
Does that mean that Ethan will go the James Bond route?
Will they continue Mission Impossible with another
character? We don't know.
What we do know is that Tom Cruise has said he's going to
keep making movies quote into his hundreds and that he will
(07:20):
quote, never stop doing action. I, for one, am looking forward
to 100 year old Tom Cruise doingaction.
Why would anyone want that? All right, well, those are all
the potent notables. Let's go to the movie overview.
So let's start out here by saying that the Mission
Impossible series is undeniably a fun and excellent series of
movies. The fact that Tom Cruise at 62
years old is still doing this stuff is incredible, and he
(07:42):
looks pretty good about doing it.
It does make me wonder if we'll ever have someone take up that
mantle, as I was just talking about with these and not, but
just in general. It's funny because I actually
had an epiphany several years ago, maybe a decade ago at this
point, and it's sort of falling in line with the Tom Cruise's a
weirdo conversation, jumping on couches, yelling at Matt Lauer
about psychiatry, Scientology nonsense.
(08:05):
By the way, that all still holdstrue.
But what I realized is that I don't know that I've ever seen a
bad Tom Cruise movie or a Tom Cruise movie that I didn't least
enjoy or feel entertained. Now I will say I've never
watched Tom Cruises version of The Mummy.
So before the comments start pouring in that he has done bad
movies, The Mummy is one of them.
I haven't seen it. I'm not saying that it is bad,
(08:26):
I've never seen it. Maybe I should do it.
We'll find out, but either way, that was the that was the one
that I think of that people go that was a bad movie.
Anyway, let's get to the movie in hand.
So right off the RIP, they're trying to fill us in on the plot
line from the previous movie with like these dreamlike voice
overs. And this isn't going to be a
consistent thing throughout the movie.
Not the dreamlike voice overs, but the filling us in on the
(08:48):
plot. We get a lot of flashbacks to
the previous movie to help people understand the plot, but
then we also get a ton of flashbacks to older movies in
the series. So there's a lot, I mean a lot
of flashbacks to the point of interaction.
At times they even flashback to moments in this movie that
haven't been seen, which is alsodisorienting because you're
like, wait, is this is this now?This story was so conceptual
(09:09):
that it required a ton of exposition, but Even so, they
probably overdid it a bit. That being said, they were also
hurrying it along because of theexhaustive runtime.
And yet they had no problem withstaying on some scenes that
didn't advance plot for a long time.
I would say that they weren't economical with their
filmmaking. Now that all makes it sound like
I didn't like it. I definitely did.
The movie puts in a a lot of effort to entertain you for
(09:31):
nearly three hours, and it does an excellent job of that.
I never felt like I had been there too long, which is pretty
awesome when you consider it wasnearly three hours.
There's another aspect of the movie that I found overly
convoluted and and unnecessary, and that is that they tried to
wrap everything around Ethan Hunt.
They definitely made him larger than life within his own
universe, and they just kept raising the stakes and
explaining the stakes ad nauseam.
(09:52):
And the stakes were all Ethan's fault and on Ethan's shoulders.
I mean, we get lines like everything you've done,
everything you want has come to this.
It's like, OK, slow your roll a little bit here.
And we don't get these lines just once.
We get them throughout and oftenstill though, there are some fun
surprises and unexpected appearances and and the tension
they build is fantastic. It's no doubt an edge of your
(10:15):
seat movie and the action scenesand stunts will not let you down
from what you've come to expect from these series of movies.
Before we go to the rank, I justwant to share this silly thing.
I overheard a family talking about the movie in front of me.
It was just like I'm leaving thetheater there in front of me and
I overhear them talking about it.
And the woman, presumably reallythe wife and mother was talking
(10:36):
about the plane scene and sayinghow you know, he's in his 60s
He's crazy. I don't know how he how he can
do it. And the guy, presumably the
father slash husband says, oh, Icould do it.
It sounded pretty earnest. This is a guy, by the way,
probably in his 50s. He's not necessarily in bad
shape or anything, but come on, the pride, the hubris of just
men are stupid. We're dumb animals.
(10:57):
Yes, clearly some more than other.
So anyway, that's it. Let's go to the rank A wank.
So the rank is where I ranked the movie based on 10
categories, Story, acting, originality, action sequences,
film coherence, euro appeal, villain appeal, slash hatred,
supporting characters appeal, the final showdown, and my rank.
So I rank it on a scale of one to five, one being the worst,
(11:19):
five being the best. In the first category is story,
which I gave a 3.25. My main issue with it is it's
overly complicated. They took a simple concept,
which is admittedly probably a little too conceptual and just
decided to make it complicated. Now, Mission Impossible Possible
movies are known to do that, so this is not like a new thing,
but their decision to try to encapsulate all of the previous
(11:40):
movie plots into this one doesn't really do it any
service. Why not just make it its own
thing? You could have still had the
unexpected appearances and surprises without trying to make
every plot from every Mission Impossible fit into this one.
That being said, I did give it a3.25, so I'm not saying it's a
bad story. I just think they overcompeted.
So let's go to acting, which I gave a 3.75.
The acting is really good, but they were asked to deliver some
(12:03):
tough lines on this. Like I mentioned before, so many
stakes, so much exposition. The guy who played Gabriel at
times looked like he was trying to learn ventriloquism.
For some reason. He would keep his teeth girded
together for whole scenes and hewasn't even expressing anger.
I don't know what was with that choice, but whatever.
Plus, the fawning over Ethan wasa lot, which is fine, but it
(12:26):
makes for some tough lines. So let's go to originality,
which I gave a 3 1/2. It's really hard to call this
original. Do you need to have seen the
previous movies to understand what's happening in this one?
Probably not, but that's becausethey painstakingly point out
everything from previous movies keep you up to speed, which
again, didn't need to happen. It's also Part 2 even though
(12:46):
it's not called that anymore, which detracts from the
originality of it. That being said, the originality
being a 3 1/2 and not lower is because of the uniqueness of its
action sequences. It's impressive how unique and
creative they've always been able to to be with the stunt
work, stunt coordination, all that stuff.
Action sequences in these movies.
(13:06):
So that leads us directly to action sequences.
Our next category, which I gave A5.
They always pull out all the stops for these movies and the
action sequences are always insanely impressive.
I thought about giving it like a4.754.85, something like that,
and I just like, you know what it deserves A5 I'm giving them.
So let's go to the next category, which is film
coherence, which I gave a 2 1/2.I don't know that they that I
(13:27):
need to keep beating this horse,but why did they decide to
complicate this story so much? I actually still don't really
know what MI three had to do with this movie MI 3 being
Mission Impossible 3, even though they spent a bunch of
time and flashbacks trying to explain it to me.
I'm trying to avoid spoilers so I'm I'm not going to go super in
depth here, but yeah coherence is its weakest category and it's
(13:49):
because they tried to do too much.
So let's go to hero appeal. I gave hero appeal 4 1/2.
Now at this point Ethan Hunt is iconic and as much as I found it
annoying at times how much they had characters fawning over him
and how everyone seemed to act like he was the only man that
could do anything, I still foundmyself rooting for him.
That being said, the fawning andother stuff like that knocked it
down from A5. So let's go to villain Appeal
(14:11):
Slash Hatred, which I gave a 2 1/2.
So is the villain Gabriel or theEntity?
Either way it's 2 1/2 but the Entity and Gabriel are both
blocked. That's OK though because the
story doesn't need them to be fantastic to be fun and
entertained. So let's go to supporting
characters appeal, which I gave a foreign act.
There are so many supporting characters in this and they're
all enjoyable. I would have liked to maybe
(14:32):
spend more time with Grace, and I missed having more of Benji's
Comic Relief, but I still enjoyed spending time.
So the next category's final showdown, which I gave a 4.75,
not a 5 because it went on too long.
Still fantastic though, just a little too long.
It was actually a dual scene final showdown where the tension
was really high on one side and not as high on the other, but
(14:53):
mostly because I was just staring at the stunt work from
Tommy. 4.75 is a great score, bythe way, it's just not a 5.
So let's go to my rank. I gave it a 3.85.
I really enjoyed it. There are definitely aspects
that I thought could have been done better, but there are
things that I mostly thought about after the movie while I
was in it. I was just playing entertained,
you know, for the most part 3.85I think kind of fits perfectly
(15:15):
there. So that puts the total for
Mission Impossible Final Reckoning at 38, which puts it
in the tier. And watch it again.
This puts it just .1 points above Cliffhanger and .65 points
below Hero and The Expendable 2.Where does it rank with the
other Mission Impossible movies that have already been ranked?
It fell 4 points below the original Mission Impossible from
(15:36):
1996, which is in the Supreme Cinema tier, but it beat Mission
Impossible 2 by 5 1/2 points because that one's in the Myth
the Ogre tier. I will definitely be ranking
Mission Impossible 3, Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and
Fallout at some point so be on the lookout for those and we can
find out which Mission Impossible movie was the best.
So thanks for listening and or watching everyone.
(15:57):
If you'd like to see list of ourrankings up to date, you can do
that on our website at the rank with John and zach.com.
Remember to subscribe, review, comment.
Please consider supporting us onour Patreon site at
patreon.com/the Rank Podcast where you can get exclusive
perks and Auvois. So thanks for listening slash
(16:27):
watching everyone. If you'd like to see a list of
our son of a bitch.
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