Sean Fennessey, The Ringer
Mission: Impossible Is the Best Movie Franchise—Here’s Why

[Ranking out of the six films]
1. Mission: Impossible (1996)

Directed by Brian De Palma

The Lesson: Franchise Isn’t a Dirty Word

While Brian De Palma watched his pals George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola build franchise empires and scale the movie business to the height of their imagination, the Movie Brats’ fourth compadre worked in a cocoon. His films in the ’70s and ’80s were brash, often violent, sexualized thrillers indebted to Alfred Hitchcock. They were elegantly composed and bracing works that sometimes struggled to exceed their own commitment to the ecstatic. But decades after Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Godfather, De Palma finally took a studio gig with Mission: Impossible and became a part of a template that is being copied to this day. It’s his movie, through and through. And it vanishes from his hands the minute it ends. In the Mission: Impossible parlance, he accepted the mission, and then it self-destructed.

2. Langley heist, Mission: Impossible
“Relax, Luther,” Ethan says with a smile. “It’s much worse than you think.” And indeed it is — getting to the file they need from CIA headquarters requires voice ID, changing numerical codes, double electronic key card, and a retinal scan, all to get into a secure room with heightened sound and temperature sensitivity. And so Hunt is lowered in, by rope from an air duct (an homage to the classic ‘60s heist picture Topkapi), in what’s really the opposite of what we think of an “action sequence”: there’s no gunplay, no explosions, no fisticuffs, and no pounding score to juice up the excitement. (The closing action sequence, which falls into those a parameters, is a dud — and, criminal considering the eventual direction of the franchise, it looks laughably fake.) In fact, director Brian De Palma’s decision to play the sequence in total silence makes it more involving for the viewer; it’s so quiet, and the stakes are so high, the audience is afraid to make a sound either. De Palma, playing his audience like a piano (as his hero Alfred Hitchcock used to say), stretches the suspense as far as he can, snaking in to tight close-ups of Hunt’s rope, Jean Reno’s hands, that single bead of sweat — and then the rat shows up.

I hadn’t revisited the first three in over a decade, and they’re a fascinating trio of movies in no small part because of who made them. One of the elements that has really separated the “M:I” films from other action franchises (or even most of the MCU) is the willingness of Tom Cruise and company to turn the storytelling over to known auteurs. We live in an era in which most franchises work to flatten the authorship of their director (again, looking at you MCU), but each “M:I” is unmistakably the product of its creator. There are touches in each of the first three films that echo themes of the other works of Brian De Palma, John Woo, and J.J. Abrams. The next three get away from this aspect a bit and feel more consistent with one another, but it’s fascinating to watch a major Hollywood franchise that allowed viewers to see the director’s fingerprints instead of just waxing them out.

Having said that, the two newest films are the kind of technical marvels that really amplify the art of 4K most of all. To be fair, the first movie has never looked or sounded this good, and I had forgotten how beautifully-constructed it is from first scene to last. If you haven’t seen it in a long time, you should catch up on 4K. “Mission: Impossible 2” has not held up quite as well—it’s startling to see how much Hunt changed as a character/hero from De Palma to Woo—but it’s still an interesting film, anchored by solid supporting turns from Thandie Newton and Sir Anthony Hopkins. “Mission: Impossible 3” is often held up as a high point because it has the best villain and the highest emotional stakes. Both are true (at least until “Fallout”), but it already feels a little dated.

In the Eighties going into the Nineties, spurned on by the success of the “Star Trek” movies, making big screen versions out of familiar small screen titles suddenly became the rage for a while. With its well-known title and memorable theme music, Paramount Pictures was keen to make a “Mission: Impossible” film but the project remained in limbo until Tom Cruise, at the very apex of his stardom, decided not only to do it but to make it the first effort from his newly-formed production company. Sydney Pollack was attached to the project for a while but eventually it went to Brian De Palma—the notion of the generally iconoclastic filmmaker doing a potential tentpole project of this sort must have seemed strange at the time but his last major box-office success had been an adaptation of another television show, “The Untouchables” (1987). A number of top writers, including Robert Towne, Steve Zaillian and David Koepp, worked on the script but it reportedly went into production without a completed screenplay. There were also rumors of friction during the shoot between Cruise and De Palma that appeared to be tacitly confirmed when De Palma dropped out of the film’s press junket on the eve of its opening.

When audiences first sat down to watch “Mission: Impossible” in May 1996, those with an actual working knowledge of the series must have felt right at home. From the start, the film trotted out the most familiar ingredients—the theme, the opening credits featuring a rapid-fire assortment of clips from the story we were about to see and, most of all, an IMF team once again led by veteran Jim Phelps (now played by Jon Voight) and including his wife, Claire (Emmanuelle Beart), and various experts in their respective fields (played by such familiar faces as Kristin Scott Thomas and Emilio Estevez). Most importantly, there was point man Ethan Hunt (Cruise) choosing to accept a mission in Prague to recover a top secret list of CIA agents from the American Embassy that requires clever moves, hi-tech gadgetry and, of course, an elaborate disguise or two. Then, in classic De Palma fashion, things quickly go sideways and the once-cocky Ethan is left standing helpless as the rest of his team is killed off one by one and the list vanishes. To make matters worse, when Hunt reports to his superior (Henry Czerny) for debriefing, he learns that the entire mission was a ruse designed to ferret out a mole who was intending on stealing and selling the list to a secretive arms dealer known only as Max—since he was the only survivor, the assumption is that Ethan was the guilty party. He escapes easily enough and, after putting together an ad-hoc team consisting of a couple of disgraced former IMF operatives, computer genius Luther Stickey (Ving Rhames) and pilot Franz Krieger (Jean Reno), and Claire, who survived the attack after all, creates an elaborate plan to steal the real list himself in order to lure the person who framed him while at the same time escaping the pursuit of his former employers.

The film got reviews that were decent but hardly spectacular with many of them complaining that the storyline was too convoluted for its own good. Therefore, it may come as a shock to people revisiting it for the first time in a while (or those who have never seen it before) to discover just how strong it really is. Yes, the systematic destruction of the IMF team in the opening scenes, coupled with the later revelation that—Spoiler Alert!—it was Phelps himself who was the mole, shocked and outraged fans of the original show (not to mention some of the original stars, who gave interviews to show their displeasure with the film). And yet, this move proved to be as dramatically clever as it was audacious. The times had changed considerably in the years since the original series went off the air and the notion of a clandestine spy agency going on officially unsanctioned missions to mess around in other countries was simply not going to play in the same fashion. By blowing things up in this way, the film managed to clear the decks for a “Mission: Impossible” designed for the current world while managing to throw most moviegoers for a loop early on in the proceedings.

It is funny to note that this film was once derided for its alleged incoherence because the narrative seems remarkably clean and efficiently told, especially in comparison to what passes for blockbuster filmmaking these days. When it is seen a second time—and this is the rare modern screen spectacular that actually plays better on repeat viewings—one can more clearly see just how smartly written it really is. (I especially love the scene in which Ethan and Phelps reunite and catch each other up on what is happening and Ethan quietly realizing that he is being lied to by his former mentor.) The performances are also quite good as well, which also comes as a surprise since quality acting is not usually the highest priority in films like this. Cruise does an excellent job of playing against his generally cocksure screen persona, Voight adds weight and even a slight degree of poignance to his turn as Phelps and as the mysterious Max, Vanessa Redgrave turns up in a couple of scenes and pretty much steals the show—when she and Cruise have their big scene together, the screen crackles with so much electricity that one wishes that someone could have found a project that would have given them more chances to play off of each other. (The only sort-of disappointment in the cast is Beart, who is nowhere near as electrifying here as she was in films like “Manon of the Spring” or “La Belle Noisseuse” [1991], though that might have something to do with the last-minute deletion of scenes suggest a love triangle between Claire, her husband and Ethan.)

The best thing about “Mission: Impossible”—not to mention one of the key elements that would go on to drive the subsequent films—is the way that a film that was presumably launched primarily as a star project managed to morph, with the approval of the star/producer, into perhaps the most auteur-friendly franchise in operation today. Since it is a film where he was hired to interpret someone else’s material, this is clearly not a “pure” Brian De Palma movie in the manner of such self-generated projects as “Dressed to Kill” (1980), “Blow Out” (1981) or “Femme Fatale” (2002). However, this is one of his most successful attempts at channeling his own particular obsessions into a more overtly commercial framework than is usually found in his more personal efforts. Although not necessarily the kind of story that he might have designed wholly on his own, this story allowed De Palma to tackle subject matter that has long fascinated him, such as voyeurism, technology, mistrust of the very organizations that are supposedly there to protect us and stories that feature unreliable narrators. The film also allows him to demonstrate once again that he is one of the great visual storytellers of our time and includes some of the most memorable extended set pieces of his career. Under normal circumstances, either the opening sabotage in Prague or the climactic fight aboard and on top of a train speeding through the Chunnel would be duly enshrined as the absolute peak moments in the career of an ordinary filmmaker. With De Palma, they aren’t even the high point of the film thanks to the masterful sequence depicting Ethan and his team infiltrating CIA headquarters to steal the list of spies from a room rigged to sound off alarms at even the slightest hint of an intruder in the room—even a simple drop of sweat could do the trick. The entire sequence is a breathtaking wonder that is pretty much a master class in filmmaking all by itself.