‘Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning’ Is Here. How Will We Reckon With It?

Sean and Amanda need you to trust them one last time as they unpack the highly anticipated ‘Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning,’ starring Tom Cruise. Before diving into the film, they briefly recap all of the news headlines from the Cannes Film Festival by highlighting all of the heavy hitters, big surprises, and disappointments (1:05). Then, they unpack their complicated feelings on the newest ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie and discuss its legendary set pieces that might be the greatest of the entire franchise, plus its very deep flaws (19:42). Finally, they update their ‘Mission: Impossible’ rankings to see where this new installment fits among the rest of the series at large (1:21:04). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Producer: Jack Sanders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you're a fan of the inner workings of Hollywood, then check out my podcast, The Town, on the Ringer Podcast Network. My name's Matt Bellini. I'm a founding partner at Puck and the writer of the What I'm Hearing newsletter. And with my show, The Town, I bring you the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. Every week, we've got three short episodes featuring real Hollywood insiders to tell you what people in town are actually talking about. We'll cover everything from why your favorite show was canceled overnight, which streamer is on the brink of collapse, and which executive is on the hot seat. Disney, Netflix, who's up, down, and who will never eat lunch in this town again. Follow The Town on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:38Sean Fennessey?

  This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail-biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with big game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life with great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime. This episode is brought to you by the Autograph Journey Credit Card from Wells Fargo. The Autograph Journey Credit Card from Wells Fargo is built for travel. You can earn rewards wherever you book, your favorite hotel site, your go-to airline, and more. You get five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants, and other travel, and one point on other purchases. Whether it's a big vacation or a quick getaway,

• 1:23Sean Fennessey?

  from booking your stay to that first meal when you arrive, you're turning your trips into rewards with the Autograph Journey Credit Card from Wells Fargo. Learn more at wellsfargo.com/autographjourney. Terms apply.

• 1:44Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessey.

• 1:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 1:46Sean Fennessey?

  And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. And boy, will we reckon with it today on the show. Before we get into Tom Cruise's eighth And maybe final Mission Impossible movie. We gotta talk about Cannes. Cannes Film Festival is happening. It's been happening for the last 10 days. We're not there.

• 2:05Amanda Dobbins?

  We are not.

• 2:06Sean Fennessey?

  We haven't seen any of the films that are playing there. We don't have any insider information. We've been following it along.

• 2:12Amanda Dobbins?

  We went to no parties. We did not witness Jeff Bezos slapping Lauren Sanchez's ass on a yacht.

• 2:19Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, I did see that in the tabloids.

• 2:22Amanda Dobbins?

  That there was, you know what?

• 2:23Sean Fennessey?

  Love is love.

• 2:24Amanda Dobbins?

  It's, it was playful, to be honest. I have many issues with them.

• 2:28Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 2:28Amanda Dobbins?

  But, uh, but that was not one of them.

• 2:31Sean Fennessey?

  They were there for Cannes?

• 2:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, just all the yachts are in town.

• 2:35Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Did he direct any films that are there?

• 2:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Does Amazon get to bring anything to Cannes?

• 2:40Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, they don't. Interesting that you mentioned that. I was just talking about who would and wouldn't go to Cannes in season two, uh, of the studio. On the Prestige TV podcast. Nevertheless, let's talk about the actual Cannes fair because there were a ton of films that played there this week that I think are of significant interest to us, I would guess. Maybe three or four of them will actually matter to us on the show for the next 12 months. You think more?

• 3:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Probably a few more, but you can talk yourself down. It's fine.

• 3:04Sean Fennessey?

  You think more than four movies?

• 3:06Amanda Dobbins?

  You've been like rowing yourself, you know, along on this take of like, it was fine. I don't miss it. Like, okay. Just to bring everyone behind the scenes. Sean, as you all know, went on a golf trip with Chris and with other people I'm related to. And that's, that makes it sound like I'm not really, I'm related to Chris, which I'm not.

• 3:25Sean Fennessey?

  You're a long-lost brother to Jim.

• 3:30Amanda Dobbins?

  And you guys had a lovely trip and it, and the pictures were cute and I'm happy for you guys. But it's, it's, you're on the way back and I'm on day four solo with my kids. My mom came to help. Shout out to my mom. But you know, it was like bedtime. Things were getting tense. And you have the temerity to text me, so far, nothing makes me wish I were at Cannes. And then like emoji, like shrug emoji, cute girl shrug emoji.

• 4:00Amanda Dobbins?

  And I literally, I just texted you back. I was like, I'm not receptive to this right now.

• 4:04Sean Fennessey?

  Who's doing it better than me? Honestly, when you look back on your life and you see the way that I live, is anyone doing it better than me? I haven't missed being a can. There are a few films there that I'm excited about. And that I hope to see soon.

• 4:15Amanda Dobbins?

  It's because you wanted your nipples out on the red carpet and that wasn't going to be possible.

• 4:19Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't, unfortunately. That's not something I would have pursued. But um, I wasn't really following the red carpet very closely because I was golfing. But I was looking at a lot of capsule reviews of these films. So I've organized the films into a series of categories that I've completely made up.

• 4:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Sean Fennessey?

  Do you want to hear about them?

• 4:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, yes.

• 4:35Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. The first category is the heavyweights. These are the films that were met with great anticipation. This is not necessarily a qualitative judgment on these movies, but I'll just start with Nouvelle Vague. This is arguably the signature film of the festival in part because it is a film about French cinema. Made by an American. It's Richard Linklater's new movie.

• 4:55Amanda Dobbins?

  I was like, I was already like, hey, you're missing one, but you've put that in a different category.

• 4:58Sean Fennessey?

  I have. Um, I'm not saying it is the, the, the most important or the best movie, but because it is a movie about the making of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, um, starring uh, Guillaume Marbec as Godard and Zoe Deutsch as Jean Seberg. The movie got very, very good reviews. Um, I guess not surprising relative to what we know about Richard Linklater, but every once in a while. He'll miss.

• 5:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, he tries something and you respect the effort and are also like, hmm.

• 5:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 5:26Amanda Dobbins?

  That had a lot of Jack Black in it.

• 5:28Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't say that. Um, that does not seem to be the, the case on Nouvelle Vague. Uh, it was met very warmly and particularly Guillaume Marbec's performance apparently is quite good. He looks strikingly like Godard. Uh, we will see. This movie still has no distribution. I'm quite curious to see who picks it up. I'm also quite curious to see if it is anything more than a cineous

• 5:50Sean Fennessey?

  object of affection.

• 5:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you mean that in the award sense? Or the box office sense?

• 5:54Sean Fennessey?

  Everything, kind of like, will this be a widely seen film or will it be significantly smaller? It doesn't really matter to us because we'll probably enjoy it either way, but for the sake of this podcast, it does matter in some respects. The, one of the noisiest movies at the festival is Die My Love, which we have been talking about quite a bit. This is Lynn Ramsey's new movie, her first movie, I believe, in seven years. It is a postpartum psychological drama starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson.

• 6:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Welcome.

• 6:20Sean Fennessey?

  AKA the Amanda Dobbins story. And it got mostly positive reviews, but a kind of mix.

• 6:28Amanda Dobbins?

  It's like Jennifer Lawrence is lights out, um, as, as she always is. And it is about her, so that doesn't, I don't mean to diminish the wonderful Robert Pattinson, who is also apparently like quite good.

• 6:40Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, and then parts of it are really amazing, but it is, I don't even, I don't know if it seems like a tough hang, but it's just, it, it is about a tough time in someone's life. So I don't know if like, it's all just joy and wonder.

• 6:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I, I wouldn't really describe the cinema of Lynn Ramsey as Barbie-esque. You know, this, these are not like fun romps historically, so it's not surprising that I think it's kind of a tough sit. There have been a handful of films at the festival that are a tough sit, but you're right, Lawrence has gotten rave reviews across the board.

• 7:11Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean.

• 7:12Sean Fennessey?

  Seems like she's an Oscar contender already. Um, and I think is becoming increasingly respected, which is weird to say for somebody who won an Academy Award at like 25 years old.

• 7:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Is she becoming increasingly respected by you?

• 7:21Sean Fennessey?

  By, I mean, the answer is yes.

• 7:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Sean Fennessey?

  The answer frankly is yes.

• 7:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 7:24Sean Fennessey?

  Um, Mubi acquired this movie for $23 million. I believe that's a record for Mubi in terms of acquisition. And the thing that I said after the Academy Awards was here comes Mubi. They, they are really getting, making this, they're making it a three horse race with A24 Neon.

• 7:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Buying or distributing a lot of things at Cannes, because obviously they got the substance at Cannes last year.

• 7:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 7:43Amanda Dobbins?

  And are running with it.

• 7:44Sean Fennessey?

  And they recently were capitalized.

• 7:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 7:47Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, pretty significantly in recent weeks. And their founder, I believe, was on the cover of Variety, was it Variety or Hollywood Reporter, can't recall.

• 7:53Amanda Dobbins?

  I read about it in what I'm hearing, Matt Bellini's newsletter. Yeah, so, you know.

• 7:58Sean Fennessey?

  So Die My Love, look for that later this year. Another film that's getting huge rave reviews and was recently acquired by Neon, which is a big sign that perhaps this film will win the Palme d'Or is A Simple Accident that is also known as It Was Just An Accident. This is the new film from the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Uh, it's a thriller like his last couple of movies. It was made illegally without licenses from the Iranian government. Panahi is a very transgressive filmmaker when it comes to the expectations of Iran and also widely celebrated. This film seems like perhaps it is.

• 8:35Sean Fennessey?

  Accessible is not the right word, but maybe a little easier to latch on to, say, The No Bears, the movie that he made a few years ago that came out that was also very celebrated but felt very arthouse. And I think there's an expectation, especially with Neon jumping on, that they're gonna try to put this in front of as many people as possible. It's definitely a leading contender for the Palm. If it wins the Palm, you can expect to hear about it, yeah, for a really long time here. The next film is highest to lowest.

• 9:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 9:01Sean Fennessey?

  I got a little nervous because the first review I saw of it was very negative. And I was like, oh, no.

• 9:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Everyone seems to have a great time.

• 9:07Sean Fennessey?

  And then everybody else seemed to really enjoy it, which is new Spike Lee movie, Denzel Washington, remake of the Karasawa film, High and Low. In this film, Denzel Washington is a high-powered record executive who becomes ensnared in a criminal situation. And that's all I really wanted to know about it at this point. Apple is distributing.

• 9:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Sean Fennessey?

  And it's out August 22nd, pretty soon.

• 9:26Amanda Dobbins?

  As of now, maybe they'll change that.

• 9:27Sean Fennessey?

  I hope they put it in theaters for a little longer.

• 9:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Denzel got a surprise honorary Palm door.

• 9:33Sean Fennessey?

  He did.

• 9:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I think that feels a little made up, and you gotta respect Denzel and give him a real award. But that's just me.

• 9:39Sean Fennessey?

  What would the real award have been? Because the film's not in competition, so you can't give him Best Actor, right? Because normally, you'd just be like, put that movie in competition, give him Best Actor, and then Denzel has his can moment. They didn't do that. Did they not do it because, and is it not in competition because they weren't sure if he was gonna go?

• 9:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Perhaps.

• 9:54Sean Fennessey?

  That seemed to be the issue.

• 9:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. And so then they just, like, made a Palm door out of construction paper?

• 9:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 10:00Amanda Dobbins?

  And presented it to him?

• 10:01Sean Fennessey?

  Or is it because Apple is the distribution company and they don't like the streamers?

• 10:07Amanda Dobbins?

  And they aren't allowed to be in competition. Oh, interesting.

• 10:09Sean Fennessey?

  You know, the famous no Netflix can situation.

• 10:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. I don't know. ASAP Rocky and Rihanna were there?

• 10:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, they were.

• 10:16Amanda Dobbins?

  And attending events. And they looked great.

• 10:19Sean Fennessey?

  ASAP Rocky, innocent?

• 10:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 10:22Sean Fennessey?

  Rihanna, pregnant?

• 10:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Again, yes.

• 10:24Sean Fennessey?

  Um.

• 10:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Announced at the Met Gala.

• 10:26Sean Fennessey?

  They're hot.

• 10:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, they seem really into each other.

• 10:29Sean Fennessey?

  I've always liked Rocky. I have always been a fan of his music. And it would be fascinating if he was able to pivot in his midlife to being... Rihanna's baby daddy and the movie star.

• 10:42Amanda Dobbins?

  That would be, that would be a real like circle the square version of life. I'm really open to it.

• 10:46Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I am too. The last big heavyweight, which is not to say that there weren't other notable films, but some other notable films will slide into other categories. I think it's Eddington, which is, I would say was received about the way that I expected. This is the new movie from Ari Aster, which is a, an angsty quote unquote accurate portrayal of American madness in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• 11:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Great.

• 11:09Sean Fennessey?

  Stars, uh, Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone.

• 11:14Sean Fennessey?

  And people were like, this movie really pissed me off and I found it kind of annoying and it's too soon to be shown something like this. Of course, for myself, Bo is afraid fan that I am, I say bring it on.

• 11:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Pedro Pascal and Austin Butler are also in this movie. And so red carpet just lights out for everyone involved.

• 11:33Sean Fennessey?

  They looked good.

• 11:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Rooney Mara was also there with her husband, Joaquin Phoenix. They looked great. Yeah, everybody did a good job. Photocall, yes. Red carpet, yes. Emma Stone got stung by a bee, but they can't keep her down.

• 11:45Sean Fennessey?

  Is that a fact?

• 11:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh yeah, the footage, it's very, it's very good.

• 11:48Sean Fennessey?

  She was stung by a bee on the red carpet?

• 11:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and she does like a, a full like Emma Stone cartoon like reaction and then like keeps posing. It's very good stuff. She's a treasure.

• 11:57Sean Fennessey?

  You know how I stand, feel about her.

• 11:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 11:58Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay, next category, the big bumps. Now, you and I, worst person in the world, super fans that we are, had, had expectations of sentimental value.

• 12:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 12:08Sean Fennessey?

  This is the new Joaquin Trier film, his follow up to that 2022 movie, which is so wonderful, a reunion with Renata Renzvi. Stone, Scars, Gardner, Fanning are also in this movie. And the reviews of this movie are rapturous.

• 12:19Amanda Dobbins?

  They are.

• 12:20Sean Fennessey?

  So.

• 12:21Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, the standing ovation meter means nothing, but this was reported as 19 minutes, which is just really long.

• 12:29Sean Fennessey?

  That's really long.

• 12:29Amanda Dobbins?

  That's like, really long.

• 12:31Sean Fennessey?

  That's like the length of the finale of the studio.

• 12:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I really appreciate, so Kristen Stewart debuted a film at Cannes that she directed.

• 12:38Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:39Amanda Dobbins?

  And so the camera on her while she's getting her standing ovation and she just looks, it's so like, what am I supposed to do right now in a way that I thought, I already love Kristen Stewart, but I was like, what, what do you do for 19 minutes?

• 12:51Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think we should be doing pods in front of live audiences and then getting honest standing ovation reactions?

• 12:58Amanda Dobbins?

  They don't do, they don't do standing ovations at Telluride.

• 13:01Sean Fennessey?

  Um, not in the clocked sense.

• 13:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, cuz at Venice that they do and it's.

• 13:08Sean Fennessey?

  It's a lot of older people maybe don't wanna stand that long.

• 13:11Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I would think so as well. The other thing is that it's not like, you know, at the opera or the ballet or something where these people are up like on some stage far away from you and they're just like in the middle of the movie theater and everyone's just kinda like checking their phone and then also like half applauding. It's ve- it's very strange and 19 minutes is very long.

• 13:32Sean Fennessey?

  It is one of the silliest of all of the film festival vagaries and I don't really care how long it is, that being said. Sentimental value's like 2X the length of any other movie that played this week at the festival, so that's notable. This film is an interesting one. It splits the two halves of the big players at this festival. Neon is distributing the movie in the US. Mubi has it in Europe and elsewhere.

• 13:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, we'll see.

• 13:57Sean Fennessey?

  We'll see. I'm very, very excited to see that film.

• 13:59Amanda Dobbins?

  So am I.

• 14:00Sean Fennessey?

  The Secret Agent is another one that is notable, which we also earmarked when we talked about the preview. Uh, this is Claver Mendoca Filo's new film, uh, set in 1977 Brazil. It's a thriller. It stars Wagner Mora. Um, Neon just acquired it. They're working really hard right now. Um.

• 14:18Amanda Dobbins?

  This is their time, you know?

• 14:19Sean Fennessey?

  It is. I've heard this film described as like a more propulsive companion to I'm Still Here, the film from last year.

• 14:28Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm into it.

• 14:29Sean Fennessey?

  Which sounds interesting, obviously set in a very similar time in history in that country. So, looking forward to that. And then The Mastermind, I believe, is premiering today, right? This is the new Kelly Reichert film, um, which Mubi is also distributing, an art heist thriller set against the events of the Vietnam War. They posted a clip of that film of Josh O'Connor stealing something from a museum.

• 14:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Sean Fennessey?

  In a very subtle way to a jazz score.

• 14:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Sean Fennessey?

  I was very interested.

• 14:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I'm really excited.

• 14:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's very, uh, I would say it's very big picture coded, that film. Okay, The Underwhelmers.

• 15:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, people are just very rude to Julia DuCorno.

• 15:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Julia DuCorno returns not so triumphantly to the Cannes Film Festival with Alpha.

• 15:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:12Sean Fennessey?

  This is, uh, her first film since Tatan. Neon is also distributing this movie. This movie's getting dunked on.

• 15:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I heard the phrase "by far her worst movie" uttered a few times about this, which only made three films.

• 15:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Where? Where did you hear that?

• 15:25Sean Fennessey?

  Ju- just on the internet.

• 15:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 15:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I heard it with my eyes.

• 15:31Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't speak to anyone who was there, but you know, I'll occasionally get a missive from a journalist or critic.

• 15:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 15:36Sean Fennessey?

  You know me, I'm sort of connected.

• 15:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. I just, I wanted to clarify that at no point were you on the Quasette?

• 15:43Sean Fennessey?

  I was not.

• 15:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Or anywhere in the south of France.

• 15:44Sean Fennessey?

  Julia Duquorno called me and she said, this is by far my worst film. And I was like, wow, that's an odd thing for you to share with me. We don't even know each other. The History of Sound also premiered yesterday.

• 15:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Sean Fennessey?

  This is Oliver Hermanis's period romance about two men falling in love secretly. Movie also distributing this film.

• 16:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 16:02Sean Fennessey?

  It stars also Josh O'Connor and Paul Meskell. Reviews were pretty eh.

• 16:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I think that the people who want to see Josh O'Connor and Paul Meskell fall in love.

• 16:12Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Will not care.

• 16:13Sean Fennessey?

  Seems like maybe not as much fucking. That seemed to be some of the concerns.

• 16:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 16:17Sean Fennessey?

  Like this is, feels oftly stayed and sort of restrained.

• 16:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Well, you know, that's, I didn't make up how things were in 1811 or whatever.

• 16:27Sean Fennessey?

  Is that when the film takes place? It takes place in the year 37.

• 16:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 16:32Sean Fennessey?

  AD.

• 16:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I think there was more fucking back then, just across the board.

• 16:35Sean Fennessey?

  Very good point. You know, Phoenician Scheme.

• 16:37Amanda Dobbins?

  I saw Megalopolis.

• 16:40Sean Fennessey?

  Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme, which I've seen.

• 16:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Sean Fennessey?

  Got mixed reviews.

• 16:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't care. I don't care what anyone but me thinks. And then also.

• 16:49Sean Fennessey?

  No kidding.

• 16:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Also, Mutia Prada hosted a screening of The Phoenician Scheme at the Prada Foundation in Milan. So I care what I think and what Mutia thinks.

• 17:00Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 17:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Mrs. Prada.

• 17:00Sean Fennessey?

  That's a very weird.

• 17:02Amanda Dobbins?

  For pretending I'm on a first name basis.

• 17:04Sean Fennessey?

  Your personal Venn diagram makes no sense, but that's fine. I have seen the film. It's very, very good. So.

• 17:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 17:08Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not too worried about it.

• 17:09Amanda Dobbins?

  There are also, no one like got Asteroid City. Even like when we were like, this is revelatory and the best movie ever. And then we didn't put it on our top 10 list.

• 17:18Sean Fennessey?

  I would describe The Phoenician Scheme as very different from Asteroid City in terms of its intentions and in terms of its scope, but that, you know, that's all very purposeful. And I think maybe that like the pullback and the tight focus on a small number of characters may throw, be throwing people for a loop because he has been so expansive in the last two or three movies that he's made. The new Darden movie also kind of arrived quietly. Young Mothers. It's actually been a few years since they've had a big breakout at Cannes. But let's talk about breakouts. Handful of quick titles. We haven't seen these movies. We're not going to pretend to know what they're all about. Most of them are from filmmakers we haven't seen films from before, but Sound of Falling was probably the first big breakout. This is Masha Shalinsky's temporal exploration of four girls from different time periods experiencing their youth on a German farm.

• 18:02Sean Fennessey?

  And then those time periods sort of blend together in interesting ways. This movie was very, very, very well received and MUBI also acquired this one. We've said MUBI 300 times on this podcast already.

• 18:13Amanda Dobbins?

  They're showing up.

• 18:14Sean Fennessey?

  They're really in the mix. A lot of strong reviews for The Little Sister, which is Hafshia Hery's new film, particularly the performance of Nadia Maliti. It's a French-Algerian coming-of-age story about a young woman realizing who she is in the world. Serat has been divisive, but has gotten some very strong reviews from Spanish filmmaker Oliver Lacks. It's about a father and a son trekking into the Moroccan desert to retrieve their daughter, who apparently is getting involved in some desert raves and some hard drugs.

• 18:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 18:50Sean Fennessey?

  And then there's been, you know, you mentioned Kristen Stewart's The Chronology of Water. That premiered in a certain regard. Your boy, Harris Dickinson.

• 18:58Amanda Dobbins?

  If only he were my boy. It's apparently good, Urchin.

• 19:03Sean Fennessey?

  Urchin got very strong reviews, his directorial debut. Pillion, Harry Lighton's BDSM drama starring Alexander Skarsgård feels very in your zone.

• 19:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you see any of his red carpet looks?

• 19:15Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't.

• 19:15Amanda Dobbins?

  He's going for it. He was wearing thigh-high, I believe they were YSL, or Salem Rock, leather boots with his tux.

• 19:22Sean Fennessey?

  Nice.

• 19:23Amanda Dobbins?

  What a gig.

• 19:24Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. And then Eleanor the Great, not as great reviews.

• 19:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 19:28Sean Fennessey?

  For Scarlett Johansson's directorial debut, which is starring June Squibb.

• 19:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I like June Squibb.

• 19:34Sean Fennessey?

  As do I. Of all of the movies that we've talked about.

• 19:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Sean Fennessey?

  Anything that you're like, I need this in my eyeballs right now?

• 19:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Sentimental value and highest to lowest.

• 19:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Amanda Dobbins?

  That's, that's where I am.

• 19:46Sean Fennessey?

  Not much has changed. So this, to my, my point is.

• 19:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I also need the Phoenician scheme.

• 19:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Well, that'll be, I mean, the movie, that movie's out in a week.

• 19:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I know. I know. Um, we have it on the calendar to go see it.

• 19:57Sean Fennessey?

  We do.

• 19:57Amanda Dobbins?

  I want to see New Valvag.

• 19:59Sean Fennessey?

  I do too. I'm very excited about that. Uh, the other film that.

• 20:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Mastermind. Yeah, I'm excited.

• 20:04Sean Fennessey?

  Good stuff. Yeah, there's good stuff.

• 20:05Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm, I'm open to the experience of Eddington also.

• 20:08Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I should hope so. Um, with the exception of sentimental value though, I would not say that there's a film that has premiered there that people have been like, wow. This is, this has really changed the way I see cinema.

• 20:18Amanda Dobbins?

  But last year, many of the people who attended Cannes were like, wow, I saw Amelia Perez. So.

• 20:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's a very good point. Should, should we be suspicious of sentimental value? I don't know.

• 20:30Amanda Dobbins?

  No, it can be the Enora, you know?

• 20:32Sean Fennessey?

  It can be. It certainly feels like the Enora and in some ways has some similarities. All right. Enough throw a clearing on this episode. Let's talk about Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning.

• 20:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. You've seen it once.

• 20:43Sean Fennessey?

  I've seen it once. You've just returned from the second screening.

• 20:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I have seen it twice.

• 20:46Sean Fennessey?

  I wanted to see it a second time. We made plans with Jack Sanders to see it a second time and then I lost power in my home and I could not leave my home.

• 20:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I also wanted to reflect on the circumstances in which you saw the, the film.

• 20:58Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 20:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Which was, um, in the afterglow of a Knicks win that you watched on PlayCast on your phone very tensely in the front row of the IMAX theater.

• 21:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 21:09Amanda Dobbins?

  And it, the game concluded right as the movie started. So you're as high a high as you could be.

• 21:15Sean Fennessey?

  This was, this was game four of the Knicks Celtics series.

• 21:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 21:18Sean Fennessey?

  A game that I did not think that they would win and that they won in incredibly dramatic comeback fashion.

• 21:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And we are recording this, uh, Thursday evening, one day after maybe one of the lowest lows in, in Knicks. I'm not an expert on Knicks history, but I did watch the last shot and then that overtime and that was excruciating.

• 21:38Sean Fennessey?

  It was one of the single worst sports experiences of my life. I've been appearing on many sports podcasts on the Ringer Podcast Network. What is happening with the Knicks broadly has been very exciting for me. What happened yesterday. Genuinely sucked out my soul. I felt really, really bad.

• 21:53Amanda Dobbins?

  So I would just say that you have some complicated associations with this film.

• 21:58Sean Fennessey?

  I do.

• 21:59Amanda Dobbins?

  And your, and your emotions and then the state that you're in when you're receiving Mission Impossible.

• 22:05Sean Fennessey?

  And I'll, you know, we've talked about Mission quite a bit recently because we had Fallout on our 25 for 25 list. We just did the Tom Cruise movie draft where Mission Impossible was a category. You and I are huge fans of this series and it's a, it's honestly a big part of the show. And so this movie was very, very high on my anticipation list, which makes it a little bit of a challenge. I was just chatting with Jack before we started recording. The early word on the film was not super positive. And so I think that that has lowered the expectations of a lot of people who went in. But when I saw it and when you saw it.

• 22:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Sean Fennessey?

  We were like, could this be the movie of the year?

• 22:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 22:37Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. We hadn't seen a single review. And.

• 22:41Amanda Dobbins?

  It's not the movie of the year.

• 22:42Sean Fennessey?

  It's not the movie of the year. I'll put, provide a few data points and then we'll get into our feelings about it. So it's, it is directed by Christopher McQuarrie. This is his fourth feature as Mission Impossible director. It's co-written with Eric Gendresen. Of course it stars Tom Cruise, Haley Atwell's back, Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg are there. Henry Cherney and Angela Bassett are here, along with a rogues gallery of that guys and those gals and very notable performers.

• 23:07Amanda Dobbins?

  And a couple of scene stealers.

• 23:09Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely. And we will talk about the, the good works of Terrell Tillman very soon.

• 23:14Sean Fennessey?

  So, you know. He was wonderful in this movie. We'll talk about him. The major crew from Dead Reckoning is returning to this movie. This is of course a sequel, the DP Fraser Taggart and the editor Eddie Hamilton, who's edited a bunch of these movies. Production designer Gary Freeman. Notably, the composer Lorne Balf did not work on this movie. And I will say, within the first five minutes, minutes, I noticed because it is a different vibe and Balf's, what Balf kind of figured out, I think with McQuarrie. Played a part in my appreciation of the films that they've done together. So, you know, the story is, it picks up more or less where the previous film left off.

• 23:51Amanda Dobbins?

  More or less. More or less, about three to four months later.

• 23:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 23:56Amanda Dobbins?

  It would seem.

• 23:57Sean Fennessey?

  When we last saw Ethan Hunt, he was on a, what's that thing called? The, the, the what wing? The jet wing? The bi wing? The fly wing? That thing he jumps out of and the, like, that sort of parachute?

• 24:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, right, like a...

• 24:12Sean Fennessey?

  Out of the train?

• 24:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, oh, sure.

• 24:14Sean Fennessey?

  He was sort of escaping. He had retained the one half of the chrysaform key.

• 24:19Amanda Dobbins?

  So I don't know.

• 24:19Sean Fennessey?

  No, they don't. He had, for the moment, defeated Gabriel, Isai Morales's character, who was trying to get the key, which would then unlock access to control of the entity, the AI superpower that was sort of buried in a submarine at the bottom of which sea?

• 24:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Bering.

• 24:38Sean Fennessey?

  The Bering Sea.

• 24:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Though I don't know if they know that at the end.

• 24:41Sean Fennessey?

  At the time, they did not know where it is.

• 24:43Amanda Dobbins?

  They just know that the keys were found in frozen ice.

• 24:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And so this film is all about how Ethan Hunt is the only man that can retain the other half of the key,

• 24:57Sean Fennessey?

  get to the bottom of the submarine, unlock it, grab control somehow of the entity, and save the world from true nuclear holocaust.

• 25:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:09Sean Fennessey?

  That's the whole, that's the whole thing.

• 25:11Amanda Dobbins?

  That's it.

• 25:13Sean Fennessey?

  Now, obviously interspersed in this, there are fantastical set pieces. There is tremendous amount of self-serious Tom Cruise dialogue. And, and then there are some other things. So with all that thorough clearing, what did you think of Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning?

• 25:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Two hours of throat clearing, thirty-five minutes of exhilaration. And it's a real shame that they had to split the two movies up. You know, for it's very, very clear now that they had a story arc for and a villain and a beginning, middle and end for one movie.

• 25:54Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:54Amanda Dobbins?

  And then life happens, especially when you're jumping out of planes all the time. It got split into two. And so they find themselves at a real disadvantage. They've essentially, they've written themselves into a corner and have to set up a whole new set of stakes in the second movie that are preposterous, that take too much time. And I say that preposterous even in the context of a Mission Impossible film, which is supposed to be preposterous, but these are like, I mean, there's just like a lot of nuclear codes talk in this in a way that isn't fun. And so by the time you get to, I'd like a truly stunning set piece.

• 26:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I've seen it twice. It's the biplane, you guys. You've seen the trailer, you know, but like I cannot, like Jack, am I wrong?

• 26:47Sean Fennessey?

  You are not wrong at all.

• 26:48Amanda Dobbins?

  I was like, what is going on? Sean, you said to me yesterday that you don't want to see the making of the feature of that because you just want it to be magic. And I think I agree, but I am also like, like, how, what? How did they do it? So it's in like, it's and it's beautiful, by the way. They filmed it, you know, somewhere in South Africa that is very beautiful. And it's like the red plane, the yellow plane, it's soaring, like great stuff. I just had to sit through two and a half, two hours and fifteen minutes of like not super rewarding content to get to it.

• 27:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we're more or less on the same page. I think this film in particular features arguably the highest highs of the franchise. And pretty clearly the lowest lows. The first hour of the movie, I found. Really, really unfortunate. There were a couple of choices that were made that you could tell in the first film, obviously reintroducing the Kittredge character in Dead Reckoning.

• 27:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 27:48Sean Fennessey?

  That we were, there was going to be a focus on entirety of this franchise, the history of the Ethan Hunt character.

• 27:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 27:54Sean Fennessey?

  You know, it's not that they haven't done that previously. Julia pops up in Fallout after, you know, moving on from Ethan's life. So, you know, keeping the ball rolling on characters who mattered in previous films is not entirely new, but you could sense that they were trying to sync up 30 years of this franchise together. In this film, in the first hour, it's not just that characters are coming back who we'd previously seen, it's that we're seeing sequences from those older films interspersed, intercut in a kind of frenetic fashion that reminded me of almost, it felt almost at times like it was an hour-long version of the now very familiar Mission Impossible title sequence.

• 28:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 28:36Sean Fennessey?

  You know, which is, is a cool thing that, that I think Macquarie in particular has done where he shows you events that are coming in the movie during the, the credits. But this movie, while it's trying to move the plot forward, for example, there's a prison break sequence early in the movie, which is also a callback to something that happens in an earlier Mission Impossible movie. And there's a series of these callbacks all throughout the film. But after this prison break sequence, which is pretty cool, it's kind of a, like a, there's a mask ripoff.

• 29:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and there's like a moment of humor when Cruz is like trying to, you know, handle the standoff, like it's not, it's not not funny. It's not the best opening set piece or the best set piece in the franchise history, but it's not bad.

• 29:14Sean Fennessey?

  But it's kind of familiar territory in a good way. You're like, yeah, we're back with our friends. And that to me is like the last time that the film is having any fun.

• 29:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, so I, I remembered that as well. And so I looked at my watch this time and that happens within the first 15 minutes.

• 29:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 29:33Amanda Dobbins?

  And then the next action sequence, you know, give or take some, some fighting.

• 29:38Sean Fennessey?

  Some hand to hand.

• 29:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Some hand to hand, where even that is like, there's a choice for a lot of it to be shown off screen that's like a little funny, but there's not that much action.

• 29:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, the next action sequence is 70 minutes into the movie.

• 29:53Sean Fennessey?

  That's a long way to go. And that first hour is extremely challenging, in my opinion, in part because there was a whole other movie that came before this movie that introduced to us the stakes. So I genuinely don't know whether or not that idea of showing us, reminding us of everything that had happened in the previous film, and then also, you know, front-loading that with the history of the franchise in that first hour was a studio note or something specifically that Macquarie and Cruz wanted to do or felt was necessary? But it felt to me like watching a clip show of a sitcom, you know, when they would be like, ah, well, we didn't have time to make one for episode 22 this year, so it's near the end of the season and we'll have one character come out and start looking at a yearbook, and then they'll remind you of all the great moments you had with this show

• 30:36Sean Fennessey?

  over the years, which is just not cinematic. It's the opposite of what these movies are supposed to be.

• 30:41Amanda Dobbins?

  It really doesn't work. To me, to me, it did feel like filler in the sense of they have a second act and they have, which is the submarine.

• 30:50Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:51Amanda Dobbins?

  And they have a third act, which is convoluted, but like leads to the biplane.

• 30:56Sean Fennessey?

  The chase to get Gabriel.

• 30:58Amanda Dobbins?

  But basically, the movie, the part one, or Dead Reckoning.

• 31:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 31:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Sorry.

• 31:04Sean Fennessey?

  Not part one, how dare you.

• 31:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, excuse me, I really, Mr. Cruz, I apologize. Um, Dead Reckoning ends with, like, almost like with a shot of the submarine underwater in a way that I've, I was, I don't love submarine sequences, so, and like underwater things. So I was like, oh, God, the next one's gonna be all about. But, so if, if the next, if you only have like two acts in your, like, story-wise, you gotta figure out something to do if you have to make a whole other movie, I, not great choices.

• 31:37Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not gonna tell this movie what it should be, but it's two hours and 49 minutes.

• 31:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 31:43Sean Fennessey?

  The previous film was a little bit shorter than that. These are by far the longest Mission Impossible movies. Why did the first act need to be 70 minutes and then the second act needed to be 70? You know what I'm saying? Like, there was something in the design of the story. And I don't know if that it's because the production was complicated and it keeps kept getting expanded or more characters were getting added.

• 32:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I think we do understand that they they do the stunts first and

• 32:09Sean Fennessey?

  They build around that.

• 32:10Amanda Dobbins?

  They build around and they write like, you know, things on set. And so my husband did a piece with Macquarie for GQ. It's a great piece about how these things get made. And there's a lot of good Fallout stuff in there. I mean, I'm biased, but whatever. And but there is one scene where it's like, they're just, they pull up like a reaction trove of just like Tom Cruise, like doing reactions in front of the mission screen. And they're like, no, we need something else. And it's just they have like hours of Tom just filming his face in different ways so that they have the range of options. Now, like, that is what movie stars do, and that is how franchises get made. And that is, you know, smart.

• 32:48Amanda Dobbins?

  But it also does speak to the fact that they're they are sometimes searching for the the images or the plot pieces that will will help smooth the thing together after the fact.

• 33:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I recently made reference to something that Macquarie wrote about Close Encounters on the rewatchables last week. And I had him on this show back in 2018 for Fallout. I've read a lot of interviews with him over the years, including Zach's.

• 33:18Sean Fennessey?

  I think I think of him really as like a samurai of movie construction. I think he's incredibly good at understanding great classical adventure films. That's like, that's his thing. You know, he's like, he knows how he like, has really admiration for like The Magnificent Seven and Bridge on the River Kwai and films like that that are in the mold of the Tom Cruise hero vehicles. And this movie just feels like it breaks so many of his rules, you know, especially in the first hour where he and I'm I genuinely was surprised and disappointed. And I can say on the flip side of that. The second act submarine sequence, which I definitely liked more than you did, and we can talk about it in some more detail. And then that biplane sequence that you're citing is as jaw dropping and as like worth your money as anything you'll see in a movie this year.

• 34:02Sean Fennessey?

  Like, it is spectacular what they accomplish. And you can almost sort of forgive them writing the movie around those events, but not totally.

• 34:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's just, I found myself losing focus a few times when they were, you know, when they're, when they're doing all the nonsense exposition, there still is that a little bit of like in-joke-iness. And there are several like, so like, that's the plan? Like, wait, you're telling me that this is the plan? And they're like, kind of know, but it's never as funny as in Fallout when like Henry Cavill's like, what is it like, "Hope is a plan"?

• 34:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Amanda Dobbins?

  You must be new here.

• 34:41Sean Fennessey?

  You must be new here.

• 34:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 34:44Amanda Dobbins?

  But, but then even some of the, filler is the only word that I can use for it, where like I, and they're cutting between like people hitting each other in different circumstances. And I was just kind of like, oh, okay, this feels real shaggy. I still wish, like, it just is so clear to me it was one movie, you know? And it like, could have been a like tightly McQuarrie structured movie, or maybe not tightly, but at least more of the shit we like.

• 35:10Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's ultimately a five and a half hour movie.

• 35:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 35:13Sean Fennessey?

  And in that way, it kind of makes it feel a little bit more like episodic TV with the biggest budget of all time.

• 35:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 35:19Sean Fennessey?

  And it's just the drag. It doesn't mean that there's not, it's not worth seeing. It doesn't mean that it's not significantly better than most action movies. It's just that the bar for this franchise is very high, and it does not meet the bar.

• 35:32Amanda Dobbins?

  No. It's, it is still fun. I, I saw it with like, a paying crowd as opposed to this, the press screening. And people were hooting and hollering and laughing at the jokes and some of the absurdity and the things that are played a little bit for laughs, they were more willing to give into than the critics. So, I had a good time. It's fun. If you're gonna go see it, go see it on the biggest screen possible.

• 35:54Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely. It is worth seeing in the IMAX format.

• 35:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but it's, I have a lot of nitpicks. I know this isn't the rewatchables, but I just, I have some questions I would like answered.

• 36:05Sean Fennessey?

  I do as well. I mean, I think the set pieces are the things that are easy to say, this is what makes this movie special. There are a handful of moments.

• 36:17Sean Fennessey?

  Particularly, the biggest gasp that the movie got out of me was the transition from the aircraft carrier to the helicopter to jumping into the

• 36:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 36:25Sean Fennessey?

  Bering Sea.

• 36:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 36:27Sean Fennessey?

  Which comes in the second act of the movie after Cruz's character convinces the President of the United States.

• 36:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Angela Bassett.

• 36:35Sean Fennessey?

  Angela Bassett.

• 36:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Congratulations, Madam President.

• 36:38Sean Fennessey?

  Who was formerly the Director of the CIA, which I guess George H. W. Bush was as well, but I was like, in 2025, would the Director of the CIA be the President? I'm not sure if I could see that, but maybe I'm wrong.

• 36:47Amanda Dobbins?

  The aircraft carrier was the George H. W. Bush that he, that he commandeered.

• 36:51Sean Fennessey?

  I just think that there's a little bit more skepticism of those institutions.

• 36:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I completely agree with you.

• 36:56Sean Fennessey?

  Just a small note.

• 36:57Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, we're also interested to her cabinet, for lack of a better term, and

• 37:01Sean Fennessey?

  Really, like her Defense Department.

• 37:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. It's like, I haven't seen their credentials, you know, but I have some questions about their strategy.

• 37:09Sean Fennessey?

  A lot of hitters in there, though.

• 37:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Sean Fennessey?

  Paul McAlany, Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer.

• 37:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Charles Barnell, he was in the last one, but yeah, it's like

• 37:16Sean Fennessey?

  There's some, there's some, some real, some real strong actors, given 1.7 lines of dialogue.

• 37:23Sean Fennessey?

  So anyway, he convinces them that he's the only one who can accomplish this extraordinary feat, which, when described in the movie, you're like, this plan makes no sense. It makes an Avengers movie look insane.

• 37:33Amanda Dobbins?

  It does, because it's all about, they just have to outthink the entity. But only Ethan understands how to outthink the entity.

• 37:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 37:43Amanda Dobbins?

  And they're just keeping like, no, the entity wants us to do this, so I have to do that. And the entity just wants to do exactly what Ethan thinks that they should do. And if they don't, then all of the world's nuclear missiles are going to be set off simultaneously.

• 37:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. It's, I don't know if you were a Seinfeld fan, but, you know, Costanza-ing is a thing where George Costanza realizes one day if he just does the opposite of every impulse he has, that he will have a great life. And in fact, it does go amazingly well for him for a stretch of time.

• 38:15Sean Fennessey?

  And he kind of pulls a Costanza in the movie by outthinking the entity, but the things that he has to do to accomplish this.

• 38:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 38:21Sean Fennessey?

  Are ludicrous.

• 38:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And also, also, so and I am, this is fresher in my mind, I'm sorry, but so he only has three days to do it because somehow, we don't know how they know, but we know that exactly, in exactly three days is how long it will take the entity to take control of the entire world's nuclear stockpile if Ethan doesn't get there first. So there's a giant countdown clock to three days because they understand enough about the entity to know its timelines, but not enough how to stop it. Also, last thing, when he is giving this speech.

• 38:53Sean Fennessey?

  That's a really bad writing.

• 38:54Amanda Dobbins?

  When he is giving this speech before he jumps into the sea, when he's like, this is our only option, and there are three days left, half of the world's nuclear stockpiles are already under control by the entity. The other half, including the US, which is the largest, are TBD. We are still only at DEFCON 3. And I gotta tell you, like, and that everyone but the US is down by like day two, and it's still only DEFCON 2. And it is only when the US missiles are no longer available that we are at DEFCON 1. And I don't think that's an accurate representation of the DEFCON system. I lived through the 2000s, you know?

• 39:39Sean Fennessey?

  I, I don't have enough data on hand to confirm that supposition, but I think you're probably right.

• 39:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, thanks.

• 39:45Sean Fennessey?

  You know, obviously, it's an action movie.

• 39:47Amanda Dobbins?

  It's ridiculous.

• 39:47Sean Fennessey?

  And we can, we can, you know, say, ah, well, this is an event movie, whatever. Like, the rules are always a little bit ridiculous. Even in Mission Impossible, there are all of these bold proclamations made about what could happen.

• 39:57Amanda Dobbins?

  But they spent.

• 39:57Sean Fennessey?

  But they're so specific.

• 39:58Amanda Dobbins?

  They spent, and they spent so much time, and they, they want you to take this seriously. And also, once you're, you know, once you're showing us pictures of the nuclear missiles of every country that, you know, has them, there, there's a tonal thing that's like not quite funny enough for me to just be like, oh, okay, well, that you guys are just being ridiculous.

• 40:18Sean Fennessey?

  I'm with you.

• 40:18Amanda Dobbins?

  So then I'm worried about DEFCONs.

• 40:20Sean Fennessey?

  No, I, to me, this is a challenge of the movie, because on the one hand, when he does. Jump into the the ocean and is miraculously.

• 40:27Amanda Dobbins?

  You who you like.

• 40:29Sean Fennessey?

  I was like, whoo. Like, this is like.

• 40:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, literally.

• 40:31Sean Fennessey?

  Movies, man.

• 40:32Amanda Dobbins?

  You're just like, yo.

• 40:33Sean Fennessey?

  I was like, that was awesome. The way they shoot it, the way that Cruz is clearly shooting himself, like flying into the ocean. The just the energy of the action filmmaking that they can accomplish in this movie is fucking awesome. And we're gonna nitpick the movie to death, but there are a few things that they pull off that are that just like get me so jazzed about movies. But. Everything leading up to it and then everything in the aftermath of it.

• 40:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, not everything in the aftermath of it, because then you wind up on the USS Ohio with one Trammell Tillman.

• 41:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think the way that he's saved is um extremely unlikely. The frogmen on the submarine like float up just in time before he freezes to death in the Bering Sea.

• 41:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Even that, I don't care, because even that's a cool shot where they like show up one by one and you don't know if they're friendly.

• 41:20Sean Fennessey?

  You know, there's some some cool. Are they they're Navy officers in the submarine, correct?

• 41:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I would think so.

• 41:26Sean Fennessey?

  So the naval officers save them, one of which is Katie O'Brien, last seen in Love Lies Bleeding.

• 41:30Amanda Dobbins?

  She's awesome.

• 41:31Sean Fennessey?

  In this movie and Trammell Tillman is the commander of the submarine. I I know you don't watch Severance, but he is, in my opinion, the best part of Severance. And when he showed up in this movie, I was like, this is gonna be good.

• 41:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Several people in our screening also cheered as soon as he showed up.

• 41:45Sean Fennessey?

  He's just a terrific actor and somebody who can like immediately. He reminds me of like old, not in the same way, but like when Joe Pantoliano would show up in a movie and you'd be like, we're about to have a fun scene here. Like, it's the same thing with Tillman. And he's he's one of the only characters in the whole film, in my opinion, that has that old Mission Impossible feeling.

• 42:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Sean Fennessey?

  Of like.

• 42:03Sean Fennessey?

  What's this fucking Ethan Hunt guy doing? You know, like that thing of like, everyone's like, what's this? What's this guy's deal?

• 42:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but.

• 42:08Sean Fennessey?

  It's funny and his delivery is very arch and amusing.

• 42:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Somehow has he has chemistry with Cruz.

• 42:14Sean Fennessey?

  He does.

• 42:14Amanda Dobbins?

  So does Katie O'Brien. Like, they are actually interacting with each other. And he is. He gets to both like be in on it. You know, he says, like, if you want to poke the bear, then you came to the right place. While also just like absolutely casting doubt on every single thing in a in a funny way. Like, he's funny. He has comedic timing.

• 42:34Sean Fennessey?

  He really does. And he is on that submarine so that he can um. Basically get like insta-training to deep sea dive so that he can, now that he's in possession of the cruciform key, unlock the power of the entity and then, I guess the idea is to destroy it, right? To make it inoperable for anyone so that no one can have

• 42:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, because Luther made him a poison pill. We didn't even talk about, I mean,

• 43:00Sean Fennessey?

  This is a, okay, I'm sorry. We went too far. This was a huge sin, in my opinion.

• 43:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 43:04Sean Fennessey?

  The way that they edited the storyline of Luther and Luther's death and the way that Gabriel set Luther up to be killed and drew Ethan Hunt into this, which happens in the first act. I forgot about this. I apologize. But they edited it in a way where they show you an aspect of it and then they go back to what really happens and then they go forward again to Luther's death.

• 43:25Sean Fennessey?

  And I don't know why that was better than just showing it to us in a linear fashion. I don't know why that sequence was chopped up because this is complicated in the world of Mission Impossible, but the most meaningful emotional relationship that Ethan Hunt has in his life is with Luther.

• 43:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 43:39Sean Fennessey?

  That is his best friend. That is the guy who's been his road dog in all of these movies. Ving Rhames is Team TC for life. And they kill this character, which I think is honestly a good choice. I have no problem with it. I wanted Chewbacca killed in The Last Jedi, The Last Skywalker.

• 43:55Amanda Dobbins?

  You said it, not me.

• 43:56Sean Fennessey?

  But I think that those, making choices like that in movies can be very powerful because it shows you real stakes. And if you're like, this is the last one. We're making big choices. We're not letting people survive this stuff. It could be done well. It just wasn't done well in this movie. But before he dies, he does make this poison pill.

• 44:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. Which then Gabriel steals so that getting to Gabriel can, you know, be part of the tension of the movie as well. And then Tom Cruise has to like run through London really fast. I guess he has to run through London really fast to get to Ving Rhames. When I said that there was no action for the first 70 minutes besides the prison break.

• 44:34Sean Fennessey?

  There was some running.

• 44:35Amanda Dobbins?

  If you count running, which it's not a sports thing, maybe it's action to you. I did get a little emotional when he ran under the, under Big Ben, but.

• 44:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that sucks. So he has a poison pill.

• 44:46Sean Fennessey?

  Gabriel has a poison pill and Cruz needs to retrieve access to the entity. And then draw out Gabriel so that he can get the poison pill from him.

• 44:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 44:55Sean Fennessey?

  That's essentially the plan.

• 44:56Amanda Dobbins?

  So here's another thing. The keys, it turns out, are useless. I mean, that's fine. A MacGuffin's a MacGuffin, but like, come on, guys. What are we doing?

• 45:06Sean Fennessey?

  Well, what do you mean by it being useless?

• 45:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, it turns out that the Russians also have one.

• 45:12Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 45:12Amanda Dobbins?

  So whatever. I mean, I guess Ethan still needs it to open the place, but it's like.

• 45:22Sean Fennessey?

  It wasn't this rare object that we thought it was. I don't think it's useless. I think it has value in that, in for Ethan when he eventually gets to the submarine, and he does get to this submarine. And this is the second biggest of the dramatic set pieces in the movie.

• 45:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. There's some shooting in between.

• 45:37Sean Fennessey?

  There is some shooting.

• 45:38Amanda Dobbins?

  And some sled dogs.

• 45:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, the other thing we should mention is, is like, there's an attempt on Ethan's life when he's on the submarine by a zealot who believes that the entity should take power and that there, we see on news reports that there are people around the world. Who have turned their lives over in a kind of QAnon or Jim Jones fashion to the all-seeing power of the entity.

• 46:01Amanda Dobbins?

  The other thing to note about that sequence is that Tom Cruise defends himself and does the hand-to-hand fight in boxer briefs. Which is not the only time he will do an action sequence in boxer briefs in this film. I would say it's at least 15% of the movie.

• 46:16Sean Fennessey?

  I'm just gonna be honest.

• 46:19Sean Fennessey?

  He looks good. Like, I don't, I have no notes. He's in his 60s.

• 46:22Amanda Dobbins?

  It's fine, and as long as he's healthy.

• 46:24Sean Fennessey?

  I'm sure a lot went into that or whatever. But he looks, it's actually jarring.

• 46:27Amanda Dobbins?

  It's just a pure costuming choice, that it is just like his boxer briefs for like, a very long period of time.

• 46:34Sean Fennessey?

  It's the same thing as him being shirtless in Jack Reacher for like, six minutes. And you're like, why is this happening? But now it's 10 years later and he's still doing the same thing. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great. Impressions, reach, and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not-so-great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that: bull spend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO? LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So, cut the bull spend, advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you.

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• 48:15Sean Fennessey?

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• 48:50Sean Fennessey?

  Real inside of these fight sequences, inside of these action sequences. Like, obviously, he is notorious for doing a lot of his own stunts, or at least partially a lot of his own stunts. But he is just very credible for as a man in his 60s. I'm in my, I'm 20 years younger than him and I'm, I'm dying. So I give him credit for that. The whole subsequence, when he does actually become a deep sea diver, there's a couple of incredible moments where a submarine flies past him. It is quite scary and really, really well done. And then the film moves into like a different kind of state where the music stops and we are submerged literally inside of this, this flooded submarine, which is sliding down

• 49:32Sean Fennessey?

  the shelf of the sea, the bottom of the sea. I really, I really enjoyed this. I, I, I think this may be a slightly divisive sequence because it is quite quiet and it lacks the kind of like daring do thrum of the best of Mission Impossible. This is a, this is a film and a series that is very indebted to James Cameron and a movie about AI à la Skynet.

• 49:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 49:59Sean Fennessey?

  From Terminator and then submarines and the under, the world, under the world of the abyss. It's just a lot of Cameronian.

• 50:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Absolutely.

• 50:10Sean Fennessey?

  Influence going on, maybe a little bit too much for my liking, but I did think that the way that they orchestrated the scene, it's another thing where I'm just like, I don't know how they did this. I have no idea what they shot inside of, how they made that tank look the way that it did. How Cruz spent all of that time underwater is very obviously him doing all of the swimming through the sequence.

• 50:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, he's definitely diving, yeah.

• 50:27Sean Fennessey?

  Um, there's something kind of extraordinary about it, but the quiet approach will lead to some people, I think, thinking it's boring.

• 50:35Amanda Dobbins?

  And it is also wordless and I, obviously, because he's just by himself underwater and he's focused on breathing. And then I think it's almost, it's over 10 minutes. It might be close to 15 minutes long. Uh, I, I found it a little boring. I am not a fan of the underwater sequences. I just kind of always feel like I'm watching someone like get their scuba diving license. And that's great for them, but.

• 51:01Amanda Dobbins?

  There are parts of it that I, like you, I'm like, how did you do this? It does look very real, but it's long. That's, I mean, that's just the thing. It's, it's, it's a little too long.

• 51:11Sean Fennessey?

  It is very long. Eventually, he is successful.

• 51:13Amanda Dobbins?

  How long, how deep do you think the ocean is, by the way?

• 51:15Sean Fennessey?

  I have no idea.

• 51:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, they say he's going 500 feet, which is like gonna kill him. But 500 feet doesn't seem that deep to me. So I just Googled, it's 12,000 feet is how deep the ocean is.

• 51:27Sean Fennessey?

  But he's only going 500 feet?

• 51:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 51:30Sean Fennessey?

  So the bottom of the Bering Sea is 500 feet?

• 51:33Amanda Dobbins?

  That he's at 500 feet? Don't they say that, Jack? Back me up.

• 51:36Speaker 04

  They do.

• 51:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Sean Fennessey?

  Well, that explains how he's able to survive. Because that's the one thing that I found quite confusing is if you were at the bottom of the ocean and your suit has been torn from your body as it is near the end of the sequence.

• 51:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, again, that's, that's boxer briefs number two. The boxer briefs stay on, though.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  Google also says the Bering Sea is 12,000 feet deep, so.

• 51:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I mean, it's, it is on the ledge, as Sean noted, like it hit one part and like is gonna keep sliding further. But they say 500 feet.

• 52:04Sean Fennessey?

  500 feet deep.

• 52:06Amanda Dobbins?

  And they're like, you can't at that depth. And they're saying this is like extraordinarily low for a diver. And you go any lower, your survival chances decrease by the second. The other thing they say is that, and this was just a good life tip. When you are going up, when you're ascending back to the water, you have to breathe out continuously or else your lungs will explode. So that is one thing we learned from Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning.

• 52:29Sean Fennessey?

  That will be helpful when you are deep sea diving in the Bering Sea in the near future. Obviously, it's extraordinarily cold there and most of it is also covered in sheets of ice. And so.

• 52:41Amanda Dobbins?

  They've got a chainsaw.

• 52:42Sean Fennessey?

  The suit is torn. He somehow finds a space where he can be saved via chainsaw and then is CPR'd back to life in a, what is the tent called that he needs to enter?

• 52:54Amanda Dobbins?

  It's a hyperbaric chamber, right? Or something like that? That's the pressurization. Yeah, oh, I'm getting thumbs up from Jack. Yeah, there we go. See, I'm, I, I know all about sea technology.

• 53:05Sean Fennessey?

  It's super dumb to be like, this is not realistic in a Mission Impossible movie. But I'm like, what the fuck?

• 53:09Amanda Dobbins?

  It does look like a tent that you buy at REI. Like kind of a fashion one, you know? It is, it's chic-er than, you know, it's, but.

• 53:18Sean Fennessey?

  Where did they get that? Simon Pegg just made that?

• 53:22Amanda Dobbins?

  No, no, he has it in a box. And he's like, our plan is that we have to get this box to wherever Tom Cruise tells us to. To these coordinates. And then when Haley Atwell and her and her friend pull up the uh, the dog sled. If they show it, they're like the, but it really does look like some sort of device that you order on Amazon to help your toddler get through a five hour flight. You know?

• 53:48Sean Fennessey?

  It does. Uh, you've just reminded me of the concurrent action happening alongside of the subsequence, which is that the rest of the team, which includes Simon Pegg, Haley Atwell's character Grace and uh, Paris, Pom Clementeve's uh,

• 54:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Who's very funny in this.

• 54:02Sean Fennessey?

  She does, she retains some of the humor that is otherwise missing from the movie. She also um, arrives at the home of a man named Donlow, who people will recognize as the original kind of quant designer of the security system at Langley from the very first film.

• 54:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 54:20Sean Fennessey?

  And that space that Hunt is able to breach, which then leads to Donlow being reassigned to this Arctic nowhere.

• 54:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:29Sean Fennessey?

  And he's

• 54:30Amanda Dobbins?

  To a listening station.

• 54:31Sean Fennessey?

  A listening station, yes, which is uh, what many people are doing at home right now. They're sitting in their listening station quietly listening to us speak about the film. Um, and Donlow's up there and he fell in love. He met a gal.

• 54:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Sean Fennessey?

  And a woman native to the area and uh, they spent some time falling in love and they built a life together.

• 54:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Sorry, just local woman falls in love.

• 54:55Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty much how they pitch it to you.

• 54:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but they seem to have a nice connection and their house is lovely.

• 55:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, it is. They have, they've made a nice little life for themselves in the middle of goddamn nowhere. And he seems very happy about it. And he, of course,

• 55:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Too many dogs.

• 55:07Sean Fennessey?

  A lot of dogs, a lot of dogs. Um, they, he's been keeping up on the technologies of the world. He's got a lot of info and floppy disks hidden in his house. This movie is fucking weird. And, but he has information that everyone wants.

• 55:21Amanda Dobbins?

  And also the Russians are there.

• 55:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, the Russians want this information. The Americans want this information. We do have this potential nuclear holocaust that coming. And so access to the entity and power over this circumstance is um, much desired. And so there's a big fight, that home catches fire. There's some hand to hand combat, some people throwing bookshelves on each other.

• 55:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 55:44Sean Fennessey?

  Eventually, Grace is able to escape thanks to Don Lo's wife and her sled dogs.

• 55:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Grace and Don Lo's wife go are sent out separately with the codes. Cause he remember, he memorized them.

• 55:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, the coordinates for.

• 55:58Amanda Dobbins?

  The for, for where.

• 55:59Sean Fennessey?

  For where Cruz will land.

• 56:00Amanda Dobbins?

  But they're actually not the coordinates, they're the coordinates exactly halfway across the ocean.

• 56:05Sean Fennessey?

  180 degrees.

• 56:07Amanda Dobbins?

  In case the Russians are listening.

• 56:09Sean Fennessey?

  Um.

• 56:09Amanda Dobbins?

  That was stupid.

• 56:10Sean Fennessey?

  Which is fine.

• 56:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh. You know what I realized that we also didn't even talk about Hannah Waddingham?

• 56:16Sean Fennessey?

  No, I not my favorite performance in the film.

• 56:19Amanda Dobbins?

  I think that I could have done that, you know? And like, next time you need a steely American.

• 56:25Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Consider casting someone who knows how to do an American accent.

• 56:30Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 56:30Amanda Dobbins?

  That's all. And I do.

• 56:32Sean Fennessey?

  Do are you saying that you don't feel that women should be commanders of aircraft carriers?

• 56:37Amanda Dobbins?

  I think I should be.

• 56:38Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, that would probably go really well for all of us. Uh, eventually Grace does meet up and she revives Hunt and then the plane continues pace where Hunt draws in Gabriel and they have a confrontation in South Africa. And then they go on a chase and then that leads to the biplane finale.

• 56:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but there's all this other stuff about another bomb that Gabriel's gonna set off that then everybody else has to defuse because they gotta give them something to do. And then like Palm's gotta do surgery on Simon Pegg and, you know, on Benji, excuse me. So there it still is incredibly complicated and I'm not sure I understand everything. Also Angela Bassett has to decide to save the world in her own way.

• 57:22Sean Fennessey?

  She does. Um, she also has a son.

• 57:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 57:26Sean Fennessey?

  Who is in the military and whatever decision she makes will also affect him and the entire world. We're trying to get a little bit of emotional gravity around the president, which I don't think we needed necessarily in this movie. But it's nice that Angela Bassett's character has a son.

• 57:41Sean Fennessey?

  The big finale is extraordinary. As you said, it is like top tier stunt filmmaking. The final 20 minutes of the movie, I just sat beside you, my mouth wide open.

• 57:52Amanda Dobbins?

  So was I. And it was honestly, the reaction is like, what are they doing? How is he doing that? And now, you know, I still wish the hair were shorter, but I do understand why his hair is longer now. It's so that one Tom Cruise is literally hanging off a biplane. As the plane is flying, the wind rushing flatten his, flattens his hair in such a way that you know, oh, he really is actually flying.

• 58:16Sean Fennessey?

  He's on the plane, yeah.

• 58:17Amanda Dobbins?

  His skin is moving in a way that suggests they timed whatever treatments just so, so they would be flexible enough to be moved by the wind. He is just on the plane.

• 58:30Sean Fennessey?

  It's funny, in a movie where we have 100 nitpicks about our inability to suspend disbelief. During this sequence, I was like, I think he might die. I think he might die. I think maybe they're gonna show us the film. Everything we've been seeing of him in the last two weeks must be recorded because this seems impossible to me. Pardon the pun.

• 58:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I know that there's that Matt Damon anecdote about like having dinner with Tom Cruise and they talk about, you know, the insurance guys said no. And so Matt Damon said like, oh, well, like, well, so what'd you do? And Tom Cruise goes, well, I found other insurance guys. But like, who is saying, like, is it insured? It can't be like, how are they, how are they guaranteeing his safety? Like, what is?

• 59:10Sean Fennessey?

  When you get to the end of the movie, when in fact, he does survive, when in fact, he does defeat Gabriel. He literally punches him out while holding on to the side of the plane and pulls him out of the plane.

• 59:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 59:21Sean Fennessey?

  And he dies a very grisly death. And he successfully lands the plane.

• 59:25Amanda Dobbins?

  No, he doesn't land the plane. He jumps out.

• 59:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, you're right.

• 59:28Amanda Dobbins?

  With the parachute.

• 59:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 59:29Amanda Dobbins?

  And then the parachute burst into flames and that got a real gasp, like, oh, my God, in our.

• 59:35Sean Fennessey?

  So did he just land hard or was there a backup shoot?

• 59:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, Jack?

• 59:39Sean Fennessey?

  It's kind of a.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  Backup shoot.

• 59:41Sean Fennessey?

  There's a backup shoot. They don't really show you much of the backup shoot.

• 59:43Amanda Dobbins?

  They also don't really show you him finding the original shoot. And that's one of the last things Gabriel says to him is like, I have the parachute, ha ha. And then, you know, he meets his end and then.

• 59:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Then the next time you see Tom Cruise, he's managed to find the shoot.

• 59:58Sean Fennessey?

  It's a little rickety in the storytelling.

• 1:00:01Sean Fennessey?

  Anyhow, he does land, he does encounter Briggs, the Shea Wiggum character we have not mentioned, who-

• 1:00:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh my god, that was the, that's the worst part. Not Shea Wiggum, he's wonderful.

• 1:00:09Sean Fennessey?

  The reveal of, of Briggs, which is that in fact, his name is Phelps, Jim Phelps, maybe perhaps Jim Phelps Jr. He is the son-

• 1:00:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Just like your dad.

• 1:00:18Sean Fennessey?

  Of the John Voight character from the original Mission Impossible, a man who betrays Ethan in that film. And it feels like a completely unnecessary callback to the first film because it's not really carried through in any meaningful way. We don't really see Phelps, other than in South Africa, but later in the movie, he's not, you know, he's presented as the potential, you know, the sort of like the the bad guy's good guy, you know, sort of like the, the, the military operation, the FBI, the CIA, the person who is working to bring in Hunt from the American side. But he doesn't play a significant role in the movie until you get to the end where he pulls a gun on Ethan at the very end.

• 1:00:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:00:58Sean Fennessey?

  And you think, oh my god, are they gonna shoot Ethan Hunt in the last two minutes of this movie? And then he extends a handshake.

• 1:01:03Amanda Dobbins?

  And extends a handshake, yeah.

• 1:01:06Sean Fennessey?

  Could've used more Shea Wiggum in the movie, if I'm being honest.

• 1:01:09Amanda Dobbins?

  He was good in the beginning. I, I felt bad that he got saddled into that plot stuff. I still don't know what I was supposed to learn from it. Can we, can we talk about Angela Bassett's plan to save most of the world?

• 1:01:22Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 1:01:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And all these people are like, okay, so you just have to bomb everyone else and set out, set off like hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons? And, and also sacrifice one American city?

• 1:01:34Sean Fennessey?

  That's the one that is a little curious.

• 1:01:36Amanda Dobbins?

  In order, like, that's our only plan?

• 1:01:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Amanda Dobbins?

  And then when she finally, you know, bless Angela Bassett, Madam President, she says at the last moment, she covers the button, she's not doing it. And then she makes one phone call, they take all the missiles offline, and then everything's okay.

• 1:01:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know. I just, I don't under- I would get some new advisors.

• 1:01:59Sean Fennessey?

  They all want her to, well, let's just, let's just talk it out. What city do you think they were gonna target there?

• 1:02:04Amanda Dobbins?

  They never say.

• 1:02:05Sean Fennessey?

  Kansas City?

• 1:02:07Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I think-

• 1:02:07Sean Fennessey?

  Salt Lake?

• 1:02:08Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I think it has to be like a major-

• 1:02:11Sean Fennessey?

  Like a, like a, like a, a tier two city in America?

• 1:02:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I think so. Yeah, too bad, sorry. Yeah.

• 1:02:18Sean Fennessey?

  Tough. That's what the Knicks did. Um, well, I mean, what else is on the board here? Seattle? Is that on the board?

• 1:02:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh-

• 1:02:25Sean Fennessey?

  Dallas?

• 1:02:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, Dallas, sure.

• 1:02:28Sean Fennessey?

  That's a hugely populous area. Isn't Dallas the fourth biggest city in America? Like, are we talking that big? But less strategically valuable, that seems to be what's, what's notable about this. I'm sure the people of Dallas right now are like, will you shut the fuck up?

• 1:02:40Amanda Dobbins?

  It's really fucked up, but they, like, no one even ever explains, there's no discussion. There's no, like,

• 1:02:48Amanda Dobbins?

  there's like, well, clearly you'll just have to bomb everyone else. You'll have to, like, just bomb all the nuclear- all the other nuclear arsenals. Like, why?

• 1:02:58Sean Fennessey?

  How would the entity not know that was happening?

• 1:03:01Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, that, well, because he hasn't gotten to the end of the third day yet, you know? So they, they know their timeline.

• 1:03:06Sean Fennessey?

  You remember in Dead Reckoning, when the entity is at that club, and he's just like, warp, warp, warp, warp, warp, warp.

• 1:03:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like, he's hanging out at that party, like, he's there, or she's there, frankly, we don't-

• 1:03:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Wait, we didn't talk about the entity coffin.

• 1:03:20Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:03:21Amanda Dobbins?

  You know?

• 1:03:21Sean Fennessey?

  Another thing that was, like, clearly written at the last minute, where it was like, don't go inside of this chamber.

• 1:03:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, which is how he communicates.

• 1:03:29Sean Fennessey?

  With the entity, it will change you. By the way, I meant to tell you that I was the voice of the entity in that sequence. I'm really proud of my work in that film.

• 1:03:36Amanda Dobbins?

  That sucked.

• 1:03:37Sean Fennessey?

  It was really not good. I think what it was meant to do, in part, was not just to be a, an exposition delivery system to Ethan in the movie, but also to explain how Gabriel had gone completely mad, because Esai Morales's character in this movie is not this kind of steely, all-knowing- You know, agent of fortune as he is in the first film. He is a lunatic.

• 1:04:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:04:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's a completely different character, the way that he's playing it, especially in the final sequence. It's like, this guy's nuts. And I guess what Pom Clemente's character tells him, what Paris tells Ethan is like, don't go in there. It will change you.

• 1:04:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:04:11Sean Fennessey?

  And I guess maybe forced exposure to the entity has made Gabriel go nuts.

• 1:04:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, that seems to be true of all the followers, you know, that there's something. But Gabriel does also think that he is going to control the entity.

• 1:04:24Sean Fennessey?

  He does.

• 1:04:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Cause that's the other thing here. Yeah.

• 1:04:27Sean Fennessey?

  Very stupid man. Uh, okay, here's some things that are missing from this movie that are not really missing from other Mission Impossible movies.

• 1:04:35Sean Fennessey?

  This movie's not sexy at all.

• 1:04:37Amanda Dobbins?

  No. Well, I think they're trying to have like a little like CPR, like when it comes back to life.

• 1:04:46Sean Fennessey?

  That's romantic.

• 1:04:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, it's like very hazy also, and there's like a deep breath that if you would like to, you know, you know, what do they call an orgasm in French, like a little death? So there you go.

• 1:04:56Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, sure, that's a rather elegant portrayal.

• 1:04:59Amanda Dobbins?

  But it's not sexy. It's, I agree, it's not sexy.

• 1:05:02Sean Fennessey?

  You know, this is a, this is a franchise that has hosted like Paula Patton exploding into that gala or Lea Sadeau in that hotel room.

• 1:05:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:05:10Sean Fennessey?

  You know, this is the White Widow and Vanessa Kirby removing the knife from the side of her garter, like,

• 1:05:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it's true.

• 1:05:16Sean Fennessey?

  This is like one of the sexiest franchises. This is Elsa Faust emerging from the, the, the pool in the One Piece. And you're like, oh my God, Rebecca Ferguson.

• 1:05:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Tom Cruise is in his boxer briefs for at least 15%. I, of this movie, I do agree, I thought that Hayley Atwell's ski parka was very fetching and the appraised ski looks were great, but like she is completely bundled up because they're in the tundra.

• 1:05:39Sean Fennessey?

  I don't mind saying Hayley Atwell, smoking hot. Why is she in a parka this whole movie?

• 1:05:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Listen, she is like my wife, if I had a wife, I'm with you.

• 1:05:47Sean Fennessey?

  It's, it's, it's an unusual choice for a franchise that is sort of, you know, and the original TV series too, that there's something, it's a spy show. There's, it's, it's in a sort of post-Bondian storytelling. So to remove a lot of those factors, obviously the stakes of the story are high. That shouldn't interfere with that. And the other thing, which is just that. The sense of humor is just not there. You know, even in Dead Reckoning, which is a little bit more serious and has all this AI stuff that you weren't crazy about the first time around, it has the submarine stuff.

• 1:06:13Amanda Dobbins?

  But it has the Rome sequence.

• 1:06:14Sean Fennessey?

  It has Rome, it has the car chase, it has that Buster Keaton style slapstick comedy that Cruise really excels at. You know, we forget that Grace's character is a pickpocket and they have that great handcuff sequence where they're switching arms and switching seats. There's all this kind of the close up magic and the flirting. There's none of that in this movie.

• 1:06:32Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 1:06:33Sean Fennessey?

  And it's a mistake, I think. I think it is actually against the brand of what has made these films so successful. So I find that very disappointing.

• 1:06:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Agree.

• 1:06:41Sean Fennessey?

  The other thing that I found was kind of missing ultimately is a very unusual sense of self-awareness. In the last couple of Macquarie films with Cruise, we'd been hearing increasingly about the messianic nature of Ethan Hunt, that he is, quote, "the living manifestation of destiny."

• 1:07:03Sean Fennessey?

  Which felt ridiculous, but very knowing.

• 1:07:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:07:08Sean Fennessey?

  Sort of, maybe not tongue in cheek, but with a sense of like, we're doing something with this guy here. Come along on the ride with us, because this is going to be a crazy story. And in this movie, it has kind of curdled fully into self-serious Messiah complex. And it's happening at a time when Cruise has fully become the avatar of movie savior. He's the guy who brought the theaters back with Top Gun Maverick, he's the guy who goes to see Sinners and goes to see Tenet in the movie theater and takes a selfie afterwards and says, "I want everyone to succeed at the movie theater."

• 1:07:49Sean Fennessey?

  The entity is clearly, in some ways, a metaphor for the algorithmic streaming revolution and the difference between human experience and communal experience of the movies and sitting at home alone and letting a machine dictate to you what you should enjoy.

• 1:08:07Sean Fennessey?

  These two things are mapped so hard onto each other that it's a little hard to enjoy it now for me.

• 1:08:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:14Sean Fennessey?

  And I know I'm like really deep in the tank on the Cruz mythology, as you are. But the balance was off on this one when it came to all that stuff for me personally.

• 1:08:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I completely agree. It just, the movie's seriousness in general and self seriousness and belief that like, we need to see lots of pictures of all of the different missiles. Like, a lot of times getting ready to go. And even, like, there are a few kind of premonitions of disaster to come where McCory, and I thought they were like very upsetting and effective, but they just, they filmed and included random sequences like of the world ending just to kind of bum you out.

• 1:08:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:09:00Amanda Dobbins?

  So it's, it's not light on its feet. It's not like, this is a, this is, this is silly. There is no sense of the ridiculousness about the movie generally. And so then that does mean that it can't like wink to you. Or it doesn't really let, give Tom Cruise an opportunity to be funny also, which brings out some of, or counterbalances some of the messianic stuff. I think also, again, it just really uniquely doesn't make sense in a way that you start asking questions rather than just being like, yeah, yeah, well, Ethan has to do it. I mean, this movie, he's just been like hiding out in a hotel room for four months with the key?

• 1:09:42Sean Fennessey?

  It's a great note.

• 1:09:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, what, like, okay, because that's

• 1:09:46Sean Fennessey?

  He's the most wanted man on earth.

• 1:09:48Amanda Dobbins?

  And it just, but, and, but also, like, he got the key. And then he's just like, well, I'll just chill out. I'm not really sure what to do about it, you know, because like, on the one hand, you know, the destruction of the entire world. On the other hand, people say we really need the internet. So I'll just, I'm gonna be a neutral party. Like, what are we?

• 1:10:05Sean Fennessey?

  It's a devil's bargain.

• 1:10:07Sean Fennessey?

  And, you know, sometimes I gotta look at Instagram. I don't know what to say. If we need to be annihilated because of that, so be it.

• 1:10:13Amanda Dobbins?

  So

• 1:10:14Sean Fennessey?

  There's just a lot of Blu-ray boutique sellers on Instagram that I need to look at.

• 1:10:17Amanda Dobbins?

  If it's doing too much and being too earnest, but there isn't any like escape valve of, of humor or, you know. Absurdity. There's just, there's one mask thing in this movie as opposed to like 4,000. Even the ridiculous gadgets are all about different ways to use AI to end the world or save the world. And really, like, they're not gadgets. They're just like a bunch of like laser, you know, what are the drives? What are, what are they called?

• 1:10:46Sean Fennessey?

  The floppy disks?

• 1:10:48Amanda Dobbins?

  No, no, no, the ones that, you know.

• 1:10:51Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, the one where they, they capture the entity in?

• 1:10:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, sure, but like, what is the, USB sticks?

• 1:10:55Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah. Well, there's one where it's like, it's a hyper terabyte mega drive. I didn't even know this could exist, but Luther created one. I actually love that stuff. That's, to me, that's Mission Impossible. I like, and I like the idea of like Haley Atwell, the world's greatest pickpocket, has point oh, oh, oh, one second to grab it out. That shit is great.

• 1:11:13Amanda Dobbins?

  That's great. Yeah, that's great. But even like the Luther making like the special device that will capture that whatever is shrouded in him also, you know, dismantling a nuclear bomb that's going to ruin London, but is going to kill him. It's just like.

• 1:11:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, only the underground tunnels that will be destroyed, not the entirety of London because of his dismantling.

• 1:11:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, this is, this is a flawed movie with, with incredible moments and.

• 1:11:38Amanda Dobbins?

  It's really fun to talk about.

• 1:11:40Sean Fennessey?

  frustrating lows. It is, it is. There's just a lot to it. And you know, like, first Mission Impossible is one hour and 50 minutes. Two is two hours and three minutes. Three is two hours and six minutes. Four is two hours and 13 minutes. Five is two hours and 11 minutes. Six is two hours and 27 minutes. Seven is two hours and 43 minutes. And eight is two hours and 49 minutes. This is something that is happening at movies.

• 1:12:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:03Sean Fennessey?

  That this kind of length bloat is happening. Now, I love a good, long movie. A movie that is, I love Killers of the Flower Moon. I wanted that movie to be as fulsome as possible. I think if you need that much space to tell a grand story, I completely respect that.

• 1:12:21Sean Fennessey?

  This is not that.

• 1:12:22Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 1:12:23Sean Fennessey?

  Because of the shambolic nature of construction, you can kind of just feel them tacking eight, seven, four minutes into sequences that have no flow and no rhythm. And so that pacing that you were talking about, just, just hamstrings this movie.

• 1:12:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Or are clearly filmed after the fact, you know, in one.

• 1:12:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, reshoot city.

• 1:12:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. Yes. And you can almost pick out like, oh, interesting. Okay. This one, this one, like, I wondered the scene where, early on in the first act,

• 1:12:55Amanda Dobbins?

  when Erica, Madam President, I'm not on a first name basis with her.

• 1:13:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:13:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Is like, she ultimately decides in this movie to send Ethan off on its way. But the way that it's shot is like they're in the war room with her defense department of great TV actors. And

• 1:13:18Sean Fennessey?

  How dare you call Janet McTeer a TV actor?

• 1:13:20Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm sorry. I was just, it's all the boys, as you know, you got your Nick Offerman, you got your Holt McElhenney, you've got your Charles.

• 1:13:27Sean Fennessey?

  Holt is, I mean, this is an icon of masculine cinema.

• 1:13:31Amanda Dobbins?

  They're all.

• 1:13:32Sean Fennessey?

  We've just, we've just seen the man in the amateur.

• 1:13:34Amanda Dobbins?

  They're great. Okay. But you understand my point.

• 1:13:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:13:39Amanda Dobbins?

  And so the scene ends with her being like, you know, lock him up or whatever. And then it cuts to two soldiers leading him outside. And it's revealed that she's like, on a helicopter waiting for him. But I was like, oh, there was definitely a version of this movie where she puts him in prison. And he like actually is, and because of the way it's shot and the way that, you know what I mean? And when you can see that level of.

• 1:14:02Sean Fennessey?

  It's possible that that was an alternative route for the story.

• 1:14:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Of PC, of PC-ness.

• 1:14:06Sean Fennessey?

  No, I think that's a good call.

• 1:14:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Sean Fennessey?

  I had another issue I wanted to chat with you about, which is Greg Tarzan Davis's character, De Ga, who was Briggs's partner in the first film.

• 1:14:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:14:17Sean Fennessey?

  But joins Ethan's side, throws away his career in the CIA.

• 1:14:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:14:22Sean Fennessey?

  To join the impossible mission force, which I don't know what their benefits are like. Like, I don't know if that was a good call. Does it come with a vehicle? Like, I'm really not sure. But he is now joined up with this ragtag group of international criminals and fugitives because he believes Ethan is right? Like, I know this keeps happening in these movies where people are like, I'm on your team. But at least they're all IMF. And like, they seemingly went through a training program of some kind. This guy is just like, absolutely, I'm a hired gun for you, Ethan, whatever you need. I will definitely put my life in danger.

• 1:14:54Amanda Dobbins?

  And I'll like stay back here and help the couple dismantle yet another random bomb. That we gotta pull out and cut the right strings on at the right time.

• 1:15:03Sean Fennessey?

  I befriended Don Lo and we will die together if necessary.

• 1:15:05Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm not with you.

• 1:15:07Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, very curious movie. What else haven't we covered off on?

• 1:15:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, I mean, I've, I've brought a lot of my takes to you. They don't let Haley Atwell cook enough.

• 1:15:17Sean Fennessey?

  Not at all.

• 1:15:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, they don't really use locations that, you know, I mean, I understand that like the water tank is a location or whatever. But the first hour, give or take some running through London is just people in rooms or in bunkers, really. Or in helicopters or in submarines.

• 1:15:41Sean Fennessey?

  This is a lot of TV actors, which I, I really have nothing against Tramell Tillman or, uh, Henry Turney or Holt or, uh, Hannah Waddingham. I think they're all talented, but they're not Rebecca Ferguson. You know what I mean?

• 1:15:58Amanda Dobbins?

  It's true.

• 1:15:58Sean Fennessey?

  They're not Vanessa Kirby.

• 1:15:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Sean Fennessey?

  The, the movie's missing some juice.

• 1:16:02Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's, and it is missing all like the grand locations and like, you know, the Burj Khalifa or the, the Palais Royal, which I never really got confirmation on what happens there.

• 1:16:13Sean Fennessey?

  The center of Rome.

• 1:16:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. Yeah. This is like.

• 1:16:16Sean Fennessey?

  We're in, we're in a cave in South Africa. We're at the bottom of the Bering Sea.

• 1:16:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:16:22Sean Fennessey?

  And we're in, you know, an underground bunker in London.

• 1:16:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. And the, the biplane exterior stuff is all outside. And in Zach's piece, McCory says that they had trouble finding, like governments that would let them do the biplane in like their actual country. I think they got turned down a couple of times. So that is beautiful, but otherwise it is just, it doesn't have that kind of globe trotting vibe. That is a fun part of Mission Impossible.

• 1:16:49Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not saying that we should be the czars of Mission Impossible, because we don't really know what we're talking about. But like, we do know what we're talking about.

• 1:16:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Sean Fennessey?

  And there's just a few checkpoints that I feel like you kind of need to hit with these films. And this one very curiously avoids or evades them.

• 1:17:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Let me ask you one more question.

• 1:17:04Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:17:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. So, uh, the entity, which is, um, AI that, you know, can ruin all of us.

• 1:17:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:17:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Just winds up in a little glow box.

• 1:17:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yep. That's right.

• 1:17:15Amanda Dobbins?

  And they just hang on to it. And then they just like bring it to the center of London.

• 1:17:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:17:19Amanda Dobbins?

  And like.

• 1:17:20Sean Fennessey?

  It's like when they caught Jafar in the, in the, in the lamp at the end of Aladdin. And it's just like, somebody's gonna rub that lamp.

• 1:17:27Amanda Dobbins?

  I just also like.

• 1:17:27Sean Fennessey?

  Jafar's gonna come back.

• 1:17:28Amanda Dobbins?

  We have not.

• 1:17:28Sean Fennessey?

  And then Jafar returned in Aladdin two.

• 1:17:31Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, we have not had enough fishing training as a society to like, someone is gonna put that little drive in their computer, you know, it's.

• 1:17:39Sean Fennessey?

  You're leading me to my next conversation.

• 1:17:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:17:42Sean Fennessey?

  Which is, is this the last Mission Impossible movie?

• 1:17:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I said the minute they actually announced the stunt Oscar, I was like, they gotta do another one to get Cruz's Oscar. And I know you think he'll be like, no, it's just the guys. But I actually think that he will accept it with his team.

• 1:17:58Sean Fennessey?

  Well, there obviously is a remarkable stunt design team that works on all these movies. And Cruz, more so than most stars, maybe more so than any star, is at the forefront of participating and helping the design. And obviously participating at a high level in the execution of it.

• 1:18:14Sean Fennessey?

  The story, you know, he doesn't die. So it is not final in that way, say the way that No Time To Die was.

• 1:18:23Sean Fennessey?

  But it does feel like the end. And I'm, I'm cynical enough to know that if there's money there.

• 1:18:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:31Sean Fennessey?

  That they'll come back. But the movies that he has been talking about in the press recently, that he is looking to explore again. Obviously, he's got this new film coming with Inari Tzu next year. I think Top Gun three is very much on the table. There's another critical sequel that he was talking about. I can't recall what it was. Do you remember this?

• 1:18:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Tom Cruise sequels? No, I was too focused on him eating two buckets of popcorn at every movie.

• 1:18:55Sean Fennessey?

  Now, some people have been mocking his popcorn eating style because he kinda tends to throw it. I support that.

• 1:19:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I like, I support it too.

• 1:19:01Sean Fennessey?

  I think violent popcorn consumption is, is fine by me.

• 1:19:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Days of Thunder.

• 1:19:05Sean Fennessey?

  Days of Thunder, yes.

• 1:19:06Amanda Dobbins?

  I just.

• 1:19:07Sean Fennessey?

  Hot on the heels of F1.

• 1:19:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, but that's fine. I do feel that two buckets is a lot of popcorn.

• 1:19:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, agreed.

• 1:19:14Amanda Dobbins?

  And, uh, doesn't correspond to the physique that we saw displayed prominently in Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning.

• 1:19:22Sean Fennessey?

  Popcorn, unbuttered and unsalted.

• 1:19:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:19:25Sean Fennessey?

  Not that bad for you.

• 1:19:26Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true, but like at the, you know, I don't know if you can get the calorie control you're looking for at your local cineplex.

• 1:19:32Sean Fennessey?

  I like to get a little Molly water on mine.

• 1:19:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, really?

• 1:19:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:37Amanda Dobbins?

  And then you and the entity are just like

• 1:19:42Sean Fennessey?

  Such a strange movie. It's such a, it's such an interesting-

• 1:19:45Amanda Dobbins?

  But it's fun. I don't care. It's-

• 1:19:47Sean Fennessey?

  It is fun. It is. I just, you mentioned the high and the low of my experience.

• 1:19:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:51Sean Fennessey?

  Coming off that Knicks win of game four, you, and it was, there was also a Mets walk off win that night. And it was when the Mets were sort of peaking and they've actually had a bit of a downturn since that moment.

• 1:20:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh.

• 1:20:02Sean Fennessey?

  They got swept in the subway series against the Yankees. They lost two of three- That's not true. They won one game. They won one of, one of three. Sorry, Jack. Uh, Jack just woke up.

• 1:20:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:11Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and they also just lost two of three in Boston. They're on the down slope. Knicks obviously getting crucified publicly, which is painful to watch.

• 1:20:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:20:21Sean Fennessey?

  It was, it would have been hard for, for a movie to live up to the high that I felt watching that Knicks game. So I will, I want to see the movie again. I said it to you as soon as we went out. I was like, I need to see that again. I kind of need to see it in a different headspace. And it does seem like the second time that you saw it, that you enjoyed it more in part because of the crowd that you saw it with.

• 1:20:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Definitely. Um, and even-

• 1:20:40Sean Fennessey?

  But it still left you scratching your head.

• 1:20:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I mean, I was definitely confused, but like I, I think it's fun to talk about why the entity is just like trapped in a little Tamagotchi, you know? And then, did you have Tamagotchis growing up?

• 1:20:53Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I was getting a little old.

• 1:20:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Jack, Tamagotchi, yes, no?

• 1:20:56Sean Fennessey?

  Nope.

• 1:20:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Do you know what that is?

• 1:20:59Sean Fennessey?

  Nope.

• 1:21:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. It was a little creature. So it was like, help me, help me describe it. It was like-

• 1:21:07Sean Fennessey?

  It was a little electronic device.

• 1:21:09Amanda Dobbins?

  It was like, it was like this big, yeah. Sort of like golf ball. Just for those of you that don't have a visual, Jack's just like nodding at us. I can only see his eyes like TJ Eckleberg style, like through the window. Okay. So it was a little electronic Tamagotchi thing, right, Jack? No, it's just like toy thing. And I guess it was like a, a tiny video game where you had to keep the being, the little animal alien robot being not really sure on Tamagotchi lore, alive. And it would poop a lot and you had to clean up its poop, but you were just like pressing two or three buttons. And it went with you wherever you were. And so if you were six, uh, you were quite devoted to it and it beeped at annoying times. And then there was a whole thing of,

• 1:21:54Amanda Dobbins?

  could you take your Tamagotchi to school? But then your Tamagotchi, which no, but then your Tamagotchi was going to die. Real phenomenon. Um, so now you guys just have real video games. Congratulations.

• 1:22:03Sean Fennessey?

  This has been Amanda's Toy Corner. Um, so yeah, the entity is in a Tom and Gachi. When we saw Dead Reckoning, you were more down on it than I was. I liked it.

• 1:22:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:15Sean Fennessey?

  In fact, I gave it four stars out of five.

• 1:22:18Amanda Dobbins?

  On Letterboxd?

• 1:22:18Sean Fennessey?

  On Letterboxd, yeah. I had a lot of fun with it.

• 1:22:21Amanda Dobbins?

  It is genuinely really fun, but I like AI.

• 1:22:25Sean Fennessey?

  That's what I was gonna say. That was your issue was ultimately like, I don't think the entity is a good villain for this franchise. We had a discussion about the quality of the villains on the Tom Cruise movie draft.

• 1:22:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:22:36Sean Fennessey?

  There's a lot of, um, Owen Davian, I think, came out the winner, the Philip Seymour Hoffman character, but you know, Sean Harris's character, Simon Lane.

• 1:22:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:22:43Sean Fennessey?

  Much admired, um, for his thoughts on anarchy. And, uh, I don't know if the White Widow ultimately nets out as a villain. It kind of seems like she does. Her absence was felt deeply in this film for me, in part because I knew that she filmed stuff for it and they didn't put it in.

• 1:22:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. What? I don't remember what happens to the White Widow at the end of.

• 1:23:00Sean Fennessey?

  She's on the train and she makes the deal with Kittredge.

• 1:23:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh.

• 1:23:03Sean Fennessey?

  And then she's just gone.

• 1:23:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:23:04Sean Fennessey?

  Because she's been doubled by.

• 1:23:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:23:06Sean Fennessey?

  Haley Atwell.

• 1:23:06Amanda Dobbins?

  And she's also a CIA, uh, agent operative.

• 1:23:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:23:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:12Sean Fennessey?

  Um, so.

• 1:23:16Sean Fennessey?

  Now, having seen the film, I actually think the entity is still a good idea. I don't actually think that's the problem. I think everything with the entity in this movie is overwrought. But it is like, it is a good way to threaten the world, you know?

• 1:23:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but again, they like the stakes are like, just unplug it, you know? And that's like literally what they do. They just, they unplug it.

• 1:23:33Sean Fennessey?

  And unfortunately, that's not how AI works.

• 1:23:35Amanda Dobbins?

  And they.

• 1:23:35Sean Fennessey?

  I've seen the Terminator.

• 1:23:36Amanda Dobbins?

  They unplug both the, the vault that's in under. Where is like the, the protect, all the servers, you know?

• 1:23:47Sean Fennessey?

  Another thing where I'm like, where's, what is this place? Is this a real place?

• 1:23:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Servers that can never, never be destructed that are ruining our environment. Um, but then they also just unplug, unplug the US's missiles. I'm like, it's fine.

• 1:24:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's not ideal. Okay. Well, as we get to the end of this discussion.

• 1:24:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:24:04Sean Fennessey?

  We need to update our Mission Impossible rankings.

• 1:24:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:24:07Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Now I've revisited some of these movies in the year and in two years since Dead Reckoning. Um, not all of them. We.

• 1:24:17Sean Fennessey?

  I think quite famously had Mission Impossible 2 as our least favorite.

• 1:24:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Sean Fennessey?

  Now, many of the real heads are putting Final Reckoning near the bottom.

• 1:24:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I think it, that's probably the case.

• 1:24:29Sean Fennessey?

  I think so too. So I, I would keep, I still prefer this movie to 2.

• 1:24:33Amanda Dobbins?

  I do as well.

• 1:24:34Sean Fennessey?

  There is stuff in 2 that I quite enjoy. Obviously the throwing motorcycles at each other stuff is pretty extraordinary. John Woo stuff, there's, you know, we've, we've, we've got doves flying in the air.

• 1:24:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and there is something.

• 1:24:45Sean Fennessey?

  Hanging from the cliff in the opening sequence, which is awesome.

• 1:24:47Amanda Dobbins?

  It's sick.

• 1:24:48Sean Fennessey?

  But it's very flawed. Now, is, is the Final Reckoning the second worst Mission Impossible movie?

• 1:24:57Sean Fennessey?

  It might be.

• 1:24:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Bob's not here for Mission Impossible 3.

• 1:25:01Sean Fennessey?

  Nor Chris.

• 1:25:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Nor Chris, nor Bill.

• 1:25:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that was, he was just jumping on the back. He doesn't really believe that. He hasn't seen Mission Impossible 3 in 15 years.

• 1:25:08Amanda Dobbins?

  He was really funny though. I love Bill.

• 1:25:09Sean Fennessey?

  It was great.

• 1:25:12Amanda Dobbins?

  So what, well, 3 has Philip Seymour Hoffman and this has Tom Hanks.

• 1:25:21Sean Fennessey?

  I think I'm with you. I think, I think Final Reckoning goes to 7.

• 1:25:24Amanda Dobbins?

  I think you all, all of the three heads need to look yourself and your visual standards in the mirror, but.

• 1:25:31Sean Fennessey?

  Shame on these people trying to tell me that it doesn't look like TV. Come on guys, get the fuck out of here. Uh, so then Mission Impossible 3 would be 6?

• 1:25:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:25:40Sean Fennessey?

  Now, does that mean that Dead Reckoning goes to 5, a film you just drafted in the Tom Cruise movie draft?

• 1:25:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, well, that was, that was strategy, my guy. That was desperation also.

• 1:25:50Sean Fennessey?

  I'm aware, I'm aware. Newsflash, I don't think either of us won that draft.

• 1:25:53Amanda Dobbins?

  So that's, yeah, that's 5.

• 1:25:55Sean Fennessey?

  So then, and I would say that 3 and, and Dead Reckoning, I, I prefer Dead Reckoning personally. I think it's superior. I think the scale, the scope, the sense of humor.

• 1:26:06Amanda Dobbins?

  The, well, the Rome, yeah, I do as well.

• 1:26:09Sean Fennessey?

  So then.

• 1:26:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Vanessa Kirby.

• 1:26:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. We're, we're down pretty clearly to the top 4.

• 1:26:13Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, even though what they did to Rebecca Ferguson in Venice is unspeakable.

• 1:26:19Sean Fennessey?

  You know, there's something really, really, really great, though, about that scene.

• 1:26:24Amanda Dobbins?

  It's, I understand why they did it.

• 1:26:26Sean Fennessey?

  I was like.

• 1:26:27Amanda Dobbins?

  It's really, it's very good. But I, again, we've really felt her absence in this.

• 1:26:33Sean Fennessey?

  I just want to go back to it really quickly, though. It's the, it's the alleyway fight between Paris and Hunt.

• 1:26:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39Sean Fennessey?

  Where he doesn't kill her and he bangs the lead pipe against the brick wall.

• 1:26:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:43Sean Fennessey?

  And lets her live, which then is like, was a good storytelling choice because it lets Paris kind of glide through the story in a meaningful way. And then that leads to that bridge sequence when they fight and they have that knife battle. Which is just incredibly elegant action filmmaking. Now, obviously, a lot of people were not happy with Rebecca Ferguson's death. Some deemed it fridging. I'm not sure if it can be fridging when like the character is not even, her name is not uttered in this film. She's not even.

• 1:27:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:06Sean Fennessey?

  Neither she nor the White Widow come up at all in this new movie. Nevertheless, um, you're right, she was missed. Number four. There's been some discussion about what, whether Ghost Protocol is underrated in the aftermath of our draft.

• 1:27:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:27:21Sean Fennessey?

  Because it went so late. Bill got to get it pretty late.

• 1:27:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but that's.

• 1:27:24Sean Fennessey?

  We obviously did him a big favor on that one.

• 1:27:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's people kissing up to Bill, which is fine.

• 1:27:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, is, so Rogue Nation, I realize I don't really remember very much about Rogue Nation. Even though I've seen it recently.

• 1:27:34Sean Fennessey?

  We had made a mistake. Chris kept asking me, is that the one, Rogue Nation, the one where they bombed the Kremlin? It's not. That is actually in Ghost Protocol.

• 1:27:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, okay. And then Ghost Protocol, I mean Rogue Nation, he's hanging on the plane. Is that where there is also like an extended underwater sequence?

• 1:27:50Sean Fennessey?

  There is.

• 1:27:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:51Sean Fennessey?

  Isn't that big circular?

• 1:27:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, see, and I'm like, I don't, I find that boring. So I, I'm okay with.

• 1:27:57Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, you're gonna, so you want to put?

• 1:27:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I'm just saying.

• 1:27:59Sean Fennessey?

  Rogue Nation at four.

• 1:28:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Like Burj Khalifa.

• 1:28:02Sean Fennessey?

  But Rogue Nation's introduction of Ilsa Faust.

• 1:28:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, oh, yeah, when she's like in the desert and just, I mean, that's good. I was just doing some fake punches. That's how I fight. I, I, I don't think I feel very strongly, honestly.

• 1:28:15Sean Fennessey?

  I'll, I'll, I'll let you make the call. You want Rogue Nation to be four?

• 1:28:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, so Ghost Protocol is Burj Khalifa.

• 1:28:21Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm. Jeremy Renner.

• 1:28:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Bombing the Kremlin, Jeremy Renner.

• 1:28:24Sean Fennessey?

  Lea Sedu.

• 1:28:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Paula Patton and Lea Sedu. So that's powerful.

• 1:28:29Sean Fennessey?

  It's Brad Bird as the director. I find the plotting of that movie not great and Burj Khalifa a little overrated. It is iconic, but the scene itself is fine.

• 1:28:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Blue is glue, red is dead is really good.

• 1:28:38Sean Fennessey?

  It is good. Uh, okay, I'll let you have that. That means Ghost Protocol goes to three.

• 1:28:45Sean Fennessey?

  I believe last time we landed on the original Mission Impossible is two behind Fallout.

• 1:28:50Amanda Dobbins?

  We did.

• 1:28:51Sean Fennessey?

  Is that still true? I have not re-watched the original in some time. Even though it is a very, it's a big one for me. And you did get it in our draft.

• 1:29:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I did. I, I do, I do think it's still true. I mean, we, we also just kind of have to stand by our own internal logic of like, I mean.

• 1:29:09Sean Fennessey?

  But knowing what you know now about Don Lo.

• 1:29:12Amanda Dobbins?

  I thought that the Don Lo is the only callback that I actually didn't really mind.

• 1:29:16Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't mind it either. I thought it was kind of fun.

• 1:29:17Amanda Dobbins?

  There was a whole thing where they tried to retrofit Three in where apparently what Ethan was stealing, the rabbit's foot, was actually this code that created the entity, which like, whatever, you know?

• 1:29:30Sean Fennessey?

  That was kind of a low for me.

• 1:29:31Amanda Dobbins?

  That, that plus the, you know, Shay Wiggum stuff, Shay Wiggum innocent. Uh, makes me, I don't know. It didn't work. Mission Impossible one and all of the Don Lo stuff I liked. And they like use effectively, but I still just think in terms of like pure action.

• 1:29:50Sean Fennessey?

  Fallout.

• 1:29:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:51Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Well, here are our official rankings before we wrap up this conversation.

• 1:29:56Sean Fennessey?

  Number eight is Mission Impossible two. I'm sorry to John Woo. It's just a fact. Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning is seven.

• 1:30:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Sean Fennessey?

  Mission Impossible three is six. Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning, No Longer Part One is five. Mission Impossible Rogue Nation is four. Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol is three. Mission Impossible from 1996 is two. Mission Impossible Fallout is number one. So this series won't be back.

• 1:30:23Amanda Dobbins?

  So they say.

• 1:30:24Sean Fennessey?

  Paramount is now owned by Skydance and David Ellison.

• 1:30:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Did, that finally went through?

• 1:30:29Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:30:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Cause they saved, they caved and everything?

• 1:30:31Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it seems like it's gonna happen.

• 1:30:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it definitely seems like they're gonna, I, it feels like we're recording this on Thursday night before Memorial Day and it seems like we'll find out tomorrow.

• 1:30:38Sean Fennessey?

  Um, certainly feels in play. Now, obviously, Skydance is a participant in the Mission Impossible movies. In fact, this is among the most successful things that they've ever done. It's kind of like bringing this series back in a big way and Macquarie being a big part of that. So I'm not ruling out.

• 1:30:54Sean Fennessey?

  Nine happening. Do you think he would ever pass the baton? There was the aborted baton pass with Renner.

• 1:31:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:31:01Sean Fennessey?

  We dodged a bullet, in my opinion, in that one.

• 1:31:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I, listen, I'm, I'm glad that we got Fallout. You know, I'm glad that we have this moment with Tom Cruise. I don't think it was like his proudest moment in.

• 1:31:14Sean Fennessey?

  Snatching it back?

• 1:31:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, so I was like, it was a little, oh, boy, this is, this is desperate. I, I don't think he will.

• 1:31:23Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 1:31:24Amanda Dobbins?

  I, maybe he just recruits, you know, in the same way with Maverick. I guess he'll hand it off, maybe he'll hand it off to like several people all at once, but it doesn't work.

• 1:31:35Sean Fennessey?

  It never works.

• 1:31:35Amanda Dobbins?

  So, no, he's not gonna let another guy be the guy. Come on.

• 1:31:40Sean Fennessey?

  The extraordinary balance of giving credit to everyone else and the psychotic, wonderful ego that powers these movies. It's very, very unique. Anything else you want to share?

• 1:31:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I had fun.

• 1:31:53Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:31:54Amanda Dobbins?

  And this was fun. Do you think that the people listening at home enjoyed this? Or do you think they just like didn't like the movie and.

• 1:31:59Sean Fennessey?

  Me, I can tell they never do.

• 1:32:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:32:01Sean Fennessey?

  And yet the show continues apace. So, um, I appreciate those, the silent majority of listeners who really love this show and don't share any feedback about that. Thank you to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on this episode. I hope people have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. We have not said the words Lilo and Stitch yet on this episode. That is the other major film that is opening this weekend, and I suspect it will absolutely destroy Mission Impossible at the box office, based on the early projections. Next week on the show, on Memorial Day, we will unveil our latest 25 for 25 installment. No clues for that one.

• 1:32:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:32:39Sean Fennessey?

  And then on Wednesday, we will have seen Lilo and Stitch. I'm not sure if I have a whole episode on Lilo and Stitch in me. But I wonder if there is something to be said about the children's entertainment right now.

• 1:32:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, we can do that, but also what about friendship?

• 1:32:54Sean Fennessey?

  And friendship, of course. So do you think people are gonna see it? This is the new Tim Robinson, Paul.

• 1:32:58Amanda Dobbins?

  They have been seeing it in very small doses, but it does go wider.

• 1:33:02Sean Fennessey?

  Did you see it?

• 1:33:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I did see it.

• 1:33:03Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 1:33:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, so I'm ready.

• 1:33:05Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:33:05Amanda Dobbins?

  So.

• 1:33:05Sean Fennessey?

  Well, then we'll talk about friendship. So if people can see friendship, they should see it. Do you think Friendship and Lilo and Stitch were well matched?

• 1:33:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I haven't seen Lilo and Stitch yet, but in a, in a way, I guess it is about-

• 1:33:17Sean Fennessey?

  Have you not seen the animated film?

• 1:33:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I have, and I was just about to say it's about unlikely friends who are perhaps struggling to fit in in the world around them and find each other and then-

• 1:33:32Sean Fennessey?

  Does that remind you of anyone?

• 1:33:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I mean, I, see, I saw Friendship while you were on your golf trip, so that's-

• 1:33:43Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:43Amanda Dobbins?

  I have thought a lot about that.

• 1:33:45Sean Fennessey?

  The pinnacle of male loneliness.

• 1:33:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:47Sean Fennessey?

  Amidst the pinnacle of male loneliness.

• 1:33:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:50Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you for listening to the show. We'll see you guys next week. Thanks for trusting us one last time. Last time.

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