Mission: Impossible Review

Tom Cruise made this the first production of his own company, hired Brian De Palma, and finally gave Paramount the film of the 1960s series it had failed to crack for years. The script passed through Steven Zaillian, David Koepp and Robert Towne, and De Palma designed the action before anyone had settled the story connecting it.

It shows in both directions. The set pieces are superb: a restaurant aquarium bursting into a wall of water, and above all the silent break-in at CIA headquarters in Langley, with Cruise lowered on wires into a white vault where one drop of sweat could trip the alarm. De Palma's tilted angles and Stephen H. Burum's crisp photography give the paranoia real style, and the finale on a high-speed train in the Channel Tunnel is gloriously absurd.

The plot is knottier than it needs to be, double crosses stacked so densely that motives blur on a first viewing, with dialogue that exists mostly to explain them. Cruise is an intense, likable center, but the supporting cast, Jean Reno, Ving Rhames, Emmanuelle Béart and Vanessa Redgrave among them, gets poses more than characters, and its treatment of the television team angered several of the original cast. The set pieces win the argument: it grossed more than $450 million and began a franchise that has run for nearly three decades.