Mission: Impossible (22 May 1996)
directed by Brian De Palma
starring Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Emmanuelle Béart, Henry Czerny, Jean Reno, Ving Rhames, Kristin Scott Thomas, Vanessa Redgrave, Dale Dye, Emilio Estevez
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MPAA rating: Studio: Cruise/Wagner Productions, Paramount Pictures Script: David Koepp, Robert Towne Music: Danny Elfman, Lalo Schifrin, Björk Running time: 110 minutes Tags: Action; espionage; Europe; London Tactical strength: [6/10]
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for some intense action violence
How exciting! A big budget version of the popular TV series Mission: Impossible. The film starts with agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) in disguise extracting information from a Russian in a cheap hotel room. The Russian spills the beans, the camera pulls back, and we see that the IMF team had constructed the hotel room and had monitored the entire event. Very cool, just like the TV series but with big-screen quality and 1990s technology.
Next, Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) gets an assignment to catch a foreign agent stealing a list of U.S. agents from a U.S. embassy in Europe. The team plans, sets up, and get the evidence they need. Again, cool -- until things go very wrong and the entire team except for Ethan Hunt dies. I can understand killing off one or two of the team members to provide a revenge motivation for the rest of the team, but killing off the entire team, including Phelps, departs so radically from the traditions of the TV series, that only the first twenty minutes really deserve the name Mission: Impossible. The rest of the film should have a name like, The Tom Cruise Show-off Hour. And why not, his production company made the movie. If Cruise wanted to head up the IMF team, why didn't he just buy a different script that stayed more with the traditions of the TV series?
If you watch the rest of the movie as something outside the Mission Impossible universe, the story makes sense, flows well, and has some good suspenseful moments and surprises. Director Brian De Palma takes the audience on a rollercoaster ride of suspense that never gives you time to question the plot. Except for the scene when a helicopter chases a high-speed commuter train down a tunnel under the English Channel: bad effects, completely unbelievable, way to long, and it didn't kill Ethan Hunt, which would have prevented MI2.
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