Mission: Impossible

DVD, Mission: Impossible (1996), film

This film was not my first encounter with 'Mission: Impossible,' I'd seen bits and pieces of the occasional episode and had a general idea of what it was about, but 'M:I2' was the first film in the series I actually saw and it blew me away with itself. It's a tribute to the quality of this first film in the series that watching it on video after seeing the sequel at the cinema was almost as powerful an experience. It was also a deeply confusing experience and is possibly the only time I watched a film twice in two days because there was so much I didn't understand. Even now I don't quite grasp every detail (how the Bible was the 'great' clue about Phelps still doesn't penetrate my skull), and this is one of the films I've seen the most, along with 'Star Trek: Generations' and the original 'Star Wars' trilogy (the first Special Editions of the late '90s to be exact - it's important to stake out your territory when it comes to 'Star Wars'!). I wouldn't say it stands up to repeated viewings quite as well as those films, but it's very close and proves that the 'M:I' series wasn't like most trilogies in that two out of the three are fantastic, with only one being merely enjoyable. I await the fourth film in great excitement, something I rarely experience now.

Watching the previous films in preparation for the new one is the reason why I happen to be reviewing or commenting, and I have to say I really did enjoy it all over again. For one thing, I haven't seen it on widescreen DVD as much as fullscreen video, and the proper ratio does produce a more cinematic experience. It stood out for me in such scenes as Ethan's meeting with 'Max' - he's seated at one end of the screen, she's at the other with the dark coat of a henchman in between. I wonder what that scene looks like on video, but I bet it's not as well framed. One scene that actually lost a little of its power in my eyes with the move to DVD was when Ethan is being interrogated by Kitridge (a character I would have loved to have seen again in subsequent films). He pulls his hands over his hair in the midst of the tension as he's accused of being the mole, but in the widescreen version you don't see so much of his head and I think it doesn't have the same impact as the fullscreen version. This may simply be an error of memory and for the rest of the film widescreen was absolutely the best way to see it.

I'm not going to note down every inconsistency or odd thing I noticed or this will end up like my 'Star Trek: Generations' review which ran to three long entries, but there are a few that stand out: one is that much of the plans in this film rely heavily on no one interfering and nothing going wrong. Another is the ridiculousness of having a high-security room which requires a key code, a passkey and a retinal scan to enter, all so some guy (we'll call him William Donloe), can tap in some stuff on his terminal. Not to mention that there's an extremely low-security room right next door with access to the air-con system which is big enough for a large grown man to crawl around in, and the noise this man and his smaller leader (we'll call him Ethan Hunt), can make is never heard. Let alone that there are rats running free in there! I bet Donloe was a terrible nuisance to the rest of the building, constantly setting off his alarm, and when you look at it like that you realise Kitridge's bitter dismissal of him is more understandable than a single breach of security.

Why does that woman (we'll call her that woman), walk right into the knife of the enemy when she's seen him stab the other guy to death? The square holes in the gate are so small that she needed to be right up close against it for him to stab her. I guess he deliberately left the knife so Ethan's prints would be on it (all adding up to framing him as the mole), but he must have a whole set of identical knives since he also loses one in Donloe's office in what is one of the moments I find funniest: the poor guy walks in and finds this knife stuck in his desk and doesn't have a clue how it got there. That whole break-in sequence was so wonderfully executed, the acrobatics, the tension, the setup for the story, it was all beautifully done, and is only rivalled by the Biocyte break-in of 'M:I2' or the whole island sequence (from Hunt climbing up the rocks at the back to the motorbike chase out of there), also of that film.

The train sequence still thrills to this day, who would have thought a train could play host to such strong action scenes? I still can't tell what's real and what's not. They can't have flown a helicopter into that tunnel the way they did, certainly the stuff inside must have been done on a stage, but the outside sequence with Cruise's face rippling in the intense speed on top of the train's roof looks real to me. I remember being so confused about whether it was Phelps or Kitridge who was the real baddie, mainly thanks to Cruise's mumbling in the scene where he meets up with Phelps and goes over what must have happened in his mind. They're talking about Kitridge, but he's seeing Phelps and I wasn't sure if Phelps was confessing or not. Then we see Job on the train without revealing his face, and he's wearing the same coat as Kitridge. That was the first time I saw it, not now.

I like that they had Ethan go to London, even though it wasn't as definitively England as in 'The Bourne Ultimatum,' and it could well have been a fabrication, but it puts the characters and some of the story in my country and that's great! I wonder if Clare's marriage to Jim had been part of the plan to get rich from the start so that they never really wanted to marry, but were colleagues planning this audacious plot against the IMF. She was much younger than Phelps and they didn't seem to care too much about each other. I guess he shot her for using her charms on Ethan, but their pairing never worked for me. It's a shame that ten million looks so inconsequential in bearer's bonds or whatever the paper was as it seems like almost an aside to the story.

The technology of the day doesn't bother me - there's something claustrophobic about using a phone box that couldn't have been achieved with a mobile phone (unless he went and hid in a cupboard to make the call), because he's dazzled by the light inside, yet he's lit up for anyone miles around to see, which makes his desperation even more true. I don't like it when he puts the little bug device in his mouth though - I imagine it's been used in public phones before. I only hope he cleans his equipment thoroughly after use! Bulky computers aren't too awful either as you get swept along in the story.

I felt Luther was used quite well, and a real friendship springs up between Ethan and he, one that was capitalised on in the second film and almost abandoned in the third. What wasn't played up in the sequels was Luther's genius hacking ability, which is kind of swept under the carpet with each subsequent film. It's amazing how young Ving Rhames looks, but his was such a good character, and I especially love the informal ending with music playing out of the building behind them, and a hopeful mood of going separate ways to live new lives. I also like the insight into Ethan's character, his Dad died from cancer, his Mum and Uncle Donald are embroiled in the plot, if only distantly, and I'd have liked to have learnt more about him over the course of the films.

Of course they are primarily action thrillers, not character pieces and the point of the TV series was that each story was different in style and tone, even with different characters with different skills and that certainly carried on into the other films. This may not have been where one of my favourite film series' started for me, but I can appreciate it just as much. I never had a connection to the 'franchise' before the films so I wasn't bothered at all that hero Jim Phelps could be turned into a nasty villain. It was a subversive film in some ways, setting up the audience to believe they were going to get what they expected: a likeable team of people pulling off daring escapades against enemies of the state. Instead it broke the mould, pushed the envelope, shocked and surprised, and that spiral of uncertainty, events out of control, only makes Hunt's victories the sweeter. The Bourne films may have taken the reigns of the cinema thanks to shorter delays between the films, and Bond remains a roller-coaster of quality, but this started the 'M:I' films on the best road and remains a greatly enjoyable, even tense watch that I'd recommend to anyone.

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