Hollywood has always liked to recycle old television shows, at least ever since "Star Trek", which only lasted three years (from 1966 to 1969) during its original network run on NBC, was turned into an incredible cinematic franchise starting in 1979. Thus, it probably isn't too terribly surprising that "Mission: Impossible", which was a huge ratings smash during its original seven-season run on CBS from 1966 to 1973, found its way onto the big screen. In fact, by 2023, it will have gone to seven cinematic spin-offs. But given that the outlandish stunts, special effects, and plotting have come to dominate the series, it is instructive to revisit its original 1996 cinematic incarnation, which is not only closer in spirit to the original TV series, but also more classically suspenseful than the sequels to come.
Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt, a member of the CIA's super-secretive Impossible Mission Force, who is given the assignment of recovering a disc containing what is known as a NOC (Non-Official Cover) list of CIA agents across Europe from a traitor in Prague who intends to give it to an as-yet-unknown organized crime fighter named Max. But during the operation, supervised by Cruise's boss Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), things go painfully haywire, and each member of his IMF team are killed (or at least, it seems so). As it turns out, the NOC list is actually safe at home at CIA headquarters in Langley, and the CIA boss (Henry Czeny, as unctuous here as he was in 1994's CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER) informs Cruise that the whole operation is a mole hunt, and that Cruise himself may be the mole. The result is a series of twists that take Cruise and a newly assemble team of rogue agents, including Ving Rhames, from Langley to London, and finally onto the high-speed train going from London to Paris (the famous "Chunnel" underneath the English Channel) where Max (Vanessa Redgrave) intends to acquire the NOC list.
As with a lot of what went on in the original series created by Bruce Geller, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE has its moments of twists and turns that don't always seem to make a whole lot of sense, though the twist as to just who is the actual "traitor" is inside the IMF organization, as devised by screenwriters David Koepp and Robert Towne, is fairly ingenious. It also helps that this film is bolstered by the fine direction of Brian DePalma, who uses his skills as a classic director of Hitchcock-inspired suspense, as exemplified in CARRIE and DRESSED TO KILL, to build intensity into a plot that can at times approach confusion. This is very much in evidence in the sequence in which Cruise has to hang by a harness inside the IMF vault to get the NOC list off the IMF mainframe, a sequence shot with almost dead silence.
The movie's soundtrack score by Danny Elfman, though often quite raucous and loud, wisely interpolates the famous theme music originally composed and conducted by veteran Hollywood film composer Lalo Schifrin. The end result, with all of its labyrinthine twists and turns, is still memorable after more than a quarter of a century, worthy of the '8' rating I am giving it.
Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt, a member of the CIA's super-secretive Impossible Mission Force, who is given the assignment of recovering a disc containing what is known as a NOC (Non-Official Cover) list of CIA agents across Europe from a traitor in Prague who intends to give it to an as-yet-unknown organized crime fighter named Max. But during the operation, supervised by Cruise's boss Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), things go painfully haywire, and each member of his IMF team are killed (or at least, it seems so). As it turns out, the NOC list is actually safe at home at CIA headquarters in Langley, and the CIA boss (Henry Czeny, as unctuous here as he was in 1994's CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER) informs Cruise that the whole operation is a mole hunt, and that Cruise himself may be the mole. The result is a series of twists that take Cruise and a newly assemble team of rogue agents, including Ving Rhames, from Langley to London, and finally onto the high-speed train going from London to Paris (the famous "Chunnel" underneath the English Channel) where Max (Vanessa Redgrave) intends to acquire the NOC list.
As with a lot of what went on in the original series created by Bruce Geller, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE has its moments of twists and turns that don't always seem to make a whole lot of sense, though the twist as to just who is the actual "traitor" is inside the IMF organization, as devised by screenwriters David Koepp and Robert Towne, is fairly ingenious. It also helps that this film is bolstered by the fine direction of Brian DePalma, who uses his skills as a classic director of Hitchcock-inspired suspense, as exemplified in CARRIE and DRESSED TO KILL, to build intensity into a plot that can at times approach confusion. This is very much in evidence in the sequence in which Cruise has to hang by a harness inside the IMF vault to get the NOC list off the IMF mainframe, a sequence shot with almost dead silence.
The movie's soundtrack score by Danny Elfman, though often quite raucous and loud, wisely interpolates the famous theme music originally composed and conducted by veteran Hollywood film composer Lalo Schifrin. The end result, with all of its labyrinthine twists and turns, is still memorable after more than a quarter of a century, worthy of the '8' rating I am giving it.