So I caught myself watching this on TV last night, and to my surprise found it moderately entertaining. I love De Palma's 80s Hitchcock ripoffs (Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double), which create a big-screen popcorn "at the movies" feeling like few others, and while he sadly turned into a hired hack from The Untouchables onward, he still knows how to make a movie. The plot of Mission Impossible is pure nonsense, overheated, over-twisted shit, but De Palma somehow makes the movie work. He wisely lets the camera, rather than the script, do the storytelling, and creates the illusion of a coherent plot where no coherence is to be found. This is in stark contrast to younger hacks like Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich, who couldn't film a two-shot without turning it into a loud, confusing mess. De Palma's competent presence is sorely felt here, and even some of his artistic personality comes through: there are shades of Blow Out in the scenes where Tom Cruise pieces together the sequence of events at the start of the movie.
As with Blow Out, De Palma has unfortunately had to build a movie around a charisma-free Scientologist, though I'd rather watch Travolta than Cruise any day. The success of this cultist shortarse, who lacks talent, looks or presence, is so baffling to me that I can only assume Scientology actually works, and Cruise is using his advanced Thetan powers to persuade his way into one $20 million leading role after another. Cruise is accompanied in his espionage team by two of my least favourite actors: John Voight, who was good in the 70s but re-emerged in the 90s as a pile of ham with the looks and personality of Ron Atkinson; and the frozen haddock Kristin Scott-Thomas, whose chilly presence in the dreadful English Patient (aka Scott of the Sahara) may well have delayed the onset of global warming by at least five years.
Fortunately we also have the presence of Emanuelle Beart, who is beautiful at the best of times but really shines out with eye-searing luminosity in this company. I simply couldn't look at anything else while she was on screen. In fact, most of the tension in Mission Impossible came from my concern that the revolting dwarf Cruise would eventually get his hands on her. Mercifully, their inevitable sexual encounters happen off-screen and are only subtly hinted -- so subtly, indeed, that I prefer to imagine that they just sat down, had a cup of tea and talked about the weather.
The action scenes have their fair share of tension too, being coherent and well-paced, especially the now-famous CIA computer break-in. That said, I found myself increasingly turn into a nit-picking trainspotter as the movie went on. First I cringed at the ridiculous hacker dialogue ("I want the 686 prototype AI chip"), and then I literally became a trainspotter during the climax, which made the mistake of setting a high-speed train sequence on the British side of the Channel Tunnel. You see, on the French side, the train is powered by a 25,000V overhead line, but on the British side, it's powered by a 750V third rail. So while the Eurostar blitzes through the French countryside at 185mph, it travels through Kent with all the speed of a dead slug.
By no means rent this movie. But if it happens to be on TV, and you're in the mood for slick vapidity, it will certainly fit the bill. With guys like Bay, Emmerich, Ratner and the Scott brothers at the helm, it's increasingly rare to see big-budget action that's competently made, and lacking in excess noise, violence and vulgarity.
Not that I could face watching a second of it again.