MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)
A Film Review Copyright Dragan Antulov 2003
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, 1996 action thriller directed by Brian de Palma, provided one of many Hollywood's post-Cold War ironies. The movie was based on the popular TV series and shot in Prague, the city where the people got the opportunity to watch that piece of television more than a decade after the end its American run. This is understandable, because the show was about group of super-secret American agents who devised complicated schemes to save the world from various dangerous villains, including Soviets.
Modern cinema version of TV series starts in Prague where Jim Phelps (played by Jon Voight), veteran operative of US government's super-secret agency IMF, gathers the team of experts to conduct a delicate mission - to catch a spy in the act of stealing NOC list - precious documents with the names of American double agents. The mission doesn't go as planned and ends in a massacre of almost entire IMF team. The only survivors are team's point man Ethan Hunt (played by Tom Cruise) and Phelps' young and beautiful wife Claire (played by Emmanuelle Beart). Hunt must find out what went wrong, especially since his boss Kitteridge (played by Henry Czerny) considers him to be the traitor. Hunt is forced to hire outside help - burglary specialists Franz Krieger (played by Jean Reno) and Luther Stickell (played by Ving Rhames) - in order to find the evidence that would prove his innocence.
East Europeans' relative unfamiliarity with original MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE might have been a good thing for the film. Those who had watched the series were disappointed with a film, and this is the understatement. While the original series featured complicated and intelligent plots, the script by David Koepp, Steven Zaillian and Robert Towne stuck only with the complicated part. Hardly anything that goes in the film makes sense, and after a while the audience would probably only pay attention to couple of action scenes that also hardly make sense, but at least provide some spectacle. Brian de Palma, once one of the most respected Hollywood filmmakers and now reduced to being a hired gun for big studios and their summer blockbusters, directs those scenes with a lot of style, but even his efforts aren't enough to save MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE from sinking to oblivion.
RATING: 3/10 (+)
Review written on January 24th 2003
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax http://film.purger.com - Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom/Movie Reviews in Croatian http://www.purger.com/users/drax/reviews.htm - Movie Reviews in English http://www.ofcs.org - Online Film Critics Society
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