Mission: Impossible Review by Beth Ann Griese

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Starring	Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Emanuelle Beart
Director	Brian DePalma
Year	1996
What it's worth		Second run (See it as part of a double-feature or at a dollar house.)

What's the difference? Why do Addams Family and Brady Bunch movies rake in the dough while Beverly Hillbillies and Car 54s limp their way to the video sales rack? I think success depends on three things: the fondness with which the original is remembered, a little bit of faith and homage to that original, but enough added glitz and punch to make the 90s kids fork over their money along with the older crowd.

So now we have the latest film in this set, Mission: Impossible. This one has no problem with the first requirement for success; it makes most of the folks who remember it glow with nostalgia, and it has a hip enough, James-Bond-with-high-tech premise to make even the most apathetic youth perk up his ears.

Added glitz and punch? Put Tom Cruise in the lead, and you're golden. Add some computer-generated graphics and a couple of stunts, and start counting up the admissions. Add a dash of modern techno-jargon like the Internet and CIA intelligence to keep things spicy. The hip stunts and tech are spread fairly thin through the movie, but it's enough to keep things moving.

Impossible's weakest spot on my three rules for success is its faithfulness to the original. Gone is the old team concept; most of the movie just follows Cruise and whoever he gathers up next to him for the moment. Neat-o keen tech toys are kept to a minimum, sadly. We get to see a few cool disguises and surveillance equipment, but not enough to really give us the cutting-edge feel the original had.

So, in general, we have a formula for success. The movie will almost certainly do well, and has enough fun and games in it to satisfy most summer moviegoers. But how does it fair simply as a movie, not as a TV reworking? Not so well, I'm afraid.

Here's the setup for the story: Cruise is Ethan Hunt, the point man for an Impossible Missions team. His mentor and the team leader is Phelps (Jon Voight), as the father figure for the team. The film starts with the team moving in on an embassy where a double agent is expected to try to steal the names of every undercover spy in the world and sell them to the highest bidder. The mission, though, goes incredibly wrong, resulting in the death of most of the team and the list getting out. Now Hunt is the one being hunted, and he must exact his revenge, clear his name of any involvement, and keep the list out of enemy hands.

Maybe I've just seen too many movies, but I could see the entire plot coming from 20 minutes into the film. Not a single twist or turn surprised me, even though I got the feeling sometimes that the filmmakers had lost track of where they were in the playbook. Cruise, who is also a producer of the film, has commented on what fun they had rewriting the script as they went. I always consider that a bad sign for a movie, and sure enough, there are a couple of scenes where I think they were just making up dialogue as they went along, and if I hadn't already figured out where they were going with the plot, I would have probably gotten very lost.

Plausability is a tricky thing to maintain in a movie like this, and although the series did it admirably, the movie tosses credibility out the window in favor of using buzzwords and raucous effects to bedazzle us. I know enough about computers and security to squirm mightily at some of their premises, and I have a feeling any other area they tackled probably had the experts in those fields squirming, too.

Let me give you an example: Cruise has to break into an extremely well- protected computer system. The room the computer is in has a pressure- sensitive floor, temperature controls that will react to body heat, and lasers guarding the air vents. For all that security, though, there was absolutely nothing to protect the computer itself to stop access or sound an alarm if it is used while no one is supposed to be in the room. I hate nagging doubts like that when I'm trying to enjoy the movie, and this film was hen-pecking me to death.

So Mission: Impossible does have some entertainment value, mostly in the form of gee-whiz effects and beautiful people on the screen. But when it comes to story, the movie falls short. If you're looking for a movie that will blow your socks off and deaden your brain, I'd recommend seeing Twister before this one; the story was even worse, but the effects were more mind-blowing, too.

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