1996 Directed by Brian De Palma
When Ethan Hunt, the leader of a crack espionage team whose perilous operation has gone awry with no explanation, discovers that a mole has penetrated the CIA, he's surprised to learn that he's the No. 1 suspect. To clear his name, Hunt now must ferret out the real double agent and, in the process, even the score.
Tom Cruise Jon Voight Emmanuelle Béart Henry Czerny Jean Reno Ving Rhames Kristin Scott Thomas Vanessa Redgrave Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė Valentina Yakunina Marek Vašut Nathan Osgood John McLaughlin Rolf Saxon Karel Dobrý Andreas Wisniewski David Shaeffer Rudolf Pechan Gaston Šubert Ricco Ross Mark Houghton Bob Friend Annabel Mullion Garrick Hagon Jiřina Třebická Andrzej Borkowski Maya Dokic Sam Douglas Olegar Fedoro Show All…
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After PULP FICTION maybe the pop masterpiece of the 90s? Probably hyperbole, but minutes after my umpteenth viewing it's the truth.
If this were made now, Cruise totally would've clung to an actual bullet train. Still, good movie tho
"Would you like to watch a movie?"
Usually a respected auteur like Brian De Palma doesn't get credit for delivering a great piece of pop blockbuster entertainment unless he or she subverts it in some way, deconstructs the genre or introduces some kind of wildly transgressive element like Verhoeven's satire or Scott's formal mayhem, but that's not what De Palma does here. This is more like his Manhunter, where a great director takes pulpy source material and turns it into a meditation on the act of watching, and the romance and excitement of movies themselves. In the opening sequence, IMF are basically established as a film crew, creating a fake scenario in order to get the name of a spy…
94/100
Mission: Impossible is delightfully cheesy, aged to perfection and surrounded by the meatiest strip of bacon ever crafted. It's a tasty and junky blast, from the first frame to the last. Brian De Palma has always been known for his sensual and gleefully silly ventures, all of which possess immaculate form and content. but this is easily his most delicious in regards to spookiness. The set-pieces here are just magnificent, relishing in flawless camerawork and ingenious pacing, and it's all enhanced by Danny Elfman's peerless score. In spite of its commitment to tone, De Palma's film also has a rat complicating things and dangerous chewing gum. Fun, fun, and fun.
Mission Impossible still rules!! Definitely the most auteur-driven blockbuster & the only one in the series to have that true spy thriller feel with 60's espionage aesthetic. De Palma going full De Palma with shots and camera placement. That Langley heist is just an all-timer set-piece, in terms of suspense and tension building, it's maybe the best set-piece in the series. Also that Elfman score is gold.
94
Still the gold standard of auteur-franchise-fuckery. De Palma lays out all the traditional crayons and colors inside the lines, yet it still plays like one great big con-job. The *classic* opening, literally dividing its space and revealing itself as a movie-set, is only the beginning of how De Palma constantly expands and constricts his canvas. Shooting wide and large, in the case of the final train/helicopter action set-piece (which is still an all-timer), and shrinking a 'light-bulb' revelation to nothing more than conjoined edits and alternate viewpoints find common ground in his delicious zooms, ghostly steadicam, and operatic tendencies. The looming fog, traveling gazes, and canted angles are right out of early-British-period Hitchcock and Film Noir, but there's a few additions such as exploding chewing gum, floppy-disc-drives, and (gasp!) email. So assured it'll re-wire the brain.
it's funny because we all know that 2018 tom cruise would actually run around on top of a moving train and so 1996 tom cruise relying on visual effects seems sort of weak by comparison
Happy birthday to Brian De Palma, who with this movie has little to say but "Hi, I'm Brian De Palma and I'm extremely good at making movies"
An ideal DePalma lark. The dedication to artifice and interchangeable faces has a perversity that belongs only to him. It is the least Cruisian film of the series as well. Very much an action film of its time which helps explain the mediocre reviews. I always forget for all the DePalmisms how much it sets the series template.
de palma’s been trying to remake the perverse paranoia anxieties of Vertigo his whole life and though Obsession is the more overt entry the casual infusion into pop thrills and melodrama here probably make it the closest he ever got. that opening that goes from screen to set to mask to person is sublime and the contradictory aurel vs. visual information reveal in the finale is still among the finest of the genre.
