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By
NICK ZEGARAC
Brian De Palma's Mission
Impossible (1996) is a fastidious high octane, no
holds barred thriller that contemporizes and
expands the original television series in a grand,
eye-popping spectacle. The film begins in earnest
in Prague on a moonlit, foggy eve where Ethan Hunt
(Tom Cruise) and his cooperatives are involved in
tail job that goes horribly awry. All of Hunt's
cooperative agents are murdered in bizarre and
macabre ways, pointing to an inside ambush job for
which it seems Hunt has become the government's
prime suspect. After eluding capture by agent
Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), Ethan gets the
surprise of his lives when Claire (Emmanuelle
Beart), Phelps' wife arrives on the scene –
mysteriously surviving the murders although she
cannot account for her whereabouts.
While attempting to piece together the events,
Hunt contacts subversives, Franz Kreiger (Jean
Reno), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and the
elusive underworld kingpin, ‘Max' (Vanessa
Redgrave) with a plan to break into CIA
headquarters and steal a NOC list of spies. The
act, while seemingly illustrating Hunt's treason
and complicity in the murders of his fellow
agents, is actually a ploy to get Max out in the
open and redeem Hunt's reputation to his
superiors.
De Palma's pacing for this action laden adventure
is just right – mixing eerily haunted settings and
moments of nail-biting silence with equally
harrowing elements of noisy all-hell breaking
loose. What ultimately emerges from the experience
is one heck of a good roller coaster ride – never
contrived, always genuinely fresh, while still
remaining true to the original spirit of the
television series. As Hunt – Cruise is perhaps a
tad over the top, but his boyish charm (that
frankly, made him a star in the first place) is
mixed on this occasion with a cynical and
dangerous shell that plays well and keeps the
audience guessing for sometime…is he really the
hero or the villain?
There is indeed a new reason to repurchase this
title on DVD. Not so much for the extra features –
which are a scant, brief and overall uninspired
claptrap loosely thrown together. But the real
bonus feature of this disc is its near pristine
anamorphic transfer. When Paramount originally
released Mission Impossible on DVD back in 1998 it
was from a rather tired looking, non-progressive,
non-anamorphic film element that was – to put it
mildly – genuinely disappointing in all aspects of
image quality.
This new incarnation gives us the film as we
always should have had it: with rich, vibrant
colors, deep solid blacks, an amazing amount of
fine detail evident during even the darkest
scenes, and a minimal amount of grain, digital and
age related artifacts. Truly, there is nothing
about this visual presentation that will
disappoint. The audio is 5.1 and packs an
aggressive wallop, particularly during the
climactic train/helicopter confrontation in the
Chunnel. Extras include an all too brief trip to
the spy museum, some junket promotional
featurettes on the making of the film, theatrical
trailers and an audio commentary. Definitely
worthy of a repurchase! Thanks, Paramount. Now how
about a refurbished film element for ‘Fatal
Attraction'? |
