This Movie, Should You Decide To Watch It, Is A Pretty Good Spy Thriller

Rating: 6/10 (19 September 2009)

Ethan Hunt is a covert CIA operative on a secret mission in Prague to retrieve a stolen list of agents' details, when the job goes horribly wrong and all his team are wiped out. With his bosses thinking he's a mole behind the botched operation, he must somehow prove his innocence and find out what really happened.
Based on the old TV spy show by Bruce Geller, this is an enjoyable, handsomely made thriller with a strong cast, exciting locations, some great action scenes and an intriguing if rather familiar premise. What lets it down a bit for me is the script, by David Koepp and Robert Towne. The key thing with this kind of material I reckon is when to reveal who the traitor is. If you do it at the end you have to pad it out. If you do it in the middle - as this does - it can sometimes work very well (Vertigo, L.A. Confidential) but it needs to be very clear and simple. The liability scene is the one where Cruise and Voight go over the failed mission and we're bamboozled by the flashbacks which accompany it - are they Cruise imagining what may have happened, or Voight remembering what did transpire ? The plot has other holes - when do Czerny and Cruise team up ? Is it a coincidence that Reno works for both Cruise and Voight ? Is money really the only rationale for Voight's actions (he's reprising the character Peter Graves played in the TV show, but seems to have had a seismic personality shift in the interim). This is weak scripting, designed to set up big surprise scenes, but which winds up just being confusing. That said however, just about every other aspect of the picture is first rate, and there are at least three cracking suspense sequences of the kind DePalma does so well (the massacre on the banks of the Vltava, the heist at CIA headquarters and the finale on the TGV train). Danny Elfman's music is great and makes inspired use of Lalo Schifrin's much loved theme tune, while Stephen H. Burum's location photography of Prague and London is sensational, a sort of Funeral In Berlin meets To Catch A Thief. Cruise is good in the lead (under some wild makeup work by Rob Bottin), with great sneaky support from heavy hitters like Voight, Reno and Rhames, although the women are kinda dull; Béart is a bit of a cipher, Scott Thomas gets knocked off quickly, and Redgrave is fun but extremely unlikely as some sort of Euro black marketeer dealer. This isn't DePalma's (or even Cruise's) best film by some margin, but it's an entertaining, if occasionally annoying, contemporary action spy thriller. Trivia - Estevez as the gadgetry man is unbilled for some reason; he and Cruise first appeared together in Francis Coppola's The Outsiders thirteen years earlier.