You know, there are times when you just have to stop and consider:

What if Tom Waits had starred in Mission Impossible 2 instead of Tom Cruise?

Seriously! It’s a Burning Question! This idea has massive potential… If you could only get it by those contemptible Hollywood bean-counters! But let’s scope this idea out further. Let us re-envision the initial scenes of the film.

In the produced version, we had Cruise, high in the desolate Sierra Nevadas, clinging to a sheer cliff without the aid of ropes or hooks:

Now conceive of the Waits version:

Long shot of the desolate, vertiginous Sierra Nevadas. A hawk’s lonely cry echoes through the rocky inhuman landscape. Pan down. continue to pan down. Dolly down. Down and down. Do that thing where it blurs like the camera is moving really fast but it’s just a fade to a new scene.

Tom Waits isn’t up on any cliff, hanging by his fingertips! He’s sitting on a rock at the bottom of the mountain, swigging whiskey out of a paper cup. “Ahh.” Raising an electric bullhorn to his lips, he breaks into song:

don’t go to church on Sunday
don’t get on my knees and pray
don’t memorize the books of the Bible
got my own special way
But I know Jesus loves me
Maybe just a little bit more
Because I fall down on my knees ev’ry Sunday
At Zerelda Lee’s candy store

One of Waits’ associates arrives and interrupts to hand him a pair of sunglasses. Waits dons the sunglasses and goes on drinking whiskey. Eventually, Thandie Newton gets in there, blah, blah, Tom gets some action, and plus he gets to rip his face off a couple of times, all that stuff.

As you can see it would be an action-filled drama of explosive proportions! The actor-director team of Waits and Woo would pack the theaters!