Mission: Impossible (Brian De Palma, 1996)

When a list of undercover agents goes up for sale, an IMF team is tasked with retrieving it.

When the team is betrayed and killed, it falls to sole survivor Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to find the list and clear his name.

Mission: Impossible was one of the most interesting ongoing franchises. It is still going strong, but I do miss the surprise of the pre-2018 instalments - when they would bring in a new filmmaker, new crew and supporting cast.  

They were like a more disposable version of the Alien movies - going from Brian DePalma, through John Woo, Brad Bird and Christopher McQuarrie. 

With these upcoming final instalments, the Mission: Impossible series feels more familiar. My heart did sink a little when almost the entire crew from Fallout were announced to return.

This is no shade on McQuarrie’s work, or that of his collaborators. There was an excitement to knowing that the slate had been wiped clean. Expectations from previous movies were almost irrelevant.

Back to 1996.

Mission: Impossible feels very Brian DePalma but minus the perversity 

Even the darker moments - the bodies against the gate, Jim’s nightmarish return as a bloody ghost.

It is fun but its success is a result of its set pieces.

The characters are sketches, and Jim Phelps’ final turn feels unnecessarily doubled.

Despite these elements, the movie is very enjoyable. I watched this movie so many times as a kid. 

I recall re-watching it quite a bit around the release of the sequel. Around that same time I was reading the James Bond books for the first time, and I remember wishing the Bond movies could be closer to De Palma’s film.

The opening embassy sequence in particular felt more like literary Bond than the movies of that time. I think I was locking on to the Grand Guignol elements of that scene. Even now, there is an atmosphere and tension to those scenes which is very effective. 

I am not the biggest De Palma fan - I have always been more interested in reading interviews and essays on his work than watching the films themselves - I used to find them too derivative of Hitchcock and overtly stylised.

 

Those aspects of his style are definite selling points, and I am more of a buyer now.

It took a few viewings but there is something so mechanical about the plot that I completely missed the attempts to flesh out Hunt's character, particularly in terms of his passion for Jim's wife, Claire (Emmanuelle Béart). 

The attraction is palpable from the first scene, where he delicately waits for Claire to wake up, but the movie never seems that interested in this element except as a set up for a heel turn at the end.

But when a main character's death is followed by an action sequence involving a high speed train and a helicopter, it is easy to overlook.

The one character that sticks in the mind is Henry Czerny as the odious IMF director Eugene Kittridge. He brings more smug malice than any of the actual villains, and it is a wonder they never brought him back earlier.

On its own terms, Mission: Impossible is a solid thriller lifted by some iconic visuals. It ignores the formula of the show, but taken within the wider context of the film series, that gives it a unique charm.