Mission Impossible (The First Movie)

Mission Impossible (1996)

Runtime: 110 minutes

Directed by: Brian De Palma

Starring: Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Emmanuelle Beart, Henry Czerny, Jean Reno

From: Paramount

Believe it or not, this is something I had not seen before this week. I just never felt like it. However, I heard strong stuff about the new MI out on the big screen now, so I figured I should at least try watching the first three in the series. I went and saw this via a DVD rental, and it was an original DVD from ’98, which showed via its presentation… and the disc being scratched up, so I had to fix it.

That wasn’t the only time I was reminded of the 90’s. The movie had data transported on floppy disks, after all, and my personal favorite, major conversations happening in Usenet! That certainly dates things.

The plot as such is that the IMF team led by Jim Phelps (of the 60’s TV show; this time it was played by Voight rather than Peter Graves) go do a mission in Prague but it gets screwed up so it’s left to Ethan Hunt (Cruise, delivering a Cruise-ian performance. You can decide if that’s a good or bad thing) to try and fix things up and not have people think that HE was the one who allowed things to go awry.

The movie has such has a lot of spy stuff such as “moles” and gadgets and wacky setpieces and what have you. It is popcorn entertainment and not something you want to think too much about. But, I don’t mean that as a slight. It’s still entertaining to watch 15 years later. The ending in particular is highly ridiculous; that said, it was still thrilling to watch. In fact, many of the special effects still look fine in 2011. So, while this wasn’t a great movie by any means at least I can say I’ve seen it.

I’ll be back Christmas Day with a review appropriate for December 25. Expect it to be up in the afternoon.