With the Soviet Union now run by chubby uncles in cheap suits, it's clear how many spy thrillers from World War II onward were built on fantasy. We wanted an enemy worthy of anything American ingenuity could hurl against it. Grim realism was also no longer an option, even though films like "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" and "The Ipcress File" made one key contribution. They suggested that if you can't be sure what side the players are on, there aren't winners or losers. The only thing left is the game itself.
The new "Mission Impossible" is pure game. The old TV show it's based on turned Cold war us-against-them paranoia into techno-fantasy. The new writers, though, were stuck: no Cold War, no enemy worthy of Tom Cruise and millions of dollars in special effects. The problem with heading a "Mission Impossible" team is that the mission really has to be impossible -- almost. Hollywood stopgaps from the Gorbachev years (Columbian drug lords and Arab terrorists) lacked stature.
The only thing left is the game itself. "Mission Impossible" is a very cleverly made really dumb movie. You can almost overhear quarrels at story conferences while producer-star Cruise and his writers tried to decide what kind of movie they were making. It was a split decision. Like so many movies nowadays, "Mission Impossible" is an action thriller and a parody of an action thriller at the same time. If you're hip to what director Brian De Palma is trying to do, you can enjoy it as a filmed commentary on the emptiness of the film genre it represents: the spy thriller. There are lots of spies but their allegiance quickly becomes irrelevant. High tech gadgetry plays against story conventions that were creaky when John Buchan wrote "The 39 Steps."
It's hard not to see De Palma's hand in this approach. De Palma is Hollywood's acknowledged master of the backward bow. His films "quote" films by classic directors. For years the rap was that De Palma was trying to be the new Hitchcock. But in "The Untouchables" he "quoted" Eisenstein's Odessa steps sequence from "Potemkin." The longest sequence in "Mission Impossible" is practically a direct steal from Jules Dassin's "Topkapi," a classic caper film. There's nothing wrong with borrowing from better films. The problem is that De Palma makes you aware of his indebtedness while emptying the reference of any significance.
There's not much I can say about the plot without getting irate phone calls. Let's just say that when it becomes confusing -- and it does -- you're probably supposed to recognize that confusion is one of the few cards left on the table any more. Anyone who looks for a seamless stitch connecting beginning and end is going to unravel quickly. The storyline follows the law of incremental plausibility, which means it's believable from moment to moment, but unbelievable overall.
To cite a few examples: Cruise and his team get involved in a scheme to sell an international arms merchant an ultra top secret list naming all the U.S. spies in the world. This list exists only in a computer housed in a vault. The vault's protected by security gizmos. Cruise gets into the vault, copies the file. My problem: Cruise could have hired Redford and the team from "Sneakers" to pull a cyber-burglary by phone. Does any spy except total klutzes like Aldrich Ames meet furtively on street corners to exchange paper? De Palma knows "Mission Impossible" shouldn't even try for plausibility. The long climax on a high speed bullet train heading into the "chunnel" under the English channel screams this. A train? Is there any reason to put the climax on a train except that every espionage thriller from Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" onward ends up in a chase from one Pullman car to another?
"Mission Impossible" knows its audience and tries to sort the crowd into those in the know and everyone else. Among the unenlightened are likely to be thousands of women who want to scope Tom Cruise. I mentioned to my Jazzercise instructor that I was heading to a preview screening of "Mission Impossible." She was interested. Tom Cruise, she said, was "easy on the eyes." Maybe so, but De Palma must have read her mind. Cruise spends the first fifteen minutes of the movie disguised as an aged senator with wispy gray hair and liver spots. She'll have to wait to salivate.
You have to assume De Palma and the writers were trying to be arch here. But underneath this surface hipness there's a genuine desperation, as if the "Mission Impossible" crew understood that a movie that empties its message ends up hollow. What impressed me was how the movie used the old Lalo Schriffin "Mission Impossible" theme. It runs under the credits, and two or three other times in the movie. Every time it's played the movie reaches a new energy level, powered mainly by the music. Danny Elfman's score fills in the in-between moments with a fairly slow and somber rhythm that often works against De Palma's visuals.
The "Mission Impossible" of the title might as well be a commentary on what De Palma and Cruise try to do. The movie is hipper-than-thou and slack-jawed-slope-brow at the same time. Lots of recent movies have danced on this thin edge: "Malice" and "Congo" come to mind. Its underlying self-parody makes me wonder whether Leslie Nielsen is the star of the future, if only somebody would buy him a tighter corset and
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