Mission: Impossible (1996) Reviews

• Exploding Bubblegum

  tieman642010-02-27

  "Fashions fade, style is eternal." - Yves Laurent Filled with super-slick visuals and impeccable compositions, this big-budget thriller looks better with each passing year. While the 90's action movies of Cameron, Spielberg, Donner, Harlin, the Wachowskis and the Scotts have started to lose their shine, De Palma's exercise in mainstream mayhem ages like fine wine (or maybe just good grape juice). It's all about style, of course. Gloriously wide compositions, extreme close ups, canted angles, split-diopters, whip-pans, point of view shots and four slick set pieces...watching this film is like attending a masterclass in camera movement. De Palma's not just good with surfaces, he's obsessed with them. Villains are dressed in 1950's PI/spy coats, the heist scenes outdo Dassin's "Riffi" and Melville's "Bob The Gambler", the film is shot in luxurious black and whites and all the while De Palma's camera glides from one perfect composition to the next. To get this kind of fluid camera work, this seamlessness, you'd have to turn to Pixar and their virtual cameras. Of course, the irony is that for a director so obsessed with achieving perfect images, De Palma is constantly reminding us how fallible images are. All his tics and themes are here, albeit in a condensed fashion: truth needing to be reassembled, the unreliability of the image, the camera that lies, voyeurs (the first shot is a close up of a digital screen), conspiracies, false identities, doppelgangers, the need to reconstruct the film's opening murder etc. The only thing missing are some operatic sex scenes, which were actually filmed but deleted when producer Tom Cruise, not wanting to chase away the teen audience, had all romantic scenes with super-lush French actress Emmanuelle Béart removed. Author James Ellroy (sometimes he feels like the only other person on the planet who actually loves De Palma's "Black Dahlia") perfectly describes De Palma's style when commenting on the director's adaptation of his novel: "De Palma's films circumscribe worlds of obsession. They are rigorously and suffocatingly formed. No outer world exists during their time frame. Colors flare oddly. Movement arrests you. You forfeit control and see only what he wants you to see. He manipulates you in the sole name of passion. He understands relinquishment. The film-goer needs to succumb. His films are authoritative. He controls response firmly. His hold tightens as his stories veer into chaos. He stands and falls, coheres and decoheres, succeeds and errs behind passion. He was the ideal artist to film The Black Dahlia." Later he says: "Bucky Bleichert is a fictional cop and a doppelganger/writer-filmmaker. He's the man writing out the great adventure of his life and the voyeur viewing sex with a camera. Bleichert is me. Bleichert is De Palma. He's standing outside momentous events. He's lost in scrutiny. He wants to control. He wants to capitulate. His inner life is near chaotic. He needs to impose external order to countermand his mental state. It's Homicide Investigation as Art. He needs to take malignancy and render it something his own." And then: "The Black Dahlia spins off the axis of De Palma and Hartnett. It's a three-mode constellation: thriller/noir/historical romance. The design is near-German Expressionist. It's L.A./it's not L.A./it's L.A. seen by Dahlia fiends in extremis. The film commands you to savour every scene and revel in your visual entrapment. This textual richness symbolises the Dahlia's hold on us. We can never look away. She won't let us." 8/10 – While "Casualties of War's" camera shifted stance with each vertical plane (underground, plateau, hill, bridge), here De Palma's camera changes stance when we jump from Prague to London to the Channel Crossing that links them. Complaints about silly plots and actors are valid but inconsequential. This is about De Palma's camera, Tom Cruise a prop that need only turn up and look appropriately intense. Worth three viewings.

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• the plot was great

  Dr. Nick Riviera2000-06-25

  Everyone seems to complain that the plot in this film is too confusing, but just because you don't 'get' it doesn't mean it's a bad movie. I thought that the plot was superb; it may be a little difficult to follow, but with a little thought it isn't at all hard to understand. It is refreshing to have a big budget thriller with a clever plot, not just masses of pyrotechnics and gunplay.

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• Very clever thriller

  benturkalj2006-05-18

  For those who have not seen the original Mission Impossible, it is a real shame. While the other flicks offer plenty of explosions and cool action sequences, the original remains the best for it's interesting plot twists, some decent acting, and a well developed element of suspense that's lacking in the later pictures. To reveal any of the plot would be a disservice: it certainly has some pretty interesting occurrences that should be seen for full effect. What really makes this great though is De Palma's direction. Unlike the later flicks, key scenes are drawn out: there is a real Spense of suspense that is rarely achieved. Three key action scenes come to mind, and there all extremely cool: it's just a shame that Criuse couldn't enlist the services of more experienced director's later in the franchise. A memorable, well executed thriller.

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• A tense thriller that is not (despite popular belief) impossible to follow.

  THFC1998-12-08

  I would like to reiterate what "Anonymous of Derby, England" said about this film (20th November). The fact that so many people have complained that they "didn't get it" is proof that our brains are being atrophied by so many movies that do all our thinking for us. I had no trouble in following the plot and found the fact that I actually had to concentrate and think things through quite refreshing. Okay, so a lot of the stunts were a bit far fetched but what does it matter when they were so entertaining? After all, it is only a movie; nobody expects us to believe that these things could really happen any more than they expect us to believe that King Kong really existed or that there's a Volcano ready to errupt in L.A. Besides, with the inspired casting of David Schneider as the train driver, Brian de Palma must have had his tongue in his cheek for at least some of the time. He's created a masterful boy's own adventure story, an original "ripping yarn" and that brilliant comic touch added to this perfectly. "Mission Impossible" is a visual and cerebral treat. Tom Cruise is excellent as Ethan, Vanessa Redgrave makes a superb villian and Jean Reno is watchable in ANYTHING he does. The only weak link is Emmanuelle Beart, who did a good job of looking beautiful but very little else. What a shame Kristin Scott Thomas couldn't have taken a more central role; she makes the gorgeous but bland Beart look like a waste of space. I give this 8 out of ten and it would have been more if it wasn't for Beart's character.

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• I like this film!

  Rammstein-22000-02-11

  I really liked this one. Not very much in common with the TV-series, and I can see why so many dislike it that way. But there are some REALLY good sequences here, and there is even one that I consider to be one of the very best and most suspenseful parts of any movie - the part where Cruise is in the vault. Beautiful and nerve-racking. Not much else to say, though - it's an action movie, and it's a good one.

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