Mission: Impossible Review
by Lewis Butler (kreme AT netcom DOT com)June 24th, 1996
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
A film review by Lewis Butler
Copyright 1995 Lewis Butler
In Short: A well crafted movie that doesn't hold your hand through the intricate maneuvers of the the plot. Tom Cruise plays the invisible agent type very well. A solid +1.5 on the ol' -4/+4 scale.
Mission Impossible is a good movie that has been taking a lot of critical hits from people who seem to have been expecting DIE HARD IV meets GOLDENEYE. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE is not that kind of movie. What this movie does is present a fairly intelligent plot that is highly detailed and makes the horrible mistake (for a summer movie hopping to be a blockbuster) of not spoon feeding every plot point to the audience.
There are no stupid pauses in the action to explain what's going on, there's no extra effort made to guide the audience along with the gizmos and gadgets. The movie shows you what is happening, and then expects you to be able to figure out the details.
There is a wonderful sequence towards the middle of the film that sold me. Tom Cruise is talking to character A about the possibility of Character B being a mole. The entire time he's engaged in this conversation, Cruise keeps flashing to a sequence on how Character A could have been the mole. The juxtaposition of the converstation against what we see Cruise thinking is a brilliant, and effective, device. However, I could hear the grumblings in the audience, they didn't seem to understand what was going on.
Tom Cruise fits into the role of a spy very well. He has a certain presence on the screen that makes him quite believable.
There is, as there always seems to be with the special effects wonders of recent years, a certain amount of suspension of belief. One sequence in particular has Cruise surviving an explosion when he is thrown by the explosion onto the roof of a moving train. Hollywodd seems to have decided on several conventions in action films that boggle the mind: cars have no trouble driving through security gates (why anyone would build a security gate that a car can drive through remains unanswered); explosions throw heroes clear and kill villains; guns are highly inaccurate weapons; and there are others, of course. Still, those "mistakes" are so established in the genre that they've become conventions. The audience expects them.
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