Product: Mission: Impossible (1996)
Rating: 4.0
Masterful visual planning
De Palma with M1 was given a very ordinary screenplay and applied masterful visual planning to a so-so script. No one assembles shots and moves the camera better then De Palma. The premise to M1 isn't convincing. Of the dead IMF agents at the Prague embassy recovered would have been Jack, Sarah and Hanna. Obviously the audience knows Ethan is not the mole. The only 2 unaccounted agents would be Jim and Claire. The CIA would have had a team trying to recover the missing bodies and another team trying to find the missing agents. The CIA would not have implicated Ethan that quickly without Jim and Claire's dead bodies on a morgue slab. The CIA doesn't work that way. When the big scene came as to who the traitor was it became extremely anti-climatic. Turning Phelps into a post-cold war murderer and villian is paying disgusting disrespect to fans of the vintage tv show!!! The film also needed another huge action set-piece. The scene where Ethan had the black hood removed was building to a huge clinical gun battle and when nothing happened something was badly missing. There should have been a shoot-out at that point leading into a hi-tech, hi-octane car chase sequence!! Still I'll give this film 4 stars because of De Palma's masterful visual planning.