Too much Cruise, not enough Schifrin, as usual

Rating: 5/10 (7 May 2006)

The TV show, which I loved, was about outsmarting people. The IMF was a government sponsored confidence team whose job it was to manipulate events in such a way as to thwart and get rid of the bad guys without anybody even knowing they existed. They use some gadgets but mostly impersonate people to set things up so that they didn't even need to be there for things to play out the way they wanted. They hardly ever used violence and their plots never came down to a car chase, a firefight or a boxing match between the head of the team and the bad guy. That would have been way too sloppy. They would be clinking champagne glasses, knowing "Our work here is done" while Lalo Schrifin's classic theme, which had followed them throughout, accenting their every move, began to play in an upbeat mode in celebration of their achievement. They made their impossible missions seem very possible while the audience wondered what it must be like to be that clever.
The movies are about a government sponsored high-tech commando team that uses force to achieve their goals, including Spiderman-like stunts, video-game-like chases, explosions, firefights and duke-outs with the bad guys, all of which would advertise their presence to the world and likely negate anything they accomplish while signing their own death warrants. Obviously a decision was made that this is what the public wants in its action films and that it would find a tradition Mission: Impossible story too boring.
I don't find the movies boring but I do find them exhausting and not very satisfying. What I would have liked is for the first half of the film to a sort of biography of the villain, showing how he became what he was and how he formed his plan for what he wants to do that makes him, (or it could be her), such a threat. Then have the IMF head show up in the middle and get his assignment in some imaginative way, pull together his team, (and let's find out who these people actually are and what interesting things they do when they aren't on assignment-remember that in the TV show they all had other professions), and then run a con that foils the villain, who never knew what hit him.
But the conventional wisdom is that you have to give your audience their first glimpse of the star immediately and these films are all about conventional wisdom. Unfortunately the conventional wisdom didn't include the liberal use of Schifrin's classic theme, which appears slightly at the beginning and over the closing credits of MI:3. I recall in the first movie that the use of the theme over the final action sequence, (its only use in the film), brought the loudest ovation I've ever heard in a movie theater.
That sequence illustrates the problem with the movies better than anything. The bad guy arranges to exchange the MacGuffin for money on the bullet train as its heading for the Chunnel. He then climbs to the top of the speeding train to grab a ladder dropped from a trailing helicopter just before they get to the Chunnel. Does that sound like something a genius would think up? Does any of it in any of the three movies? The impossible has been replaced by the improbable.