Mission: Impossible
This film has two sides clawing for attention. On one side you have the goofy, Get Smart-like spy parody, on the other the serious spy drama, with double and triple agents, deception and remote-controlled car bombs.
As soon as the mentor is gone, the goofiness wins. There is a staple of preposterous gadgets and several characters that take off their perfect rubber mask to reveal they were Tom Cruise all along. The pinnacle is the now-classic zipline from the ceiling. I forgot Jean Reno was holding the zipline in the ventilation shaft when he gets spooked by a rat which make Cruise plummet to the ground.
Angelina Jolie’s dad is a sleazy motherfucker. He breaks Ethan’s balls for not resiting Claire’s charm, after “tasting the goods” himself. What a fucking cunt. That’s really the core of the conflict, Ethan knows she is in on the mole, but dismisses it because he is lonely.
Same as Emilio Estevez, all he wants is a date with the other girl that blew up in the car, or is it Kristen Scott Thomas? Both are way out of his league.
A big budget affair, the amount of talent killed off in the first 30 minutes is incredible. Jean Reno and Ving Rhames show up in the second half too.
One of the NOC assets on the Medellin cartel is “Pablo Rovalo”, a laughable Escobar expy. This is decades before American Made.
The tech stuff is goofy as hell, just a few years before Hackers. 686 processors, AI-optimised RISC chips, the latest crypto gear. Ethan arranges meetings in Usenet. Beats Twitter and Copilot bullshit.
Ironically, even though there’s much primitive CGI, the effects hold up well, it’s tastefully done. A lot of Gouraud shading, that’s for sure.
Soderbergh stole so much of this for Ocean’s Eleven, the little touches. Jokes about batteries, the way Ethan explains the heist, some of the visuals too. He even did that film with Ving Rhames too! He missed “Those damn Gideons!”.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.