forgettable

Rating: 3/10 (1 May 2006)

Tom Cruise rewrites popular culture. The clever, effective intelligence strikeforce of the 1960's is here a group of amoral crumbs (except, of course, for straightshooter Tom); and the most evil is . . . Jim Phelps?!?!? Oh, please. A silly premise (someone is killing off MI team members) leads to a silly theme (Tom must find out who is doing it - all by himself, except for a small army of superspies who he conjures out of thin air join him), which leads to a silly plot device (the CIA has a super-duper secure room, with man-sized ventilation ducts that lead right to it, so Tom and his people use them, then drop a smoke bomb, and conjure up a fire engine out of thin air, and then just walk out of CIA headquarters, while the security alarms are going off -- yeah, right), which leads to a silly climactic scene (in which one of the bad guys is stupid enough to try to fly a helicopter into the "Chunnel"), and a silly unmasking (superspy Jim Phelps is fooled by superdoofus Tom Cruise).
What it adds up to is not an homage, but an unintended parody of "Mission Impossible". What is it about Tom Cruise's generation that must try and rewrite (stupidly) their forebear's work? (For surely what is this but his generation trying to childishly claim they are smarter than their fathers?) This trend makes me very angry -- because his generation is my generation, and I'd hate to be lumped in with it.