DAC Episode 427 - Now You See Me (2013)
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four messes in trim suits.
DAC Episode 426 - The Forbidden City (2025)
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she’s here to mess up your game.
DAC Episode 425 - Clue (1985)
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five people waiting for craft services.
DAC Episode 416 - Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)
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what is going on with ethan’s hair in this movie? It’s not the crewcut-adjacent trims of 1,3,5 and 7. it’s not the gorgeous flop of 2,4 and 6. this shaggy deal looks like it’s trying to integrate both sides of the hunthair persona. pick a lane, hunt. a solomon lane.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is unhinged. It insists that it’s a separate entity from Dead Reckoning Part One but spends most of its runtime answering the questions posed in its predecessor. It wants to be a genuine finale to the franchise but leaves the door wide open for more installments. Its prologue is a full 30 minutes’ worth of flashbacks within flashbacks that serve to explain things that are also happening in the prologue? The pacing is an absolute mess, the dialogue is agonizingly self-serious, and the final aerial action sequence is upstaged by an underwater action sequence from earlier in the film.
But here’s the thing: if you watch this with Dead Reckoning (Part One!) fresh in your memory, it’s good. It’s good, actually! I never thought I’d type those words. But here we are. Also, the underwater action sequence with Cruise swimming through an abandoned submarine? One of the greatest things I’ve ever seen in a movie. Seriously.
DAC Episode 415 - Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (lol) (2023)
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woah fellas, let’s not bother hayley atwell, she’s blameless here
The best thing about the seventh installment of the Mission: Impossible is its strange status as ‘Part One’ of a one-part story. The eighth movie, when it eventually arrived, had grown a protective shell around itself during the many delays in its production, leaving part one wriggling and vulnerable, a larva of pure setup crawling blindly in circles in search of payoff.
In Dead Reckoning Part One Of One, Ethan Hunt finally encounters an enemy that poses a challenge to his bottomless well of will and resourcefulness: a superbeing called The Entity. It’s an AI that wants… wait, what does it want? Why is it doing all the weird stuff that it’s doing? Why is anything at all happening as it does? I guess we’ll find out in Part Two! Womp-womp. Listen below or find us on your podcaster of choice.
DAC Episode 414 - Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)
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footloose, footloose, kick off your sunday shoes
Children, gather ‘round, and I will tell you of a time before plagues and strikes, before LLMs crawled over our data like soul-eating spiders, back when greedy corporations made honest blockbusters, the kind you could see in an actual movie theatre. The very last of those films was called Mission: Impossible - Fallout, and it starred a man who fell from planes and ran on roofs and wrestled men in bathrooms. His name is lost to history, but people knew him as ‘Mr. Movies’. They say he ate a dozen buckets of popcorn per day. Some say he is still alive, having transcended his physical body and existing as a beam of light that shows a constantly repeating image of a train arriving at a station.
DAC Episode 413 - Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)
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when your trying to survive a high-speed chase but your knee is soooo itchy.
Has superspy ETHAN HUNT finally met his MATCH in nasally toned apostate SOLOMON LANE???
No.
DAC Episode 412 - Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)
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ethan hunt struggling with ethan hunt for ethan hunt supremacy.
More like GOAT Protocol, amirite? The last MI installment before the McQuarrie half of the franchise, Ghost Protocol is a banger of a blockbuster. A blocker of a bustbanger? A buster of a bangblocker? Whatever, it’s great.
Let me outline the greatness for you: Tom Cruise has let his hair grow out again. This is always a win. The action sequences and stunt setpieces are clean and delightful. The story only appears to revolve around world-ending stakes, but in truth, Ghost Protocol is driven by a competition between Ethan Hunt and Ethan Hunt. Can he outrun and outperform the tiny superego figure that commands him to climb towers and chase villains? Yes. Yes he can.
Enough talking up this movie. Go watch it. Or listen to Adam and Aidan dissect it for a bit. Find us on your podclimber of choice or do that thing where you listen below.
DAC Episode 411 - Mission: Impossible III (2006)
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“Threes! They’re absolutely impossible!” is a thing no one in Mission: Impossible III says at any point. Instead, characters say things like “Copy” and “Roger that” and “I’m going to die unless you kill me”.
M:I 3 is a bit of a paradox: both the platonic ideal of a Mission Impossible film and a frozen remnant of the Abrams era, it ends up in an unsatisfying middle zone. The stunts are inspired but shot and edited too awkwardly to leave an impression, the love story drives the plot but seems to signal the end of Tom Cruise’s participation, and the movie makes the smart choice of putting Philip Seymour Hoffman in the role of the villain but giving him not much to do. The result is a film that feels like someone relating a later and better Mission Impossible installment from memory.
Also, Tom Cruise reverts to his shorter haircut for the third movie, which is always a mistake. That man has serious flop to his locks.
If you want to hear insights like that and more from Adam and Aidan, find us on your podspewer of choice, or listen below. Remember, we’re going to die unless you kill us!
DAC Episode 410 - Mission: Impossible II (2000)
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tom cruise looking like he’s just lost a battle with his bowels at a crucial moment.
Mission: Impossible II. Is it the best movie in the franchise? The most coherent? The coolest? The most enjoyable? The one entry that isn’t openly misogynistic? The one that didn’t decide on Dougray Scott as a plausible villain?
No! But it may be the most significant entry in the franchise for its introduction of the Tom Cruise Hair Length Toggle. This is the one that established the pattern that would more or less hold for the entire series: odd entries provide a short-haired Cruise with a clean-cut look; even entries give glorious mane. For this reason alone, Mission: Impossible II deserves your unbelieving eyeballs. Listen below or find us on your podgroomer of choice.
DAC Episode 409 - Mission: Impossible (1996)
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not flying but hovering
Has Tom Cruise ever been younger than he was in the first Mission: Impossible movie? In the literal sense, yes. But in the very specific rhetorical sense that I’m asking you to accept here, no. He has never looked more baby-faced and callow than he does in the first installment of this improbably long franchise. Are there really 29 years between this film and M:I - Dead Reckoning? It seems impossible to even conceive of such a thing.
It’s also the start of our series, in which Adam and Aidan watch - in some cases for the first time - every goddamn one of these things. Yay! Listen below for our take on DePalma’s take on Mission: Impossible’s take on the spy genre.
DAC Episode 408 - The Italian Job (1969)
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the self-preservation society
Oh, Cool Britannia. A young Michael Caine gathering a gang of thieves in colour-coded Mini Coopers to stage an endless car chase through the streets of Turin? We used to be a proper something or other. Listen below or find us on your podcatcher of choice.