• Director: Brian De Palma
• With: Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Jean Reno, Henry Czerny, Vanessa Redgrave, Kirstin Scott-Thomas, Emmanuelle Béart, Ving Rhames
• Music by: Danny Elfman
• Based upon the Mission: Impossible tv-series
• Duration: 110 mins
• Studio: Paramount Pictures
• Rating: 8,5/10

Review:

The spy game has just added a few new rules and it’s up to Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to uphold them or break them!

So the new M:I movie (Dead Reckoning, Part 1) was just released on DVD and Bluray and I decided to rewatch the entire series.

When after all those years of Impossible Missions on everybody’s tv-sets (in the sixties, seventies and again in the eighties) Hollywood finally decided to bring the series to the big screen… Chosen director: Brian De Palma! But for the movie they decided to veer off from the usual storytelling and to offer a more complex story.

Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) gets an assignment to gather a team for a mission in Prague where they have to stop the transferring of the names and codenames of CIA-operatives. Whoever gets those names will be able to unmask and eventually kill these agents.

But when the mission starts, it’s clear that something is wrong and before anyone can abort the mission everything goes amiss, killing almost everyone from the team, apart from Ethan Hunt! He is soon suspect number one as being a traitor so he needs to do everything possible to clear his name. So he asks a few disavowed agents to join him in this quest: Luther (Ving Rhames) and Krieger (Jean Reno) join him. But when Ethan gets closer to the truth of the failing of the mission, he has to fight for his own life as well!

This movie has deserved a fanbase due to some of the best action scenes (the train and chopper in the tunnel scene, Cruise hanging from a wire mere millimetres from the ground…) but has also been despised by fans of the tv-show due to the difference in approach and because the story was deemed to complicated.

Personally I’m still a huge fan of the movie and the storytelling here. There are a lot of twists and turns in the storyline and it gives a very ‘crime noire’ vibe.

And of course these movies all have some plot holes or mistakes in their story but if that should hold anyone back watching a movie, no one would ever watch something at all anymore! (Granted, M:I II is worse in that department and is by far the worst in the series… so far. More on that in my review for Mission: Impossible II)

So if you want to see Tom Cruise sweating, dangling from a cord, or see him flying in the air due to a blast and shockwave… this is your movie! And admit it: Brian De Palma was a great moviemaker in his days!