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.
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. Even though there’s much CGI, the effects hold up very well.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.