Well, fair enough.

More correct ranking:

However I end up ranking them, once I get around to it.

Actually I'm fine with what Jay said, except flip Ghost Protocol and the original movie.

Basically the top tier should be 1,3,5 and 6. They're all pretty damn good so there is wiggle room there.

Then the lower tier should 2 and 4, with 2 at the bottom.

And then there's these two more recent ones which I haven't seen so who cares about those.

So what was the problem with MI:2? Do you guys think it's bad or just the weakest amongst a group of pretty strong movies?

I remember the summer it came out, everyone I knew who liked action movies thought it was pretty dope.

I didn't see it until years later, on a small screen, which might have been part of the problem. Without the big-screen spectacle, it came off to me as a really generic action movie. The "spy movie" genre elements were pretty much stripped away -- no twists and turns to the plot, no clever use of gadgets, no espionage.

Also thought the dialogue was dumb, though I guess that is subjective, since arguably all these genre movies have corny dialogue when you get down to it. I just remember a lot of eye-rolling lines in MI2, which isn't the case (for me at least) with the other ones.

It's been so long I can't remember any specific lines but I googled and found this exchange:

"She's not trained for this."
"To go to bed with a man and lie to him? She's a woman, she's got all the training she needs."

Maybe with Jon Cryer, Charlie Sheen and a laugh track, that dialogue would work, but not in a Mission Impossible movie, THANK YOU VERY MUCH

I think in addition to being the weakest of the movies (not awful, just relatively weak) it also kind of suffers from being an outlier in that it doesn't really even feel like it's part of the same series as the others.

With every other movie in the series, they all feel like the same world and characters, even if you do have to squint a LITTLE bit at times. M:I 2 feels like it's in an entirely different world than the original DePalma film or the subsequent films which heavily wear the stamp of J.J. Abrams and Christopher McQuarrie.

Unlike all the other movies, the events of M:I 2 were never acknowledged or referred to at all in the subsequent sequels until the ultra-brief clips in The Final Reckoning. It's kind of like Star Trek: The Motion Picture in that regard.

It's kind of like Star Trek: The Next Generation. Although it's in many ways superior, it will never be as recognized as the original.

Wait, the new movie incorporates clips from MI2?

SCREW THAT NOISE

MI:2 was a John Woo movie more than a Mission Impossible movie, I felt. And not a particularly good John Woo movie either.

Guess I'll share my thoughts and my franchise ranking.

I did enjoy the movie a lot and have seen it twice, with plans to see it at least one more time on the big screen because this franchise has earned it. But I also felt it was about a half hour too long and overindulged itself way too much with callbacks to earlier movies in the series. The two major setpieces were great and I really wish I could see the movie on an IMAX screen, especially for the finale, although I did think it was kind of ludicrous, even for this series, the amount of things the movie asked us to believe did not shake Ethan Hunt from Gabriel's plane.

I'm going to spoil my next comment for the sake of Ocean Doot who has not yet seen this film or the previous one:



Also,



I do love that McQuarrie brought back Henry Czerny as Kittridge for the last 2 movies and I wish he had been a bigger part of the series all along.

I personally feel that Esai Morales actually was a terrific villain, or at least he could have been, but for the fact that the movie removes him from the board for most of the running time between the beginning and the end. He was a very charismatic villain on Ozark and I found him very magnetic in the two "Reckoning" movies but he was such a reduced presence. But the Entity itself was also a drastically reduced presence in this movie compared to the previous one as well. As it stands, I think Solomon Lane and Owen Davian stand alone as the franchise's best villains.

Pound for pound, I still believe that this is the best film series ever. Other series have some better movies but none has the standard of quality this one does, even with its weakest movie (M:I 2). For what it's worth, here are my rankings:

Rogue Nation (****)
Fallout (***1/2)
Mission: Impossible (***1/2)
Dear Reckoning (***)
Mission: Impossible III (***)
The Final Reckoning (***)
Ghost Protocol (**1/2)
Mission: Impossible 2 (**1/2)

I had the same feeling and even had it when they showed a montage of Ethan being blasted away by explosions and such at the beginning of the film. The number of concussions he would have sustained in that montage alone, lol.



100% agree and I didn't know that.

He struck me as bland, but maybe if I saw him in other things that gravitas would have carried over to this role. It would have been impossible to plan this far out ahead, but it would have been cool if they had been dropping hints and sowing the seeds for the final confrontation between Hunt and Gabriel earlier in the series. Even if they had laid those seeds when McQuarrie took over, it would have been an amazing build-up. But again, I know that it's purely hindsight talking and not feasible in the real world.

By the way, this is my favorite current movie franchise.

By some margin, for me. I haven't seen this one yet, bur I will see it FO SHO and I have enjoyed every single episode. Like Jeff, though, I couldn't tell you what the plot was in each movie, but the set pieces and the acting are in another league.

I like the one where IMF was compromised.

Or how about the one where Ethan is disavowed? What a twist!

Don't sleep on that dramatic moment where a character who looked like Tom Cruise in disguise turned out to be Tom Cruise in disguise!

If you guys really loved these movies you would stop making fun of them, thanks.

You guys are forgetting the one where Tom Cruise runs incredibly fast.

Or how about that time Cruise stared at someone in a creepy, weird way?

I SAID STOP IT YOU GUYS

I just hope for his sake he's taking good care of that hidden portrait of him looking his real age. If it's ever destroyed, he's going to be in real trouble.