retro movie review: Mission: Impossible

With the next installment of the Mission: Impossible film series slated to be released next year and Tom Cruise still going strong in the "action hero" stage of his career (an increasingly standard phase in any male movie star's career, it seems), it's almost hard to believe that the first Mission Impossible movie came out 18 years ago.

I remember when Paramount Pictures first announced that they would be adapting the old 1960s TV series into a major motion picture. With the project still in the earliest stages of development -- the only decided detail at the time was that Cruise would star -- the editors of Entertainment Weekly, apparently fans of the old series, excitedly speculated how many cast members of the TV show would reprise their roles.

The ultimate answer: none.

This is a shame, because although the transition from low-budget 60s TV show to big-budget 90s action movie seemed like a major revision at the time, in retrospect, especially compared to its sequels, the first Mission Impossible movie does indeed owe a lot to its predecessor.

The movie stars Cruise as Ethan Hunt, a secret agent working for the fictional American agency I.M.F. (a sub-agency of the C.I.A.). In the movie's first act, Ethan and his fellow IMF agents are on a seemingly routine mission when suddenly everything starts going wrong, and Ethan is horrified to see his colleagues and friends die one by one. Things get only worse when Ethan tries to report in to the home office, and learns that he's been framed as the culprit. The rest of the movie is about Ethan's efforts to prove his innocence and find out who's really responsible for betraying his team.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves here, because those early scenes with Ethan's original teammates are entirely essential to understanding the movie, and not just on a story level.

Producers Cruise and Paula Wagner were very public about wanting the original cast to reprise their roles, and with some of them on the downturn of their careers, their return seemed like a no-brainer. But if they wanted the original cast to return -- and there is every indication that this was a sincere desire on the producers' parts -- the makers of the film made two huge tactical mistakes: First, as originally conceived, it was the 60s IMF characters who were supposed to be killed off in the first act, offending some of the 60s stars, like Martin Landau. In a way, the killing makes dramatic sense on a couple of levels: There is, of course, the shock value of seeing the beloved established characters die. And killing off the old guys does give a narrative excuse to clear the way for Ethan to recruit new colleagues for the adventures that follow. But Landau and the others objected to the fact that they were so central to the show's success, and then being brought back for mere cameos, in a manner guaranteed to prevent future appearances in any potential follow-ups.

The one original TV character who has a sizable role in the story is Jim Phelps, originally played by Peter Graves. But this leads to the filmmakers' second mistake (major SPOILER alert, in the unlikely chance that you haven't seen the movie yet), offending Graves by turning Mr. Phelps into the bad guy.

Okay, but that's all just production back-story. What about the movie itself? Well, as I said earlier, there's a lot of the spirit of the old series in the first Mission Impossible movie, especially in the early scenes. From the familiar "good evening, Mr. Phelps" introduction to the IMF teams' mission, to the now-iconic "this message will self-destruct" warning, to the scene in which Phelps outlines exactly how the team will go about accomplishing its assigned mission, the movie gets both the detail and feel of every aspect of the old TV show just right. Director Brian DePalma even remembers and emulates the detail that the original series' opening credits sequence would always show fast snippets of the mission about to come.

Although I empathize with why the original cast chose not to return only to be killed off in the first act, I repeat that it's a shame that they didn't, because the filmmakers were right: it would have been cool to see the original characters come back for one more swan song, and it also would have made the "all the IMF agents are getting killed!" sequence much more emotionally powerful.*

That being said, it's still pretty well done, with Cruise, his co-stars, and their writers expertly using a limited amount of time to establish a camaraderie between Ethan and his colleagues; it's clear that these people aren't just co-workers, they're also friends. An unbilled Emilio Estevez is especially good in this sequence, and the way his Jim Harmon pals around with Ethan, you really do get the feeling that they are nearly as close as brothers, without the sentiment ever being explicitly stated.

Then, all hell breaks loose, leading to a series of high-octane action sequences. Landau was write to observe that this was not what the TV show was about, but listen to his description of the original show: "Mission was a mind game. The ideal mission was getting in and getting out without anyone ever knowing we were there."

That's a pretty accurate description of the original series, but Landau is flat-out wrong in describing this as a difference between the show and the film, because, if anything, this is precisely the aspect of the show that the movie succeeds in emulating. Yes, there are more chases, explosions, and fight scenes than in a typical TV episode. This is, after all, an action movie. But those scenes serve as nothing more than a spice in the recipe. Much of the fun of the movie is watching Ethan and his colleagues use their ingenuity and skills to sneak in and out of places, to trick bad guys into doing things they would normally never do, and to perform some good-old-fashioned detective work. Fans of the original show should be crying out in delight, "Yes! That's exactly what the old show was all about!" Even the arguably silly latex disguise masks Ethan uses in the movie seem to be a logical extension of the elaborate costumes originally worn by Rollin Hand and Paris the Great (played by, respectively, Martin Landau and Leonard Nimoy in the original TV show).

The later sequels would keep some aspects of this general idea, but completely abandon any attempt to maintain the tone of the original series. In Landau's words -- misapplied to the first film, but an appropriate description of the sequels -- "the whole texture changed." This is not a condemnation of the film series, mind you, just an observation on the change in tone. Aside from the theme music and the self-destructing mission tapes, Mission Impossible parts 2 through 4 bear absolutely no resemblance to the old series. They are their own animals, and make no apologies for it. Personally, I hated part 2 and enjoyed parts 3 and 4, but that's all beside the point.

Wait, what is the point? Simply this: Mission Impossible is a good movie, partially because it succeeds on two entirely separate levels. Yes, it is an action vehicle for Tom Cruise, and as an action movie, it delivers the goods. But, despite the understandable objections of the original cast members, the movie also holds up as a worthy homage to the TV series.

*side-note: Although I still maintain that the best possible scenario for these early scenes would have been to reunite the TV cast, seeing Cruise and Emilio Estevez side-by-side for the first time since 1983's The Outsiders always made me think that a really cool alternative would have been to populate Ethan's first IMF team entirely of former Brat Packers. Hey, they got Estevez, how hard would it have really been for them to get Ally Sheedy and Molly Ringwald? I'm thinking they would have jumped at the chance.