The Tom Cruise-fronted “Mission: Impossible” film series has become so decidedly, distinctively its own thing – a comically profitable big-screen franchise and a go-to cash-cow that has sustained Cruise’s career through some fairly fallow stretches – that it’s easy to forget that when it hit theaters 25 years ago this week, it could’ve been just another cynical, nostalgia-driven film version of an old TV show. The early-to-mid-‘90s was lousy with them: “The Flintstones,” “The Addams Family,” “The Fugitive,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Maverick,” “Dennis the Menace,” “Car 54, Where Are You?” and on and on.
In fact, Cruise and crew have so thoroughly redefined the title that it’s easy to forget that “Mission: Impossible” was a TV series to begin with – so one of the delights of Brian De Palma’s initial entry in the series is how eager he is to remind us of those origins. He starts his film as if it’s a TV show, with a clever, fake-out cold open that moves into what is, by any measure, a television opening credit sequence: the familiar theme song scoring thrilling moments from the show/movie we’re about to watch, many of which would be spoilers if they weren’t coming at us so rapidly. It’s a big, broad wink from the filmmaker – he knows exactly what he’s making – while also falling right in line with similar medium-blurring tricks throughout his filmography, like the dating game show that opens “Sisters,” or the ‘60s-style street theater performance documentary embedded in “Hi, Mom!” (It also feels like a casual reminder that he’s done this sort of thing before; De Palma presumably got the gig on account of his fine direction of “The Untouchables,” one of the most critically and commercially successful TV-to-film crossovers to that point.)
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Like many a mid-‘90s blockbuster (or, well, many a blockbuster, period) the script was the film’s lowest priority; De Palma and Cruise (making his debut as a producer) went into production without a finished screenplay, but with a pricey crew of scribes on the payroll to Scotch-tape one together. As a result, critics then and now insist it doesn’t make much sense, which is both accurate and irrelevant; for my money, it’s one of those movies where it’s less important that it all makes sense to you than that you get the feeling it made sense to someone, somewhere along the line. (“Tenet,” for the record, is the same way.)
But the plot doesn’t really matter much anyway. De Palma reportedly devised his big set pieces first, and advised his screenwriters to build a plot that would get him from one to the next; his idol Alfred Hitchcock worked the same way, and it didn’t harm his movies a bit. (The climax, with Cruise atop a fast-moving train with a helicopter in pursuit into a tunnel, was said to be Cruise’s baby, and you can feel De Palma checking out during that one.)
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It’s clear that the sequence De Palma was most invested in was, not coincidentally, the picture’s most memorable: the Langley heist, in which Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his makeshift crew of fellow “disavowed” agents have to extract an identity list from a hyper-secure computer terminal inside the CIA headquarters. It is, well, an impossible mission, but that’s what they do: slipping into the building in disguise, and lowering Hunt into a sound- and temperature-sensitive chamber. “Krieger, from now on in: absolute silence,” Hunt whispers, and (as in “Rififi,” the sequence’s clear inspiration), the filmmaker follows the instructions, eschewing both dialogue and musical accompaniment, providing only the most agonizing of sound effects. I saw this scene with a packed crowd on opening weekend back in 1996, and the impact was astonishing – the audience follows the film’s lead, holding their own breath and their own sounds in, lest they break the spell. In this scene, we see De Palma following Hitchcock’s modus operandi to a tee: he’s playing the audience like a piano, from the close-up of the approaching mouse to the push-in on the bead of Hunt’s sweat to the cutaways to the sound monitor and finally, thrillingly, the slow-motion close-up of the knife tumbling through the air.
What’s most striking about “Mission: Impossible” is how thoroughly it is, above all else, a Brian De Palma movie. From frame one, he’s having a great time putting his camera wherever the hell he wants and moving it every which way; he fills the picture with snazzy zooms, low angles, circling camerawork, point-of-view shots, attention-getting overheads, split diopters, and more Dutch angles than you can shake a stick at. (The playfulness of Hunt’s relationship with Vanessa Redgrave’s “Max” also feels like a De Palma touch – he loves a sexy lady of a certain age.)
For a time, it seemed this would be the standard operating procedure for “Mission: Impossible” movies – an auteurist franchise, in which each installment would welcome a new director, who would imprint the series with their stylistic signature. And that idea held for the first two sequels: John Woo’s “Mission: Impossible 2” was filled with doves and slow-motion and “gun-fu,” and J.J. Abrams’ “Mission: Impossible III” looked like an episode of “Alias.” But those flourishes fell away around the fourth film, when Abrams’ approach fused with that of Pixar director Brad Bird, and an “M:I” house style was formed, which was then adopted and perfected by Christopher McQuarrie, who helmed the fifth and sixth installments (as well as the forthcoming seventh and eighth).
Such standardization was probably inevitable; the idea of an auteurist franchise was somewhat far-fetched twenty years ago and has only grown more so in the age of Marvel, where we go searching, magnifying glasses in hand, for the stylistic touches an exciting filmmaker has managed to sneak into the template, rather than how they’ve taken it over. And, to be sure, the “Mission: Impossible” franchise has grown more reliable and satisfying through its metamorphosis. But revisiting its inaugural entry does make one fondly recall a forgotten feeling: going to these movies and not being quite sure exactly what you were going to get.
