THE CASE OF THE RED AND BLUE CHEWING GUM

Rating: Null/10 (20 December 1998)

When I first heard that Brian dePalma had to direct a movie produced by Tom Cruise, I was a little bit astonished and when it appeared that the project was MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, I really expected the worse. How a personality like dePalma would cope with those virtual chains ?
As always with dePalma movies, the critics were divided; the scale was zero to ten.
I think that we should see this movie by always having in mind that the director didn't have the liberty he used to have in his precedent movies. So, let's search Brian in this blockbuster.
Tom Cruise receives, in the first minutes of the movie, a few red and blue chewing gums whose function is to help him to open rebellious key-holes. Cruise uses those tablets twice in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE. To open doors ? Not at all, he uses them to destroy glasses, mirrors. How curious isn't it ?
And you begin to realize there is very much glass in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE : screens of TV's, PC's, glasses with incorporated cameras, etc... O.K. Brian, we've understood you're here, behind the mirror, behind the masks, one of the other recurrent theme of this movie.
Then you can recognize SCARFACE and the hero of RAISING CAIN in Jim Phelps, a man whose thirst of power reveals a multiple personality. And there is this wonderful scene when Jim Phelps tells Cruise what's happened in Kiev unknowing that his agent visualizes the same scene, with an other point of view of course, during his explanation. Isn't it a subtile version of the split-screen process, a dePalma gimmick by essence ?
No doubt about it, this movie is one of the three best american movies of 1996.
A DVD which is already a classic.