The 'hell's coming with me' scene followed by the killing montage; Wyatt Earp confronting Billy Bob Thornton at the card table; or the stretch from Wyatt Earp, on his horse after Bill Paxton's death, seeing Powers Booth through to the creek
The nominated choices open with Wyatt Earp confronting a heavier Billy Bob Thornton near the beginning, the 'skin that smoke wagon' exchange played as a clip; Earp completely emasculates him and then tells the bartender he is taking 25% of the house; Thornton's grumbling just before, about playing cards with his brother's kids, is also loved and called a good heat check.
More nominees: the first OK Corral shootout and Kurt Russell's 'hell's coming with me' speech, played as a clip and followed by a montage of them killing people; the creek shootout, Russell's version of Larry Bird walking on water in the 1987 playoffs; and Kilmer versus Michael Biehn, one-on-one at the end.
Also proposed, the 'turn your head into a canoe' scene: after the character the hosts call Ben Johnson is killed, Kurt Russell comes out and pistol-whips the shooter, Thomas Hayden Church and the others surround Russell, and Val Kilmer shows up with 'you music lover' and 'I got two guns, one for each of you'.
The first 'I'm your Huckleberry' is nominated with a clip: Michael Biehn is drunk, some of his buddies already killed, and is trying to challenge Earp when Doc comes from the shadows of the saloon and delivers the famous line; beyond Kilmer, Biehn is called really good, against type, a great villain and a great Johnny Ringo, the real-life figure.
Biehn is so good that one host went online to research why his career was not bigger: The Terminator, this, Aliens and The Abyss, where he plays one of the crazy Navy SEALs, and then not much, partly because he stopped working with James Cameron, who makes few movies; it is argued he and Michael Rooker have switched parts, since 99 times out of 100 Rooker would play Ringo and Biehn the good guy you are not sure you trust, Rooker playing a lunatic in every movie.
One favorite is the 'hell's coming with me' scene and the killing montage that follows.
Asked whether anything else belongs in the pool, the answer is no, those are the big five. — Sean Fennessey
Another host does add one: the scene at the very beginning when the brothers and their three women get off the train and look at each other in the mirror; nobody goes for the twelve-minute theater sequence, which they would have told George to cut.
From a channel-flipping standpoint, if the film is on after Bill Paxton dies, with Kurt Russell on his horse pretending to leave and then seeing Powers Booth, one host watches from that point on, knowing he is going to stay and kill everybody and end it in the creek; that is called that host's favorite part.
Another host's favorite is the Billy Bob scene, and Thornton reportedly improvised all his dialogue, as Kurt Russell told the hosts, though with Thornton that is hard to verify.
Nominees run through the Prague sequence as a whole (a 32-minute opening act that even fades to black after Tom Cruise jumps through the Aquarium and escapes from Kittredge), Ethan and Max's negotiation, the Langley heist, and the Phelps versus Hunt coffee scene where Hunt sees what Phelps has done while Phelps lies to him, the scene that confused a generation of filmgoers.
One host admits not understanding the coffee scene until rewatching it yesterday after roughly 20 viewings; the Langley break-in is called the most iconic, incredibly staged, ripped off numerous times, and the precedent for Tom Cruise attempting something that seems impossible, even though Wu takes it to another level.
The scene one host rewound four times is Ethan on the horn with Kittredge after the team is killed, shouting that his team is dead, that they knew we were coming, that the disc is gone and the list is in the open; the clip is played, and Cruise is said to go Ruffalo before Ruffalo and to resemble Bill Paxton in Aliens.
The Kittredge call is a bookend to the Aquarium restaurant scene: before it Cruise is loud and brash, cracking jokes while Jon Voight's Phelps lays out the plan, and in the restaurant he turns cerebral, seeing the other team, the waiters and the lovers on the river bank; the Langley heist is then named the pick, iconic and almost all in silence, with the tension of Don Lowe (as transcribed) about to come back, and compared to the silent drilling heist in Rafifi (as transcribed), the host's favorite heist movie.
Further Langley favorites: the digital sound meter, the rat in the air duct likened to the final shot of The Departed, the Top Copy (as transcribed) reference to the same filmmaker Jules Dassen (as transcribed), the trope of explaining the heist on the train before doing it with Jean Reno, Ving Rhames and Emmanuel Bayard (as transcribed), Cruise's Cheshire Cat grin saying it is even worse than you think, and the first encounter with the idea of an air-gapped computer; Langley is confirmed as the most rewatchable scene.
Asked for memories earlier, the Langley drop of Cruise hanging is named the iconic image inside the movie, one the later Mission Impossible films call back to every time, and the film is called De Palma's last great movie. — Sean Fennessey
