25 years in the making. (Spoilers)

I feel like this one needs an explanation.

Some of you are going to know where I’m going with this from the first sentence, but I was a big fan of the Mission Impossible show as a kid. And when I say “as a kid” I mean I was born in 1989 and caught episodes of Mission Impossible when they aired on CBS or wherever they aired in the mid to late 90s. It was one of my favorite classic shows to watch. And then Mission Impossible the movie came out and I rented it on VHS from Blockbuster at the age of ten in 1999, and I absolutely hated it.

Why? I think we all know the spoiler by now. The idea that the movie’s big twist would be turning an established and beloved character from the original show and making them a traitor was wild, it felt like a stab in the back. Also I just thought it was dumb. Ten year old me figured out that something was fishy because in that famous scene where Phelps fakes his own shooting, the camera shot very clearly looks like he’s pointing the gun at himself. I ended up never watching another Mission Impossible movie after that one.

So why am I going back and watching the Mission Impossible series? I probably don’t have a great explanation, other than that it’s been 25 years and it’s probably time to give up the grudge. So let’s just continue.

Mission Impossible the first was directed by Brian De Palma, the last film he made before his career went into the toilet. De Palma’s latest work was in 2019 with Domino, a direct to VOD piece of crap released by the industry’s biggest slut Saban Films. A real downfall for the guy who directed Carrie. The screenplay was written by David Koepp who continues to write garbage, but well-paying garbage like Indiana Jones. He also wrote good movies like Zathura, Spider-Man, and of course the Jack Ryan film. Robert Towne hasn’t done much since 2000 but was working on a screenplay for a TV series prequel to Chinatown that is definitely never coming out.

The film stars Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, a buttery young IMF agent who finds himself on the wrong side of the law after a mission goes awry and his teammates as well as the IMF director himself are presumed killed thanks to a mole. Ethan meets up with acting IMF director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) to discover that the whole mission was actually a mole-finding operation, and given that Hunt was the only survivor and oh yeah his family suddenly got a mysterious six figure deposit on their failing farm property to help pay the bills, Hunt is suspect numero uno.

By the way why didn’t his parents notice the $125,000 suddenly deposited in their account?

I like how the IMF is still portrayed as a highly competent organization in this film. Keen-eyed viewers will have noticed the second IMF team in the building during the original operation before the movie backs up to point them out, and it showcases his particular talent that Ethan was able to spot them while the rest of his team either didn’t, or didn’t acknowledge it. We see a number of IMF agents in the field over the course of the movie, and while most of them don’t have speaking roles or names they do look like they could have accompanied Ethan on a theoretical mission.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the angel of the film; when Ethan Hunt goes into the CIA to grab the actual list of agents and their secret identities. The scene takes place in almost complete silence, keeping the audience on the edge of their seat as Hunt carries out this intricate series of checks and balances to make sure he doesn’t touch the ground, that nothing touches the ground, that the temp doesn’t go up too high, that he doesn’t make too much noise, that he moves quickly and silently. Ethan Hunt would be really good at Five Nights at Freddy’s, and I’m probably the first person in history to make that comment.

Ah shit.

The biggest change in opinion I’ve had for the minor beats of this film is with Donloe, the sad sap who gets poisoned in the CIA. At the end of the scene Donloe gets reassigned to a radar tower in Alaska with Kittridge noting he wants the guy out of there so fast they’ll mail his belongings after. As a kid I felt bad for Donloe because it didn’t really seem to be his fault, but as an adult I understand why Kittridge punishes him so badly. Donloe might not be a CIA field agent, but he’s still in the CIA and knows how important his role is. So he should probably be able to tell when he’s been poisoned, and rather than bring attention to it he said nothing and left his post and it resulted in the CIA’s NOC list getting stolen right under their noses by a rogue agent.

Given Donloe’s demeanor and how Kittridge is quick to punish him hard, I’m guessing he’s been warned several times about taking his role seriously.

The funny part of this scene is that it could’ve been completely foiled with one extra line of thinking by the CIA. The lockdown room has an occupied/unoccupied setting and the computer apparently has a keylogger when the room is unoccupied. If the CIA had simply made it so files could not be accessed period while the room was in unoccupied mode, or simply pressing keys while unoccupied started the lockdown, it would’ve made Ethan’s job much harder. Or impossible. Get it? Maybe that’s also why Kittridge was so pissed, he seems like the kind of guy smart enough to have pointed out this security flaw for years only to be ignored by Phelps.

And of course we need to talk about the cast. Mission Impossible has a fantastic cast. Say what you want about Tom Cruise being a crazy scientologist, which to the extent I pay attention to pop culture has been somewhat memory holed over the last decade, but the guy is a great actor. He still does his own stunts which is wild. John Voight plays Jim Phelps very well, even though he wildly telegraphs himself as the true villain. Henry Czerny plays Kittridge perfectly, guy who you feel is a real asshole but not a villain. When Phelps is exposed at the end, Kittridge immediately pivots from Hunt.

Ving Rhames and Jean Reno play the roles of Ethan’s underground IMF team fantastically, even though you know from the start Krieger is openly working against Hunt but Stickell is just happy to be useful to someone again. Vanessa Redgrave pulls off her role as the charming and intimidating villain Max Mitsopolis, and of course there’s the gorgeous Emmanuelle Béart as Claire Phelps. That’s also how we know Jim was the bad guy, a guy like that could never bag a young woman as beautiful as Claire without the two of them being in some kind of international crime scheme together.

The lowest point of the film for me was the helicopter at the end, pushing the film up to 20 on the dumb scale where it had been at a comfortable seven before. I remember it being much worse but I still didn’t believe that a helicopter could move that fast through a small tunnel to keep pace with a bullet train. Even in a spy movie, yes. It felt shoe-horned in because Tom Cruise probably really wanted a scene where his head almost gets chopped off by the blade, and so they could have that moment where the train stops (also idiotically fast) and the helicopter’s blade is pointed at Ethan’s throat. So the train conductor could faint in the background.

The craziest part of the Mission Impossible technology lineup in my opinion was the realistic skin masks and maybe the tiny chewing gum plastic explosives. Everything else seemed advanced but also believable for 1996. Most of the tech was pretty clandestine for the time outside of the glasses cameras. We also realize that Ethan Hunt has never used the internet as his first inclination to try to contact the mysterious Max is to try to visit max.com and to search “job” into Usenet. It is a reminder that even in the 90s there were groups dedicated to anything, as Ethan finds multiple Usenet groups dedicated specifically to the Job 3:14 passage of the Bible.

Anyway, maybe it’s just a quarter of a century passing by but I’m willing to give the Mission Impossible series a shot now, and I enjoyed the first movie a lot more than the last time I watched it.

Stay tuned.