Knee-jerk review: "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One"

1. That title is a mouthful, huh?
2. The finale with the train, as you may have heard, is a total knockout.  What an ending.
3. All of the more recent Mission: Impossible movies - that is, everything that came after the J.J. Abrams' very decent Mission: Impossible III - are fantastic and thrilling, but also mostly interchangeable.  Don't ask us to explain the plots (or even the nonsensical titles that sound cool but rarely describe the movies) because most of us know by now that the storylines exist solely to connect the big action set pieces.
4. We must deduct points for the fact that these movies eventually fall back on the "agents gone rogue" premise so that our heroes have to execute their impossible mission while evading both the bad guys and also the good guys who Don't Understand What's Really Going On.
5. We love that the Mission: Impossible films always include a TV-show-style credit sequence with the theme song blasting and lots of quick action cuts of the movie we're about to see, as if it's something we just tuned into on ABC in 1974.  It always gives us goosebumps.
6. We honestly could not follow the plot here.  Eventually, we gave up trying to work out who was doing what to who and why.  Spy movies can be complicated, sure, but it's not good when they're totally obtuse.
7. The cruciform key gimmick was clever, though.
8. Strange that someone so familiar with Impossible Mission Force shenanigans would fall for the mask gimmick, which is surely the IMF's most renowned trick.
9. As smart as these movies can be, we still have a hard time watching Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg hack any system anywhere in the world at will with just a few keystrokes.
10. No spoilers, but the way the movie callously disposes of a heretofore key member of the team felt to us not only completely pointless but disrespectful to the character.  We're hoping the next movie somehow rectifies that.
11. New movie star crush: Hayley Atwell.
12. A lot was made in the marketing about this supposed death-defying motorcycle/parachute stunt that Tom Cruise performs for the movie.  We don't doubt the danger or the skill required, but viewed in the scope of everything we've seen in this franchise and considered from a purely visual perspective, that jump might not even crack the top ten Mission: Impossible stunt moments.  It's impressive, but we didn't get a sense it was somehow unprecedented or historical when we saw it.
13. Cruise is 61 now and getting a little long in the tooth for this sort of thing, but there's no reason he can't start to take a more passive mentor role in the franchise, recruiting and teaching a new generation of heroes.
14. The filmmakers did Rebecca Ferguson's character wrong.  Not cool.
15. It's pretty good, but not great.  It's the first Mission: Impossible movie from writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (this is his third) that doesn't feel like a slam dunk.

Our current rankings:
1. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) - the one where Tom Cruise climbed the skyscraper
2. Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) - the one with the dueling helicopters
3. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) - the one with the opera assassination attempt
4. (tie) Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) - the one with the train ending
4. (tie) Mission: Impossible III (2006) - the one with the Rabbit's Foot MacGuffin
6. Mission: Impossible (1996) - the one with Tom Cruise suspended over the floor
7. Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) - the one that John Woo directed

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Knee-jerk review: "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"

1. It's pretty good.  Definitely an upgrade from 2008's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which was a complete mess.  This one should have been the fourth one.
2. We really don't understand the bad reviews.  Were expectations too high?  
3. The biggest criticism we could maybe offer is the whole question of why it was made.  But should that sort of thing factor into a review of the quality of the finished film?  Should critics focus only on the art or should they take into account the narrative surrounding how and why the art was created?
4. The movie certainly embraces Harrison Ford's age (he's 80).  We noticed several shots of Indy walking away from the camera linger on his old man shuffle-limp and there's more than one scuffle that a younger Raiders of the Lost Ark-era Indy would have been handled no problem, but here he's surprisingly weak and clumsy.
5. We're not sure about including another underage, Short Round-style, street kid sidekick.
6. We heard the ending was wild, but it's... really wild.  We figured we had an idea what to expect, but we were totally wrong.  It's fun to be surprised.
7. The train prologue may go on a little too long, but it's a slam-bang action sequence very much in line with what you'd see in the earlier movies.
8. The last scene got to us. We didn't have to wipe a tear, but we sure came close.  You'll know it when you see it.
9. Another great "Indy's getting old" moment comes when he's giving a lecture to a classroom full of bored students, a stark contrast to the students (especially the female students making goo-goo eyes) in the earlier movies who were paying rapt attention.
10. Then again, as a friend pointed out, hitting the "Indy's getting old" angle so hard may be a turnoff for some.  Who wants to spend two hours contemplating the looming mortality of one of Hollywood's greatest hero characters?
11. There's also the issue of whether younger moviegoers even know who Indiana Jones is.  We took the Little Fries to see it, but would they have gone on their own if given a choice?  We've dutifully showed them the first three movies, which they liked, but it's not really in their bones like it is might be for Generation X who came of age with Indiana Jones.
12. They cast Antonio Banderas for that role?  
13. It's good that they also gave a strong arc to Phoebe Waller-Bridger's character, who starts the movie undertaking these adventures solely as a way to get rich and get out of debt.  Shades of Han Solo, in fact.
14. The "de-aging" CGI magic that creates new flashback footage of Harrison Ford as he looked thirty years ago is pretty good, but it still has a bit of that "uncanny valley" quality at times.  That said, you get used to it pretty quickly.  It does the trick.
15. It's not an Indiana Jones movie without him riding on a horse, deciphering some crazy clues in an ancient language, or crawling through a booby-trapped underground catacomb.  Check, check, and... check.

Updated Indiana Jones movie rankings -
1. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), obviously
2. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), obviously
3. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), by a hair and if you argued Dial of Destiny is better we wouldn't argue
4. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
and then...
5. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) - we still can't believe that stupid title

Our (current) favorite Indiana Jones quotes - if you know, you know
* "He chose... poorly."
* "It's not the years, honey.  It's the mileage."
* "It belongs in a museum!"
* "Give me the whip!"
* "Nothing to fear here." "That's what scares me."
* "Indiana, let it go."
* "You lost today, kid, but that doesn't mean you have to like it."
* "Bad dates."
* "I don't know, I'm making this up as I go."
* "Snakes.  Why did it have to be snakes?"

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