Tag: Mission: Impossible

Every Mission: Impossible Movie Ranked, From Worst to Best

Where does Tom Cruise’s latest, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout,” rank among the six films?

Did anyone ever expect the “Mission: Impossible” franchise to have this much longevity? In every movie, Tom Cruise dons a ridiculous prosthetic mask, pulls off an impossible heist and even ends up forking over the thing he just stole to the very person he’s trying to keep it from in the first place. But across 22 years, six films and five directors, each “Mission: Impossible” movie has varied wildly in tone, style and cast while pushing the limits of wacky, action set pieces and preserving the tongue-in-cheek spirit of the original TV series. With “Mission: Impossible – Fallout,” the sixth film in Cruise and Paramount’s franchise hitting theaters Friday, we chose to accept this nearly impossible mission of trying to decide which ones we like best. This list will self destruct in five seconds. Continue reading “Every Mission: Impossible Movie Ranked, From Worst to Best”

In Need of a Franchise

There is currently a lack of a compelling action franchise in Hollywood today that isn’t attached to a book or superhero.

We need a hero.

The American movie going audience has plenty of them in spandex and intergalactic armor, but like Batman at the end of “The Dark Knight,” they’re not the heroes we need right now.

American cinema currently lacks a quality, classical, legacy franchise. We have plenty of franchises constantly in production, but very few of them match the action movie template of the ‘80s and early ‘90s that were unadulterated fun and were marketed to people other than ravenous fanboys.

These movies were original ideas that didn’t draw from comic books, graphic novels, teen romance novels or TV shows. But what’s more, they featured men and women without superpowers or futuristic gizmos who performed stunts that were ridiculous, but at least they were down to Earth. They were fun and only rarely something more. Continue reading “In Need of a Franchise”