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LesterGroans posted:Yeah, it's actually a cool series in the sense that the first 3 or 4 movies are very stylistically different from each other. It makes sense that it's Tom Cruise's pet franchise, because until recently he seemed to be all about working with a wide range of filmmakers and rarely repeating. Even the latest one is different from those that came before it. I feel like there was a bet between some people to see whether you could do a Mission Impossible movie where Ethan barely uses a gun. I think the finale is the only real shootout in the whole thing, the rest of it is chase scenes and that really elaborate opera sequence. Hoffman was a shockingly good anything. The dude was loving amazing and he was a real loss.
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Jan 15, 2018 00:07
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I miss him
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Jan 15, 2018 00:46
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Snowman_McK posted:Even the latest one is different from those that came before it. I feel like there was a bet between some people to see whether you could do a Mission Impossible movie where Ethan barely uses a gun. I think the finale is the only real shootout in the whole thing, the rest of it is chase scenes and that really elaborate opera sequence. Yeah, it does its own thing. I do enjoy it, but it definitely feels like it used Ghost Protocol as a template whereas the others are just "I'm gonna do my own Mission Impossible". That opera scene rules. sponges posted:I miss him His death really bummed me out. We missed out on like 30+ years of amazing PSH performances.
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Jan 15, 2018 04:35
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Rogue Nation is the best and is just a really solid action/spy movie that is pure entertainment. The others are good too, MI:2 in particular is an acquired taste, as one of Woo's hollywood movies it's got a lot of style. All of them though have the benefit of Cruise throwing endless enthusiasm into the role and of course doing as much of his own stunts and running as possible and it shows.
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Jan 15, 2018 05:10
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That very long shot of Cruise running down a street in China in III had me convinced for some reason that CGI or special effects were somehow involved. Nope. Pure Cruise. It was the first time I appreciated how loving much that guy loves running.
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Jan 15, 2018 05:12
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I also find it particularly impressive how he held his breath for real for 6 minutes for the underwater scene in Rogue nation. The man is dedicated to getting the shot
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Jan 15, 2018 05:25
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It occurs to me that at one point the legit action stars were muscle cut man beefs in Arnold and Sly then we went into martial dudes in Jackie Chan then to angry old men in Liam Neeson and now to athletic dudes who can pull off Wick action.
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Jan 15, 2018 05:28
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Wandle Cax posted:I also find it particularly impressive how he held his breath for real for 6 minutes for the underwater scene in Rogue nation. The man is dedicated to getting the shot Wait, for real? That's amazing. You could throw his Japanese martial arts and firearms training on that list as well.
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Jan 15, 2018 05:36
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Gatts posted:It occurs to me that at one point the legit action stars were muscle cut man beefs in Arnold and Sly then we went into martial dudes in Jackie Chan then to angry old men in Liam Neeson and now to athletic dudes who can pull off Wick action. In the Total Recall remake there are these robot troopers whose durability and capability varies often based on what the plot needs to happen. But there's this one particular moment where one of them gets close to our hero and he just sort of, like, pulls its chest off like he's unplugging a USB cord and it dies immediately. It made me laugh because it was totally a moment you can tell they designed with the idea of having an actor that was physically imposing do as a feat of strength compared to how tough the robots seem otherwise.
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Jan 15, 2018 06:42
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Wandle Cax posted:The others are good too, MI:2 in particular is an acquired taste, as one of Woo's hollywood movies it's got a lot of style. I think Face/Off is John Woo's best Hollywood movie. Of those I've seen, I'd put Face/Off first, Hard Target second (I feel like it's more of a Jean Clade Van Damme movie than a John Woo movie, though), Broken Arrow third and Paycheck fourth after a pretty big gap (it's an okay movie and it's got that one face-to-face arm's-length Mexican standoff Woo loves, but I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it again). As I mentioned, I haven't seen all of Mission: Impossible 2 and I haven't seen that one with Christian Slater and Morgan Freeman but I have heard it's not very good.
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Jan 15, 2018 10:04
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Mission Impossible: 2 would be a lot easier to watch if it was like, twenty minutes shorter. It’s really bloated and has some serious pacing issues. And it doesn’t really go full Woo until the very end when there is a motorcycle fight scene. I’ll always have a soft spot for Face/Off, but Hard Target is my favorite American Woo joint. Van Damme in his spin-kickiest prime, Lance Henrikson playing to the rafters, Wilfred Brimley doing a Cajun accent, snake punching. What’s not to love?
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Jan 15, 2018 15:16
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I watched all of the "making of" stuff for Rogue Nation. Cruise and the director admitted that they designed the action scenes first, and then built a plot around those. And Cruise demonstrated in front of the cast/crew that yes, he really can hold his breath for 6 minutes, and brought in the Army diving instructors to teach the leading lady how to do it, too. (And get a refresher course, himself. The man's insane, but not about safety.) My review of the series is #1 has a plot, but by #3 it is all about this gleeful maniac doing crazy stunts. The stunts are definitely worth watching. I think I'll dust my copies off. I know this is heresy to people who prefer the books, but I like Cruise in the Jack Reacher movies, too. He works really hard to make you forget that he isn't 6'4" and blond, does a bit more acting and a bit less "gleeful maniac" stuntwork. Lee Child has a cameo in each movie, too. Yes, I have a bunch of the books on my ereader, but I've only read 3 so far. Murder Hobo For Justice.
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Jan 15, 2018 22:08
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Fart City posted:Mission Impossible: 2 would be a lot easier to watch if it was like, twenty minutes shorter. It’s really bloated and has some serious pacing issues. And it doesn’t really go full Woo until the very end when there is a motorcycle fight scene. and the goddamn mummy is their henchman!!!!
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Jan 15, 2018 22:11
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I've only ever seen one Tom Cruise movie in the cinema and it was Knight and Day. There's a movie that starts off promisingly and which I remember being pretty fun for its first half with Tom Cruise playing a seemingly cracked secret agent, but then in the second half it burns out and becomes a generic spy movie.
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Jan 15, 2018 22:15
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M:I1 is more about tension and suspense until the finale on the train, which actually stands up really well even today because A: DePalma knows what he's doing, and B: it was heavily dependent on CGI at a time when ILM had to work really hard just to make the shots possible (as in T2, Jurassic Park and the other early, ground-breaking stuff they did in CG), so put in a massive amount of effort to polish them. I'll brush over that as a fan of the original show making Phelps the loving villain rather pissed me off at the time. M:I2 is overlong and if anything too Woo, almost to the point of self-parody, but hey, it's still John Woo cutting loose with a mega-budget. And Cruise had a real knife less than an inch from his eyeball (on a safety wire, but I sure as hell wouldn't chance it). M:I3... eh. Everyone has different tastes, and I just didn't like it. You could tell JJ Abrams was coming from TV even if you didn't know anything about him - the action is too small, for want of a better word. It's also a precursor to a style of modern storytelling that as a writer I loving despise: the 'mystery box'. A Macguffin is one thing, but hanging your entire movie on something that the hero never learns what it is, the audience never does either, and the writer/director never bothered to think up because he thought it would be oh-so-clever to keep it hidden is lazy and insulting. M:I4 - if I didn't like the first one so much, this would be the best of the series. As a former animation director, Brad Bird basically treated his action sequences as if they were being planned down to the frame, and it works fantastically. It's not until the very end that it starts to feel like cartoony overkill, but the ride to that point has been so much fun that he gets away with it. M:I5 is... just sort of there. I honestly can't remember too much about it, except that the gag where Cruise and Pegg's car keeps flipping over and over and over went on way too long, without going all the way around to the other side like Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes.
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Jan 15, 2018 22:21
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Wheat Loaf posted:I've only ever seen one Tom Cruise movie in the cinema and it was Knight and Day. There's a movie that starts off promisingly and which I remember being pretty fun for its first half with Tom Cruise playing a seemingly cracked secret agent, but then in the second half it burns out and becomes a generic spy movie. Yeah, the first Jack Reacher is a much better Tom Cruise action hero piss-take than Knight and Day, but it's still kind of watchable.
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Jan 15, 2018 22:26
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While we're at it LIVE.DIE.REPEAT: Edge of Tomorrow is perhaps the ultimate cruise action film. He makes fun of himself by being a loser at the beginning but still gets to be the action hero by the end. There is big sci fi action but still lots of practical stunts he did. The plot revolves around a world ending threat but still revolves around one man saving it, with a sci-fi twist.
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Jan 15, 2018 22:52
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Fart City posted:Mission Impossible: 2 would be a lot easier to watch if it was like, twenty minutes shorter. It’s really bloated and has some serious pacing issues. And it doesn’t really go full Woo until the very end when there is a motorcycle fight scene. Hard Target also contains a short sequence that is just perfect. Van Damme shoots a guy a lot, spin kicks him, then shoots another guy, spin kicks him, then the first guy gets back up and gets shot some more. It's amazing Wandle Cax posted:While we're at it LIVE.DIE.REPEAT: Edge of Tomorrow is perhaps the ultimate cruise action film. He makes fun of himself by being a loser at the beginning but still gets to be the action hero by the end. There is big sci fi action but still lots of practical stunts he did. The plot revolves around a world ending threat but still revolves around one man saving it, with a sci-fi twist. If Edge of Tomorrow had had a slightly better ending and aliens that leant themselves more to action choreography, it would have been perfect. It is pretty drat good.
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Jan 15, 2018 23:59
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Yeah the aliens are a bit uninspired and I suppose the ending doesn't quite live up to the inventiveness of the rest of the plot but it's the best sci-fi action movie of recent times for sure. Also the sound effects are amazing, definitely the most aggressive sounding film i've tried on my system ever. e.g. when Cruise blows up that big alien with the landmine the noise is ear melting
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Jan 16, 2018 01:12
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Edge of Tomorrow was good but it would've been so much better if it had done the climax and ending of the book (They have to fight each other to the death to finally seal the time loop) I liked both Jack Reacher movies. The gunfights were pretty cool and realistic and Cruise really sells Reacher as a badass.
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Jan 16, 2018 10:33
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Going back to my earlier post, does Tom Cruise own part of Mission Impossible? It's the only way I can think of that would give him as much control over the franchise as he seems to have.
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Jan 16, 2018 11:07
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The first Jack Reacher is worth watching just for the novelty of Werner Friggin Herzog playing the heavy in an American action movie.
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Jan 16, 2018 15:21
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The Keysi Fighting Method in Jack Reacher is very bad. I hope that fad is dead now.
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Jan 16, 2018 15:31
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Halloween Jack posted:The Keysi Fighting Method in Jack Reacher is very bad. I hope that fad is dead now. I would kill to see a Tom Cruise action movie where the "fighting style" is Cruise 100% committing to having fight scenes built around him using Yanagi Ryuken's nonsense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdUxPLIJVgI (it's a bit less useful in an actual situation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jf3Gc2a0_8
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Jan 16, 2018 16:51
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Halloween Jack posted:The Keysi Fighting Method in Jack Reacher is very bad. I hope that fad is dead now. Were you the one that typed up that hilarious post about KFM?
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Jan 16, 2018 16:52
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I like the Keysi Fighting Method a lot honestly because it has the potential to look really cool in an action movie, but it was completely superfluous in the Nolan movies because of how the action was filmed.
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Jan 16, 2018 17:16
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Were you the one that typed up that hilarious post about KFM?
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Jan 16, 2018 17:19
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Halloween Jack posted:Was it hilarious? Because I figured it was going to come off as extremely nerdy. I don't even train, brah. no it ruled
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Jan 16, 2018 17:40
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Is that the one where Hitler shows up at the end in a wheelchair? Fantasy Mission Force (the only Jackie Chan film I’ve seen) ends with Jackie Chan fighting Roman gladiators that show up in cars with swastikas on the sides. That movie’s a loving trip. Payndz posted:On a sidenote, watching a load of awesome Jackie Chan fight scenes led me by the wonder of YouTube algorithms to the T-1000/young T-800/old T-800 fight from Terminator Genisys (my phone's autocorrect loving hated that last word), and god drat, the CG was weightless and lovely. I know it's almost a lame old-man cliche to criticise CGI, but the acid-damaged T-1000 looked like Gumby, and having the endoskeleton flail around like a skip-framed ninja did the exact opposite of making it more scary. Why are there so few directors able to go "y'know, heavy stuff has momentum. We should maybe simulate that?" The whole of Terminator: Genisys was a blank void, not even JK Simmons stood out. Wandle Cax posted:While we're at it LIVE.DIE.REPEAT: Edge of Tomorrow is perhaps the ultimate cruise action film. He makes fun of himself by being a loser at the beginning but still gets to be the action hero by the end. There is big sci fi action but still lots of practical stunts he did. The plot revolves around a world ending threat but still revolves around one man saving it, with a sci-fi twist. Live. Die. Repeat./Edge Of Tomorrow/All You Need Is Kill is pretty solid until the final act where it removes its gimmick and becomes a lot more boring/less funny. Wheat Loaf posted:Going back to my earlier post, does Tom Cruise own part of Mission Impossible? It's the only way I can think of that would give him as much control over the franchise as he seems to have. I want to say Cruise is one of those stars who’s so big, he’s given a lot of creative control over any movie he’s in, including writing and direction.
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Jan 16, 2018 17:47
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at them burning every scrap of flesh from the 'young' T-800 in about five seconds flat so they didn't have to spend any more time and money on their CG Arnold.
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Cruise has some control, not sure how much. But he's the reason Christopher McQuarrie is helming the franchise now, writing and directing Rogue Nation and the next one coming out.
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Jan 16, 2018 17:54
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X-Ray Pecs posted:I want to say Cruise is one of those stars who’s so big, he’s given a lot of creative control over any movie he’s in, including writing and direction. True, we all heard a lot about that over the failure of The Mummy last year (lol remember the Dark Universe). Still, I feel like I read once that Cruise himself owns part of the franchise or owns the film rights for Mission Impossible. I could well be misinformed, though. Haha, Dark Universe.
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Jan 16, 2018 17:56
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From what I understand Cruise 100% controls Mission Impossible, his production company has owned it basically since the beginning. If I remember correctly he sought out De Palma and personally hired him for Mission Impossible. It's easy to forget just how long Cruise has been on top. In 1996 he already had tons of money and clout and so he basically decided to start taking more direct control of his career.
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Jan 16, 2018 17:56
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X-Ray Pecs posted:The whole of Terminator: Genisys was a blank void, not even JK Simmons stood out. Yup. I actually liked that movie more than most but I still have no desire to see it again, but it was a fun enough way to kill some time. It's funny though, the T-1000 effect looking so bad is partially just because its only in the movie very briefly and, on top of that, we see it for several seconds in one shot. There's a commentary/making of stuff for Terminator 3 where they talk about this a bit. The T-1000 left such an impact that it was basically mandated that they had to have some kind of take on the T-1000 shapeshifting in the movie. So they do, and it looks like crap because of the need to top how stuff is done in the previous flicks. So while a lot of the T-1000s in T2 stuff actually happens off screen, and a lot of practical things are involved with it mixed in with the CG, and is often show up close and briefly, Terminator 3 has that HORRIBLE shot of the T-X changing its outer form while walking forward in full daylight all in one shot and it just looks terrible. And that's even in a movie that, while it has some other questionable CG moments, generally has great effects both practical and CG. I'm sure the Genisys T-1000 was born of the same mentality of both evoke Terminator 2, but trying to raise the stakes also. We see the same thing with Arnold's resurrection at the end. But Genisys had a ton of crappy effects in general, the entire helicopter chase to bridge/bus confrontation was REALLY bad. Though I will say to their credit, the shot of SkyNet John struggling to walk away from the MRI and him leaving shadows of himself behind made up of hordes of nanomachine is legit striking and something I've never seen anything quite like in any movie. Probably the best scene in Genisys and would have been a worthy final death scene effect instead of what we got. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Jan 16, 2018 |
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Jan 16, 2018 17:57
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I’m trying to remember anything about Genisys beyond Arnold and Jai Courtney loading bullets into magazines while listening to The Ramones, but I got nothing.
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Jan 16, 2018 18:02
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There's a genuinely impressive lack of chemistry between every single actor in the movie so it being unmemorable is not surprising.
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Jan 16, 2018 18:04
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Neo Rasa posted:Though I will say to their credit, the shot of SkyNet John struggling to walk away from the MRI and him leaving shadows of himself behind made up of hordes of nanomachine is legit striking and something I've never seen anything quite like in any movie. Probably the best scene in Genisys and would have been a worthy final death scene effect instead of what we got. Yeah that was super-dope, if the movie had more stuff like that it would have been better. Another thing I found strange was the whole T-800 Young Arnie scene, the punks were costumed correctly but literally had nothing else right about them - wrong hair, too much makeup, different (weaker) acting choices....just bizarre to put huge amounts of money into a stoic CGI Arnold and then surround him with clowns.
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Jan 16, 2018 18:15
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Neo Rasa posted:There's a genuinely impressive lack of chemistry between every single actor in the movie so it being unmemorable is not surprising. To bring it back to M:I chat, this was one of my main complaints with M:I 3 having rewatched it a couple weeks ago. It was the only one not fresh in my mind. Overall I think the franchise is top notch and #3 is certainly very good but the rest of the team didn't really sit right with me. Maybe my hindsight of the future instalments is skewing my opinion but Maggie Q and Rhys Meyers seemed disposable. Or it could be that the plot essentially gets rid of the team and makes it only about Ethan once the bridge scene is over.
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Jan 16, 2018 18:24
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Halloween Jack posted:Was it hilarious? Because I figured it was going to come off as extremely nerdy. I don't even train, brah. Nah, it was really funny.
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Jan 16, 2018 19:10
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Neo Rasa posted:I like the Keysi Fighting Method a lot honestly because it has the potential to look really cool in an action movie, but it was completely superfluous in the Nolan movies because of how the action was filmed. I'm glad Dunkirk turned out well because I was almost convinced Nolan didn't know how to shoot action.
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Jan 16, 2018 19:11
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I'm glad Dunkirk turned out well because I was almost convinced Nolan didn't know how to shoot action. I didn't mind it as much in Begins as much because you could at least sort of see what they were going for. But  the boxing match at the end of Dark Knight Rises.I still have to see Dunkirk.
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Jan 16, 2018 19:19
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