Highly enjoyable spy flick!

Rating: 10/10 (28 July 2008)

Brian DePalma's modern remake of the 1960s MISSION IMPOSSIBLE TV series is highly enjoyable. I find myself re-watching it a lot mainly due to the great set pieces contained throughout the film. A major part of its appeal is the movie-set style cinematography. It doesn't feel like "location shooting". There's a real old Hollywood appeal to the film. It keeps the focus on the characters and situation at hand and gives the film a personal feel. There isn't all this expansive, showy cinematography and crazy effects like in the sequels. It's like the film itself is a multi-act play done on a sound stage or in a studio, kind of a modern day version of those great 30s and 40s films set in foreign places. Yet it still has an appealing modern sensibility.
The plot is amazingly simple: a rogue CIA agent plans to steal and sell the non-official cover (NOC) list to the highest bidder on the international market and a team of IMF agents is assigned to stop the transaction. The team is led by Jim Phelps (played by Jon Voight) and includes Phelps' wife Claire (Emmanuelle Beart), Sarah Davies (Kristin Scott Thomas), Hannah Williams (Ingeborga Dapkunaite), Jack Harmon (an uncredited Emilio Estevez), and the final member of our team Ethan Hunt(played by the film's star, the versatile Tom Cruise).
This is definitely one of my favorite Tom Cruise movies. I always forget about this film in Cruise's arsenal, maybe b/c it's just so enjoyable of a film experience to me and so I forget that I am watching Tom Cruise and just get totally into the film itself. Cruise is truly effortless in his portrayal of Ethan Hunt. He had never really done an action film before this and he is completely believable.
Every member of the team (except Ethan) is killed during the mission. The operation was really a mole hunt to weed out the real traitor, so Ethan is suspect #1 in the eyes of the CIA. The rest of the film is Ethan trying to clear his name, so he puts together his own team to find the real culprit. The new team includes Claire (who turns out survived the initial mission), Franz Krieger (Jean Reno), and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames). This leads to the best scene of the film: the hacking of the CIA central computer where Hunt has to enter through the ceiling upside down suspended on a tightrope mechanism. I never tire of this suspenseful scene. A DePalma keeper!
DePalma directed MISSION IMPOSSIBLE with is usual style of suspenseful, tense, well-laid out scenes, like the CIA break-in where there is the continuous tracking shot of the team going their separate ways to do their various tasks. The film is essentially a series of entertaining, tongue-in-cheek set pieces with tense character interactions as it is hard to know who Ethan can trust in his quest for the truth and THREE memorable set pieces: (1) the early Aquarium restaurant scene in Prague, the (2) aforementioned CIA break-in, and (3) the climactic speeding train scene from London to Paris. I also like the minor tweaks to the MI theme from the 60s series, updated to fit a modern Hollywood film. The plot really plays second fiddle to the action and intrigue, though.