15-Minute Reviews: Mission Impossible (1996)

By Nicholas Stix

“15-Minute Reviews” does not mean that they take 15 minutes to read, but are of pictures I could only tolerate watching for 15 minutes or less.

I watched, or rather, tried to watch, Mission Impossible (1996) a few years ago, when I was visiting my in-laws in Trinidad.

One of my nephews bought pirated DVDs by the gross, and someone popped in this one at my sister-in-law’s.

If memory serves, the story begins with the Tom Cruise character explaining the next “impossible” job to his team of six, seven, or eight agents. Actually explaining such a complicated plan would take hours, but he does it in a few seconds per player.

Most of the players are white men, while two are blondes of whom I see and hear so little that I cannot tell them apart. (Either the director or the casting director screwed up. One of the females should have had dark hair.)

They go out on their mission, and everyone, save Cruise, gets slaughtered before he knows what’s hit him. Each killing takes about as long as the corpse’s briefing had taken.

After losing his entire team, Cruise’s character is really mad, so he wears this perpetually tight, tense face, to express to the audience, “I’m really mad!”

Me, I don’t care at all. Since the director and screenwriter made no effort to establish any of the characters, their deaths meant nothing to me, I am completely detached from the movie, and go do work on my niece’s laptop.

As I now see that Brian De Palma (The Untouchables (1987), and a series of Hitchcock homages) directed, and that the screenplay was co-authored by a David Koepp and the legendary Robert Towne (Chinatown, 1974), off a story by Koepp and Steven Zaillian, my esteem for De Palma and Towne has just dropped dramatically.