Cruise Month - Mini Review: Mission: Impossible

Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s Cruise Month

Yes, welcome to Cruise Month, where we check 10 films from actor/producer Tom Cruise that are not Knight and Day (Because I’ve already done that one, check it out here)

First off a few notes. I’m not making any scientology jokes, I couldn’t give a sh*t about scientology, at all. With that said, let’s have a look at Tom Cruise’s most famous films first. Mission Impossible

Really, with Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation coming out this year, what better time to look at this age-old franchise (well, fast approaching 20 years old) than right now

Based (very very loosely from what I hear) on a television series of the same name, the script had to go through various rewrites to get a workable and satisfactory product but miraculously still got in under an $80 million budget. The film went onto make a worldwide gross of over $400million, a very tidy profit

Cruise serves as both the titular character and one of the producers of the film, with Paramount being the distributors of the film. Paramount’s no stranger to this site, they were responsible for distributing The Last Airbender and Iron Man 3 (the last Marvel movie to be distributed by them as Disney would take over from there) but let’s not hold that against them. After all, their creative control over such projects was limited.

With Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) accused by his agency, the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) of stealing a NOC list, a list of all their undercover agents and their undercover personas, he’s forced to use his extensive training to clear his name. Unfortunately, doing so means getting close to the enemy and stealing the real Noc list when the other is turned out to be a decoy.

As someone who hasn’t seen the TV series, I really feel like this should be the second film. The introduction to this film establishes the relationships of the team, only for it to be torn apart as all of them except Ethan die. The problem is, you’re not with them long enough to feel a lot of sympathy for their deaths, and as part of this movie it feels like a very long prologue.

It feels odd to me that the IMF would consider Ethan to be the prime suspect of the murder after he came back to see them. After all, if you’d betrayed a team, killed most of them and stolen a highly valuable piece tech, the last thing I’d do is go back to the people I betrayed, expecting them to believe someone else had done it. And that’s without the knowledge that another team of agents was looking over them.

With the traitor (called Jobe for most of the movie) unknown to Ethan, he decides to get closer to the buyer, Max. And offers to steal for her the real Moc list. To do this he decides to form a team, he chooses two former IMF agents, Luther (played by Ving Rhames) and Franz (played by Jean Reno) also joining the team is fellow survivor Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), someone who didn’t go back to the IMF despite surviving and therefore likely involved.

The heist itself is long and drawn out if I’m honest, there’s not a lot of intrigue to it because there’s not a lot of motion. You get the added comedy of the guard swallowing something that makes him persistently sick but not a lot actually happens. I do applaud that they actually kept it silent in some portions to make it seems a bit suspenseful, but ultimately it didn’t get there to me

The climax of the movie is set on a train, and I do commend the production team not giving up on this despite a few setbacks. We find out that the traitor is Jim Phelps (John Voight) and a lot of fans at the original show are likely still raging about a major character from the show turning out to be a traitor this soon in (adding to my belief that this should’ve been the second movie, with the first used to properly establish the current order before it’s shaken up)

The biggest issue for me and a lot of critics what I see is character motivation. Jim’s motivations are particularly blaze, they didn’t really give us time to explain his motivation past him being a traitor out for the money.

But it’s not an awful movie. The cinematography is decent, the music is nice, the acting is solid, it just lacks a script worthy of the level of talent displayed here. Maybe a few more rewrites were needed to get the script where it should’ve been the entire time.

Rating 45/100

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Images used in this review are from Mission: Impossible and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use.