Mission: Impossible (1996)

A heist-favouring spy team working for an organization called the IMF (which stands for “Impossible Mission Force”, so not to be confused with the IWF, I assume) under the leadership of Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), is wiped out during an operation in Prague meant to retrieve some kind of ridiculous master list the IMF has of all of their undercover spies. The situation turns out to be at least a double cross. This doesn’t just kill off some of the best actors in the cast, but leaves only one agent alive: a tiny, shouty, perpetually grinning man named Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Or so it seems at first.

This does of course leave Hunt under heavy suspicion from his superiors, and instead of rotting away in a secret prison, our protagonist decides to go on the run and find out who killed his friends while also retrieving the list. He gets help from a surprise survivor of his wiped out team, Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), Phelps’s improbable wife, and a couple of burned, I mean “disavowed”, former IMF agents, Krieger (Jean Reno) and Luther (Ving Rhames). There will be heisting and an astonishing number of double crosses.

Mission: Impossible (which I pretend to take place in universe next to the original series, for reasons obvious to anyone who liked the show and has seen the movie) falls into a weird space in the career of Tom Cruise. While wielding quite a bit of star power, he didn’t have quite as much clout as to be able to bully his directors into an infinite number of close-ups of him looking heroic/constipated, even in a film he produced; though he already was able to play down the importance of every other character in his movies, resulting in a film with Reno, Béart, Rhames, Voight, and Kristin Scott Thomas that finds no space to give any of them an actual substantial scene. Only Vanessa Redgrave seems impervious to this, joyfully chewing the scenery whenever she’s on screen and flirting at Cruise in the exact same predatory manner his heroes would increasingly take on in the coming decades.

Cruise is attempting to make up for the too sharp focus on himself by trying very hard indeed, more often than not falling into a trap that comes up regularly with him during the early decades of his career when he was trying to be a proper actor as well as a movie star – he looks like a guy trying much more than one doing, grimacing and shouting when he doesn’t seem to know how to express human feelings in a more natural manner.

Ironically, the blockbuster bigness of projects like this first Mission: Impossible can’t have helped him either, for this is not a film that lends itself to attempts at being subtle and human; being appropriately big is a skill Cruise really got better in during the years following this. And really, think what you want about the guy, one can’t fault him for being a slacker.

So that leaves Mission: Impossible to be carried by its twisty passages of a curiously predictable script full of set pieces and the great Brian De Palma’s direction alone. Fortunately, De Palma in his thriller director for hire phase is brilliant in his overblown pomposity, clearly loving the technical tricks his budget affords him, finding ways to keep Cruise off-screen at least sometimes by using POV camera, and otherwise applying everything he learned from studying Hitchcock, while also adding his own ability to melodramatically heighten every action by stylish flourishes that would make them ridiculous instead of suspenseful in lesser hands.

Now, many of the set-ups for the film’s central set pieces and the heist scene everybody still seems to remember decades later are patently ridiculous when you think them through, but De Palma’s impeccable staging and timing of thrills cheap and costly makes them utterly convincing while you’re in the moment, which is all that matters in the kind of film that only ever is about its moments of excitement and the thrills that come with that. This is not at all meant as a criticism of big, loud blockbuster movies – I love rather a lot of them, older and very new – but rather an acknowledgement of what they are typically meant to be and do. Mission: Impossible does it rather well indeed, even for someone like me who only ever likes movies starring Tom Cruise despite of him and not because of him.

Three Films Make A Post: A gripping puzzle of pursuit and escape

The Lurking Fear (2023): I’m not enough of an optimist to expect something like a Tubi adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s worst – though also fun despite of itself – stories to be much good, even though you could arguably make a nice ninety minute piece of pulp entertainment out of the material. What we actually get in Darren Dalton’s film is a bit of mock-POV horror, followed by long, long, long sequences of characters wandering through underground tunnels, disrupted by bad make-up effects and what the film laughingly calls its plot. Add to that an inability to edit action sequences or parallel plot lines – of different character groupings wandering through those damn tunnels, so don’t get too excited – that borders on the anti-genius (the Anti-Christ’s less fun brother), and not even Robert Davi playing a bad guy wearing a ridiculous hat can do much to save this thing.

Reportage November (2022): In some aspects this fake documentary style piece of POV horror from Sweden by Carl Sundström is a bit more competently made than your usual movie about filmmakers/ghost hunters/random fools walking panicked through the woods, wielding cameras. At least, the script seems to have a basic understanding of dramatic structure, so there’s a pleasant lack of scenes where characters just fart around, and the plot progresses in a reasonable and mostly efficient manner.

Of course, the narrative still only works like the filmmakers want it to because a quartet of supposed professionals acts ridiculously unprofessional, and most of it consists of the usual tropes and clichés of your typical wood wandering POV horror movie (without the green night camera, though), with a bit of a vague conspiracy angle pasted on. It’s still watchable, which is more than I’d say about many of its peers. Plus, at least the forests are Swedish for a change.

The Odessa File (1974): Ronald Neame’s Odessa File recommends itself mainly through its very post-War sensibility, a portrayal of an early 70s Europe that still lies under the shadow of the kind of people responsible for World War II. This makes it unpleasantly topical in a Europe where the Right is on the rise yet again. And like the Nazis here, there’s still the assumption of victimhood, the pretence at culture, and so on, and so forth coming from these people. The films hits the tone of parts of particularly German post-War culture and the things it liked to hide from itself rather well, so much so that its more contrived conspiracy elements as well as its general sense of paranoia feel plausibly grounded.

As a thriller, the film’s pacing tends to be a little slow, but once it gets going, it does develop more than enough drive to satisfy. The acting, with a merry mix of German and British actors playing the Nazis, and Jon Voight pretending to be Gerrman, as well, is strong throughout. Maximilian Schell hits the note of the whiny, self-satisfied mass murderer, particularly well.