Mission: Impossible (1996)

Official trailer

A Spy Film That Trusts Its Audience

Mission: Impossible is a spy thriller that doesn’t slow down to make sure you’re keeping up. The plot is a tangle of double agents, false identities, stolen lists and betrayals, and on first viewing almost nobody follows all of it. That’s part of the pleasure. Brian De Palma directs it like a puzzle box, full of mirrors, disguises and misdirection, and the audience is as off balance as the hero.

It came out in May 1996, the first film Tom Cruise produced as well as starred in, and it was a huge success.

It launched a franchise that’s still running nearly thirty years later, and it’s nothing like the sequels that followed. I give it an 8. It’s colder, stranger and more paranoid than the later films, and its central heist remains a landmark of the genre.

Of all the Mission films, this is the one I’d keep, and a big part of that is how nervous it is. Cruise spends the film sweating, guessing and nearly getting caught, and De Palma keeps the camera tilted as if the floor might give way. My reservation is the plot, which I think is knotted tighter than it needs to be, but I’ll take a spy film that confuses me over one that explains itself to death.

Prague

The film opens with an Impossible Missions Force team in Prague, led by Jim Phelps, the hero of the old television series, played here by Jon Voight. The mission is to stop a traitor stealing a list of undercover agents from the American embassy during a party. Everything that can go wrong does. One by one, the team is killed, and only Ethan Hunt survives.

The sequence is long, detailed and brilliantly staged, a slow build of tension across rooftops, corridors and bridges, and it ends in disaster. Hunt meets his handler, Kittridge, in a restaurant and learns that the whole mission was a trap to expose a mole inside the team. Since he’s the only survivor, Kittridge believes Hunt is the mole.

The restaurant scene ends with Hunt blowing up an enormous fish tank with exploding chewing gum and escaping in a flood of water and glass. It’s the film’s first great set piece, and it establishes Hunt as a man on his own, disavowed and hunted by the agency he serves.

The fish tank is the moment the film wins me over. Blowing out a restaurant’s wall of water with chewing gum is a ridiculous idea, and De Palma stages it so cleanly that the ridiculousness never registers until Hunt is outside, soaked and alone.

Ethan Hunt Alone

Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt as a clever, intense, slightly nervous agent who has just watched his friends die and been blamed for it. He’s not yet the superhuman action star of the later films. He’s frightened, improvising and constantly one step from being caught, and the film keeps him off balance throughout.

To clear his name, Hunt assembles a new team of disavowed agents: Luther Stickell, a computer expert played by Ving Rhames, and Franz Krieger, a pilot played by Jean Reno. Together with Claire, Phelps’s wife, played by Emmanuelle Béart, the only other survivor of Prague, they plan to steal the real list from the most secure computer in the world, at CIA headquarters in Langley, and use it to draw out the traitor.

Rhames’ Luther is the franchise’s longest-running character after Hunt, and his calm, dry competence makes him an immediate favorite. Reno is shifty and dangerous, and nobody in the film can quite be trusted. The new team is assembled from people with nothing to lose, and the audience spends the rest of the film wondering which of them will turn.

The Vault

The Langley heist is among the most imitated scenes in film history. The CIA’s secure computer sits in a white room protected by sensors for sound, temperature and pressure. A single raised voice or a rise in temperature will trigger the alarm, and the floor detects any weight. Hunt is lowered into the room on wires from a ventilation shaft, suspended horizontally above the floor.

De Palma plays the sequence almost in silence.

We hear breathing, the creak of the cable, the hum of the computer. Hunt hangs inches above the floor, downloading the list, while a rat crawls through the vent above Krieger and a drop of sweat slides down Hunt’s face toward the pressure-sensitive floor. He catches it in his glove at the last possible moment.

It’s suspense built from tiny details, and I think it’s the best thing in the film.

There are no explosions and no gunfire, only silence, stillness and the threat of the smallest mistake. That drop of sweat makes my shoulders tense up. The image of Cruise hanging above the white floor has been parodied and copied ever since, and it’s still the franchise’s defining moment.

The Traitor

The film’s most controversial decision is the identity of the mole. Jim Phelps, the hero of the original television series, turns out to be the traitor who set up the Prague mission, faked his own death and conspired with his wife to sell the list. The twist is revealed on a train, and Hunt reconstructs the betrayal in his head, in a sequence of flashbacks that show what really happened in Prague.

Fans of the television series were furious. Peter Graves, who had played Phelps on television for years, reportedly turned down the chance to reprise the role because of the twist, and several of the original cast criticized the film. To them, turning their hero into a villain felt like a betrayal of the show itself.

Judged as a film, the twist works for me. It gives the story a personal edge, a mentor betraying his student, and Jon Voight plays Phelps as a tired, bitter man who feels the job has left him with nothing. I understand why the show’s fans were furious, and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Voight’s weary contempt matters more to me than loyalty to a television character, and the inversion is clever even if it cost the film its oldest fans.

The Train

The finale takes place aboard a high-speed TGV train traveling from London to Paris through the Channel Tunnel. Hunt confronts Phelps and Krieger on the roof of the speeding train, while a helicopter follows them into the tunnel, tethered to the train by a cable. The helicopter’s rotor blades spin inches from the tunnel walls as the train races forward.

It’s the most extravagant sequence in the film and the least plausible, and it’s thrilling.

Much of it was created with models and digital effects that look a little dated now, and the physics make no sense at all. It doesn’t matter. After the quiet tension of the vault, the finale is pure spectacle, and it ends with Hunt leaping from the helicopter onto the back of the train as the aircraft explodes behind him.

The finale loses a little of me. I enjoy the helicopter in the tunnel as pure nonsense, but after an hour of careful, quiet tension, the switch to cartoon physics feels like somebody else took over for the last reel. I’d trade half of it for one more scene as tight as the vault.

De Palma’s Style

Brian De Palma was the perfect director for the material. His films, from Dressed to Kill to Blow Out, are full of surveillance, doubles, deception and paranoia, and Mission: Impossible gave him a spy story built entirely on those themes. The camera frequently tilts, the angles are strange and unsettling, and screens, mirrors and reflections turn up everywhere.

He also stages the film’s key revelations visually. The flashback on the train, where Hunt imagines several versions of what happened in Prague, shows us each possibility as if it were real, and lets us see the truth only when Hunt does. It’s a sophisticated piece of storytelling for a summer blockbuster, and it helps explain why the film has aged so well.

The Music and the Masks

Danny Elfman wrote the score, building it around Lalo Schifrin’s famous theme from the television series, and it’s tense, playful and energetic. A rock version of the theme, recorded by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen of U2, was released as a single and became a hit around the world.

The film also brought back the series’ signature gimmick: realistic latex masks that let agents impersonate anyone.

The first reveal, when a character peels off a face to show someone else beneath it, is a great moment, and the masks became a trademark of the franchise. De Palma uses them sparingly. Each one lands because the audience never knows when the next is coming, or whose face is about to come off.

The gadgets are modest by later standards: exploding gum, a camera hidden in a pair of glasses, a laptop and a few clever tools for the vault. The film cares more about planning and nerve than hardware. That restraint is part of its appeal. The heroes win by thinking faster than their enemies.

Where the Franchise Went

Seven sequels followed Mission: Impossible, and the directors and styles kept changing. John Woo’s second film is loud and operatic, J.J. Abrams’ third is intimate and emotional, and the later films directed by Brad Bird and Christopher McQuarrie turned the franchise into a showpiece for Cruise’s increasingly dangerous real stunts.

The first film stands apart from all of them. It’s smaller in scale, more interested in deception than action, and closer in spirit to a Cold War spy novel than to a modern blockbuster. Many fans prefer the later films for their fun and spectacle. The original is the most intelligent, and the one that rewards repeated viewing, because its pleasures lie in the plotting as much as the action.

The Price of the Puzzle

The plot is hard to follow, and some viewers find the constant misdirection exhausting. Claire is underwritten, and her relationship with Hunt is sketched too faintly to carry the emotional weight the film wants. The train finale, thrilling as it is, looks noticeably more artificial than everything around it, and the digital helicopter hasn’t aged as well as the practical work around it.

It gets an 8. The Prague opening, the vault, the betrayal and De Palma’s style make it among the best spy thrillers of the nineties, and a far richer film than its sequels’ reputation suggests.

Craft Note

How well does Mission: Impossible (1996) hold up?

It’s an 8, and I think it’s the smartest film in the franchise.

The Prague opening and the vault are as good as anything in nineties spy movies, and De Palma’s paranoia gives it a chill the sequels never went near. What keeps it from a 9 is the overcooked plot, a Claire who barely exists, and a finale that swaps nerve for noise. Watch it twice, because you won’t catch everything the first time, and don’t expect the television show’s fans to forgive the twist.

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