Tom Cruise stars, but Jon Voight is the brisk thriller’s monstrous soul.
They just got done running an op in Kiev.
Jim missed it, taking an expense-account job-cation to run recruitment out of the Drake Hotel (oooh!)
Tom Cruise and Jon Voight in ‘Mission: Impossible’.Credit: Everett Collection
“Guy’s getting soft in his old age!”
It’s just a bit of ribbing, because Jim is his mentor.
It’s also a generational threat.
Jon Voight in ‘Mission: Impossible’.Everett Collection
Jim’s wife, Claire (Emmanuelle Beart), is on the team, too.
Does she feel sorry for him?
Is she seeing him the way the boys do a good man, yes, but a bit paternal?
Part of the job, of course, yet De Palma’s romantic framing demands subtextual perversion.
Don’t these two just make more sense together?
But the general audience carried the memory of Graves' silver-haired monotone right into the movie.
What was that memory, exactly?
The thing to notice is how Graves' expression doesn’t waver once.
Everything goes wrong in the opening embassy mission.
The rest of the team dies, too.
It’s one of the best first half-hours in any thriller.
You only gradually realize how many different counter-plots were playing out in front of you.
Between Jim’s “death” and his surprise reappearance, the movie loses a step.
Everyone remembers the hanging computer hack, which is a blast.
You feelMission’s many cooks, the sense that Cruise’s star power is gluing together some missing motivation.
They stitch together a renegade squad with Luther (Ving Rhames) and Krieger (Jean Reno).
They fly to America, to London.
They prepare a final sting to flush out the real bad guy.
And then Jim finds Ethan.
He peddles an alibi, blaming the team’s death on Kittridge (Henry Czerny).
Ethan doesn’t buy it.
He can see the truth.
We watch Jim’s shooting from another angle.
The old man fires his own gun, and reaches for blood packs.
He is getting away with something awful.
In this late Ethan-Jim conversation,Missionrediscovers all its layers.
They’re both fooling each other, and their lies ring true.
Why, Ethan wonders, would Kittridge have done all this?
“Why, Jim?”
he asks, “Why?”
No more Cold War.
No more secrets you keep from everyone but yourself, operations you answer to no one but yourself.
The son of a bitch.
Then you realize it’s over.
You’re an obsolete piece of hardware not worth upgrading.
You’ve got a lousy marriage and 62 grand a year.
But that’s mostly cosmetic.
James Bond keeps saving the world, and evenEvil Supermanis just a prophecy.
There are exceptions, and cultural reckonings nudge recent franchise expansions to reconsider their heroes in a broader context.
In 1996,Mission: Impossiblecould still reserve its fan service for bleak jokes.
“Good morning, Mr. Phelps,” Kittridge says when the jig is up.
That greeting started almost every episode of the show.
Here, it sounds an awful lot likeGotcha, sucker.
Tom Cruise is 58 now, finishing off his nextMissionand prepping another one.
He’s been makingMission: Impossiblemovies longer than Graves madeMission: ImpossibleTV shows.
In the first movie, Kittridge clearly thinks Hunt is a punk.
ByRogue Nation, Alec Baldwin’s next-gen Kittridge calls him “the living manifestation of destiny.”
A lot of hero worship all approved by a star who happens to be a producer.
Will any franchise ever be as boldly nasty with its source material?
Seems impossible, frankly, but the best missions always are.
