Hackman's name was left off the poster over Cruise's above-the-title deal; the ending differs from the book; Tripplehorn dated Ben Stiller for six years; Pollack voices the prison warden; a 2012 TV series continued the story; the Hyatt Regency Grand Cayman was destroyed by Hurricane Ivan; Hackman has not made a film since 2004
Gene Hackman's name did not appear on the release poster because Cruise's Paramount deal allowed only his name above the title; Hackman asked to be removed entirely and appears only in the end credits.
The ending differs significantly from the book, where Mitch swindles ten million from the firm and there is a manhunt; Jeanne Tripplehorn dated Ben Stiller for six years, and the hosts think she was a nineties face who had a better career than remembered, including Big Love, with one calling her better than Holly Hunter here.
Sidney Pollack voices the prison warden on the phone to Ed Harris's agent; a 2012 TV series picked up Mitch ten years later; the Cayman hotel was the Hyatt Regency Grand Cayman, destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and later demolished.
Hackman's last film was Welcome to Mooseport in 2004; Grantland accidentally made people think he had died through a headline Sean Fennessey wrote; Tarantino wanted him for the Robert Forster role in Jackie Brown; a 2018 bicycling article shows him at 88 riding an electric bike in New Mexico.
Brimley is his own planet in the film: the hosts quote his 'oral and whatnot' speech, note that Hackman was five years older yet Brimley seemed born at fifty, recall him as the Quaker Oats man and the manager in The Natural, and perform his catalog monologue, which the Ringer's president Jeff Chow does best.
Brimley had never played a bad guy before, brings an unexpected edge, and the blockbuster hinges on him checking whether the fax machine has paper; it is traumatic to watch Cruise fall on him and kick him, and whether he died is left for unanswerable questions.
Brimley carried himself like a hated stepfather and makes the office scene before the chase feel like Mitch is about to be killed; the 'oral and whatnot' line is recited again and he is declared the winner.
Jason Patric turned down Mitch two years before Speed 2; Cruise was probably Plan B and expensive, the biggest star in the world at the time.
Gene Hackman joined late because the producers wanted to gender-swap Avery and cast Meryl Streep until John Grisham objected; one host thinks it might be a better movie without the beach scene, but another says Hackman is why the film makes sense, and Streep never played that older, divorced, sexualized, secretly bad character.
Robin Wright turned down Abby, as she seemed to for every movie, and Halle Berry auditioned for the woman on the beach, which one host would have preferred.
The 155-minute runtime; the beach scene and Cruise's pirate shirt; the sweaty basketball scene; the backflips on Beale Street; Cruise eating ribs; the instant steak sandwiches; Abby's Cayman plan; DeVasher as muscle; the late FBI plot maintenance
The 155-minute length has aged badly; the beach scene could be ten seconds, though one host argues it is needed to show the infidelity and the repair, and the film should be about two hours, with Pollack seemingly refusing to cut anything.
Cruise's pirate shirt in the Caymans and the sweaty basketball scene, where he never actually plays, have not aged well; his athletic ability is a favorite topic, with softball in A Few Good Men and cornerback in All the Right Moves the most believable, and Vision Quest imagined as his ideal sports film.
Cruise's backflips with a street tumbler on Beale Street, set up so he can be sad walking past the kid later, immediately date the film; nobody in real life does that, Abby's 'there he goes' makes no sense, and Kaya, asked whether she would date a man who did it, answers absolutely and then absolutely not.
Cruise eats a rib on the rooftop like a popsicle, as if he had never eaten ribs, prompting the joke that he learned human behavior through acting.
Tarrance and another agent order steak sandwiches at a late-night diner and get them within thirty-five seconds; Abby's plan to fly to Grand Cayman makes no sense, since she could not know the hotel or get a direct flight from Memphis.
Wilford Brimley as head of security and muscle has aged oddly; the last forty-five minutes are heavy on plot maintenance, such as the FBI holding the mob family's itinerary, Mitch getting the overbilling idea from the overbilled client, and Avery rolling over for Abby after she drugs him.
The film has a ton of flaws but is still great; the show does not require Citizen Kane.
Dave Grusin's piano score; the name Mitch McDeere; the Cayman Islands as a locale; nineties Cruise; the cast as a whole; the Memphis setting; the foresight in casting future character actors
The soundtrack, controversial at the time, has aged the best: Dave Grusin's piano is a character in itself, adding humor, melancholy, romance and suspense, recurring in themes such as the guitar on Beale Street and the drive by the river, and it puts Grusin on the Who Won the Movie list; it is called one of the best scores of the last twenty-five years and was Oscar-nominated, though polarizing when released.
Mitch McDeere is a great name; the Cayman Islands have always aged well as a mysterious locale; nineties Cruise is a peak era, and the hosts miss having an actor you buy season tickets for, floating Emma Stone, Miles Teller, Damon and Leo.
The totality of the cast and the Memphis setting, an emptied, fading southern metropolis, have aged well; on rewatch Mitch and Abby are themselves idiosyncratic, a self-made striver and a more moneyed wife, which reads as a Clinton-era, sell-out-or-not story that David Rabe and Robert Towne were obsessed with.
The character-actor foresight has aged well: Dean Norris and Tobin Bell as the two assassins before Breaking Bad and Saw, Terry Kinney before Oz and Billions, and Margo Martindale as the secretary, classic Pollack casting where the eighteenth most important person is a great actor.
The chase is the one pick: Mitch takes files from Avery's office, is stopped for a word, Brimley comes down, and the Ed Harris 'get out of there' call starts a fifteen-minute stretch the host watches every time, with Cruise running, jumping onto a truck that happens to carry pillows, riding the tram and hanging on while the two hitmen chase him; it carries the movie and is Sidney Pollack doing Three Days of the Condor twenty years later.
The scene where Mitch guesses his salary is a minor but good dramatic scene, one of the few that shows his intellect at work, and the hosts play the clip; the final maneuver that turns the ending into a court proceeding with Lambert as judge and Lamar as defense lawyer is also loved.
The Grand Cayman meeting where Mitch and Avery talk Sonny Capps into a tax loophole shows why Mitch is a great lawyer, though Cruise's profane 'fucked with a dick big enough for an elephant to feel it' line sounds like a robot wrote it; Jerry Weintraub playing a dirtbag years before Ocean's Eleven is enjoyed.
The chase, Cruise on the run, is called one of the best fifteen-minute sequences of the nineties; the wined-and-dined montage of Mitch learning the firm while Abby grows suspicious through Lamar's wife is also entertaining, the first hour is strong, the middle sags and the ending picks up, including the demolished house and Abby's return.
The boat scene between Strathairn and Holly Hunter, with the crooked-smile exchange, is a couple the host would have taken ten more minutes of instead of the beach scene.
Obvious non-candidates like Brad Pitt are taken out; Rubinek is a slam dunk, never more of an Apex Mountain candidate, a theater actor in On Golden Pond doing his best work, also good in the cable movie And the Band Played On and an all-time Law & Order guy with some forty episodes; big winner of this podcast.
Christian Slater: a yes from one host that the others contest, going Heathers instead, then calling that too early and picking Pump Up the Volume because he invented podcasting, which is granted as a good point; nobody picked Broken Arrow or Hard Rain, and Broken Arrow was Travolta's real comeback when the wheels came off.
Patricia Arquette: Boyhood is floated because she won the Oscar for it, then withdrawn; personally and subjectively this is her film, but career-wise it has to be the Oscar; the category is defined as when they were at the peak of their powers with the most options and respect, and she was pretty unknown here with a rough seven or eight years after, so it is not this.
Tony Scott is an unequivocal yes for one host, over Man on Fire, because his commercial hits had faded, people doubted him, and this led to Crimson Tide, his career never in better shape than between the two; the others contest that yes, countering that it was a flop, that Crimson Tide is his apex, and that he made Top Gun, one of the biggest hits of all time, which launched Tom Cruise.
The counter is that in the mid-eighties Top Gun was not received as a Tony Scott movie, the narrative was Tom Cruise as the biggest star in the world, whereas with True Romance Scott was part of the narrative; the Top Gun case is acknowledged, and a favorite Tony Scott movie is conceded not to be the same as apex; the category is elusive like the MVP award; the film is also the most critically acclaimed of his, at 92 percent.
Bronson Pinchot: Beverly Hills Cop, a massive hit that made him a breakout star, with the espresso with a twist of lemon; Sizemore: Heat, since 'the action is the juice' is the definition of Apex Mountain; Chris Penn: Reservoir Dogs, Nice Guy Eddie, agreed.
Walken: hell no, he is The Deer Hunter; an early-nineties case is made, hosting SNL in fall 1992 with Trivial Psychic and Stock Talk, this film in 1993, Pulp in 1994, a Walken-sance with everyone in on him and Jay Moore (as transcribed) doing the impression, plus King of New York, Wayne's World 2 the same year and Things to Do in Denver, but the Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter has to be his apex.
Young Gandolfini: he is basically auditioning for Tony Soprano, and this and his Get Shorty role (transcribed 'bare') are the two poles of that character, sweet, charming, evil, menacing and violent; the film was one of the first DVDs a host bought, so he was always the guy from this movie.
Floyd, who gives the directions down Beachwood to the Beverly Ambassador, was an A++ in the nineties and the DVD era, a spirit animal for anyone getting baked at two in the morning; the whole idea of Pineapple Express came from Judd Apatow and company loving Floyd and asking what would have happened if he chased the Italians.
Unlike Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder working to go viral, Pitt just lies on the couch with a couple of improv lines; the Floyd stuff is largely improvised, as are Hopper's eggplant and Walken's cantaloupe lines; Floyd is the most important character because he gets everyone together for the shootout, and 'don't condescend me' is a favorite line.
Brad Pitt has an alternate path as one of the great character actors, fifteen non-essential but memorable parts up through Burn After Reading, but he was so handsome he had to be a leading man; Seven is a character he put thought into before material started being created for him; the Tarantino relationship continues through Inglourious Bastards and the coming Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Dennis Hopper is so likable that even the Speed villain was hard to root against; the Clarence-Clifford scene is economical writing, 'you're just like your mother', three years apart, a recovering alcoholic who only has a Seven Up, telling you why Clarence would throw it all away; two lines are lifted, 'you're just like your mother' from Hopper's own line in Rumblefish and the beer line from The Last Picture Show.
Pre-internet, movie quotes and pulling from the past mattered more; a host's column threw in movie lines because that is how he and his friends connected, and Twitter gifs have given it a renaissance.
Sizemore and Penn together are the twelve-episode Fox cop show we never got; the hosts saw a Reitman live read at the Ace Hotel with Slater and Arquette, the Duplass brothers as the cops, J.K. Simmons as the estranged father, Kevin Pollack as Walken's part, Jon Favreau as Gandolfini's, Keegan-Michael Key and Paul Scheer as Drexel and Elliot Blitzer, May Whitman in several parts and Jason Segel as Floyd.
Coming Home in a Body Bag is funny right on the heels of forty Vietnam movies; Saul Rubinek's Lee Donowitz as Joel Silver, Bronson Pinchot as his assistant, Boris the bodyguard who hates cops, and Dick Ritchie constantly asking whether the producer knows he is an actor; Donowitz is one of a host's favorite movie characters, saved for the Dion Waiters argument.
The Hans Zimmer score is distinct and gives the movie levity; according to a host it is based on a composition from the 1500s by Carl Orff that Terrence Malick used in Badlands, which Zimmer redoes as an homage, and Arquette's opening voiceover mimics the Badlands voiceover; the film pulls the best parts of other things.
Asked for a single best out of all of it, one goes with the way it looks, the peak of Tony Scott's neon vision of urban America; another is still responding to the dialogue, over the top and offensive on purpose because it is pulp; a third says Gandolfini, like watching Michael Jordan at North Carolina.
The first pick is Malkovich, to the other's surprise: his character is the most memorable and most quoted, still the phrasing used at tables today; this is not Damon's or Norton's biggest movie, not what John Dahl is best remembered for, Famke Jansen (as transcribed) was about to be in a superhero franchise and Turturro has bigger films, but for men of a couple of generations this is where Malkovich went for it.
The counter-pick is Damon: an old-school Tom Cruise role that just needs a star, since Mike McD is a mediocre law student with the wrong friend who likes poker and yet makes you care; Affleck, Leo, Brad Pitt and Clooney would not pull it off, with Norton ironically the only other choice.
The reply is that Damon was going to be fine regardless and a movie-star part is inherently blank, never too far or too good; another candidate is Koppelman and Levine, since few TV or movie writers are known to normal people, Steve Zalian (as transcribed) aside, and even Succession's Jesse Armstrong or Veep's David Mandel lack public profile.
Koppelman and Levine positioned themselves well in the guys' pop culture world of the late nineties and probably won, since they have thriving careers and made something people love; Damon loses initially but retroactively the Good Will Hunting, Ripley, Rounders run is an all-timer, and the best rewatchables are movies where the major players are in their sweet spot, as Damon and Norton were.
Cruise and De Palma are named first, then a wrinkle: Hollywood, the studio system putting people at the top of their craft in position to succeed, with the money to build an aquarium that did not exist and blow it up, the tanks being Tom Cruise's idea; the chaotic, almost old Hollywood way the film came together is now heard of only as a cautionary tale, like the fired Star Wars director or Fantastic Four, so the victor may be that improvisatory collaborative filmmaking.
The case cuts both ways: the manic nature of Hollywood creation showed this can work, but the film is also end times for movies, signaling a new path for the greatest movie star of the last 30 years who realizes he must keep falling off things to stay relevant into his 50s, the end of Brian De Palma, the least celebrated yet maybe most talented movie brat, the start of the powerful Wagner-Cruise partnership that ended badly at United Artists, and the end of Jon Voight's good movies after Heat; it feels like a win for nobody but Mission Impossible.
The counter-pick is Cruise, the engine of the whole thing, since nobody else could play Ethan Hunt and the attempt to try failed; the what-ifs of a different director or Cruise continuing to make films like A Few Good Men are unknowable, and the recent films have leveled out and gotten better.
Apex Mountain and who won the movie are bundled because they are complicated; Tom Cruise, Brian De Palma and Ving Rhames all get no, with Baby Boy preferred to Pulp Fiction for Rhames.
Jon Voight is not close, with Anaconda as the joke; Kristen Scott Thomas is a no, joked to be Only God Forgives; Jean Reno is a no, so this is Apex Mountain for nobody.
Henry Zerny (as transcribed) is floated hesitantly as the one possible apex, immediately answered that he is better in Clear and Present Danger, with the two self-described only Henry Zerny experts in the world saluting each other.
Danny Elfman is a no, with Beetlejuice and Batman as his peak and a plug for the Midnight Run soundtrack; cinematographer Stephen Burham (as transcribed) has The Outsiders, Rumblefish, St. Elmo's Fire, Eight Million Ways to Die, The Untouchables and Hoffa, and The Untouchables is chosen as his peak instead.
Zerny (as transcribed) is proposed, with the Ruffalo-voiced 'they knew' already covered, and seconded as a sure thing; the counter is that Cruise is really going for it, with unbelievable blinking work and the 'Job, Job, Job' face at the computer, which only his face keeps from looking ridiculous; nothing is settled before moving on.
