When I first watched Mission: Impossible, and Tom Cruise’s first outing as Ethan Hunt – I was much younger – still in High School, with a degree of familiarity with the TV series from watching reruns on TV on Saturday mornings, or on cable on TV Land, and with a limited degree of familiarity with the spy or the suspense genre as a whole. So, I don’t think it worked for me the way that Brian De Palma intended. However, the passage of time has lead me to have more experience with thrillers, the spy genre in its multiple flavors, and some of De Palma’s other work (such as The Untouchables), which has lead me to a place where I think I’m able to re-appraise this film on its own terms – and I think it fares much better in this re-appraisal.

That said, whether you’re a fan of the original work or not, the film goes off with a really strong opening act – with a classic Mission: Impossible caper in progress, but one that’s a little edgier than some of the ones from the show – complete with one of the members of the team having been put under to feign death in order to create a scenario where an informant believes that they’ve just woken up from a night of drinking with a dead girl in their bed – forcing them to turn to another member of the IMF team in disguise for help – allowing them to get a name they need for their mission. It’s played as the kind of con they’d pull on the show, but wouldn’t be able to do on television because of network standards and practices.

From there we get into the mission itself – the team being sent on a mission to prevent the theft of part of a list of undercover operatives from an Embassy, with the goal being to not only catch the thief in the act, but also catch their buyer – allowing them to stop the theft while also gaining intelligence on who was trying to get it. Again, this plays like an episode of the show – and while the original cast doesn’t return (in multiple cases because once they reached the twist in the script, they opted out of appearing in the movie) they are replaced with various name actors like Jon Voight and Emilio Estevez, which gives this aspect a similar effect to casting Drew Barrymore in Scream – you assume they’re not going to die, because why would you shell out that much money for Emilio Estevez for him only to be in a handful of scenes?

And then everything goes wrong, everyone on the team dies except for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), who learns that the whole mission was a mole hunt, because one member of the team was believed to be a mole – and because Ethan got out alive, that means he’s the mole, right? And thus, for the first of many times in this series, Ethan is on the run, disavowed by the agency, and trying to figure out how he got dragged into this horrible conspiracy and ultimately to clear his name. Except the mole is dead, right? Right?

This leads to a really fun, tense suspense thriller – something that’s right up De Palma’s alley. His use of Dutch angles does a tremendous job of showing that while Ethan is able to present a strong sense of confidence as he tries to smoke out the mole, ultimately he’s a man adrift, with nobody that he can really trust. When it comes time to do the big heist at the CIA, with one of the film’s most iconic setpieces – the rope descent into the data vault – the scene gains some added tension that none of the other sequences in the series really gets – because here Ethan is working with people he’s never worked with before, so we have no real information on whether or not they’re going to choke in a pinch – with particular suspicion being on Franz Krieger (Jean Reno) – yes, in part because he’s Sir-Not-Returning-In-The-Sequels, but also because the script does a great job of setting up that he’s a bit of a loose cannon.

The supporting cast for the film is also tremendous – Vanessa Redgrave is splendid as arms & information broker Max – and while more recent Mission Impossible films have had her character’s daughter, I would have loved to have seen her come back instead. And then there’s Henry Czerny as Eugene Kittridge. He brings a level of calm menace to the role that reminds me of some of the best of Hugo Weaving’s dialog scenes as Agent Smith in the first Matrix movie – presenting a sense of bureaucratic menace – a weight of establishment that can and will come down on you like a ton of bricks if given cause.

Where I think things get a little rough is not the break-in to the CIA, or the opening failed mission, but the big climactic sequence with a train heading through the Chunnel, with a helicopter in pursuit. Some of the individual practical effects on their own work great – but all of them don’t completely work together in concert – and I think the issue is more than anything else, the movie is just biting off more than it can chew in the final act. Fundamentally I think part of the cause of this is the Chunnel was very new at the time the film came out, and I could see someone considering it great place for a setpiece in an international spy thriller. However, for some reason they decided that rather than dialing up the claustrophobia of being on a train and a train in a tunnel under the ocean and out of phone communication, let’s add a helicopter chance to the mix! At that point I feel like they overdid it.

Still, the rest of this is a solid start for what has justifiably become a long-standing staple of the spy film genre. I do hope the Mission: Impossible series will find a way to keep going after Tom Cruise steps down (and if they decide to have him finally pass the torch in the sequel to, say, Hayley Atwell as Grace, that would be wonderful). But otherwise, this is a great start – a lot of the things you love are here – Cruise doing really stupid stunts (along with really long runs), mask gags (including in this case scenes where the actors are clearly under the masks, and getting to flex their acting muscles while doing so), and really strong spy plots. I’m glad I took the time to revisit it.

Currently Mission: Impossible (1996) is streaming on Paramount+ and has received a 4K UHD release (which is the version I watched) that is available from Amazon.com (Affiliate Link).

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