Fun, Just Don't Think Too Hard.

Rating: Null/10 (10 September 1999)

Watching "Mission: Impossible" is like watching a two-hour movie trailer: dazzling locales, pulsating music, nifty gadgets,lots of close-ups of actors sweating, and improbable action sequences that seem to be over long before they start. The dialogue is like that, too. Every line is delivered for maximum dramatic impact and was most likely written so that it could "lifted" from the film and easily placed in radio and television ads. All that noise made me wonder if the filmmakers were trying to distract us from the plot, which alternates between intriguing and implausable, cohesive and confusing. Director Brian DePalma makes his usual homages to Hitchcock (a wronged man trying to clear his name) as well as other contemporary espionage dramas, such as the James Bond films (does the phrase "Do you have a match?" ring a bell, "From Russia, With Love" fans?), "Clear and Present Danger" (Henry Czecy's character sure looks familiar) and Robert Redford's "Three Days of the Condor" ("My team is dead!") A lot of fun, as long as you don't think too hard.