MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (HD-DVD) (ENG/ENG SDH/FRENCH & SPAN/ENG 5.1)
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MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (HD-DVD) (ENG/ENG SDH/FRENCH & SPAN/ENG 5.1) description
A flashy, splashy summer-movie blockbuster that's fun and exciting without being mindless? That's the impossible mission accomplished by director Brian De Palma, star-coproducer Tom Cruise, and the crack team of Mission: Impossible. Based on the '60s TV show and an almost impenetrably complex (but nonetheless thrilling) original story by David Koepp (Jurassic Park) and Steven Zaillian (Schindler's List), with a screenplay by Koepp and Robert Towne (Chinatown, Shampoo), Mission: Impossible begins with veteran agent Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) and his expert crew embarking on a mission that goes horribly, horribly wrong. But nothing is what it seems. The nail-biting set piece--always a signature of director De Palma (Carrie, The Untouchables)--in which Cruise is lowered from the ceiling to retrieve information from a computer in a high-security vault--is an instant classic. But perhaps even more impressive, at least in retrospect, is a flashback sequence in which two characters attempt to reconstruct a series of events from multiple points of view. It's pretty daring and sophisticated stuff for a big-budget spy movie, but brains were always what put the Mission: Impossible team ahead of the competition, anyway, no? --Jim Emerson |
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MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (HD-DVD) (ENG/ENG SDH/FRENCH & SPAN/ENG 5.1) Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Your special edition, should you choose to accept it...
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Shot in Prague before it became synonymous with cheap labor and tax breaks for runaway productions, the initial signs were less than promising for Mission: Impossible - rumors of clashes between Cruise and Brian De Palma, the latter pointedly keeping a very low public profile when the film opened, last-minute heavy re-editing and the dropping of Alan Silvestri's original score (not, it has to be said, anywhere near as effective as Danny Elfman's replacement) - yet the result is a lot more fun than it has any real right to be. There's little relation to the original series aside from the title, Lalo Schifrin's theme music and an ill-done by Jim Phelps, here played by Jon Voight rather than Peter Graves - indeed, the original cast turned down offers of cameos in a film which kills off almost the entire Impossible Mission Force in the first twenty minutes so the star can hog the spotlight. But then, in those days Tom Cruise still sold more tickets than anyone else and the film raked it in - as they say in gangster movies, it's nothing personal, just business.
Although it was apparently Emmanuelle Beart's role that bore the brunt of the pre-release cuts, Cruise is in more danger of being overshadowed by co-stars Ving Rhames and Jean Reno, neither of whom get as many close-ups but make up for it with much more unforced charisma and screen presence. The plot doesn't always make sense - there's really no reason to break into the CIA's headquarters in Langley to steal a real list of undercover agents' names to use as bait other than allowing the director to stage a Topkapi-inspired high-wire heist - but it just about serves to fill in the gaps between setpieces, including a neat sequence that's pure De Palma where one character's explanation of events is accompanied by visuals gradually piecing together what really happened and a doozey of an action sequence involving a helicopter in the Channel Tunnel that caused the Bond producers to drop their original storyboarded-but-unshot Channel Tunnel pre-title sequence from the script of GoldenEye as well as boasting a neat line in spectacularly breaking windows.
No classic but an above-average Summer movie that holds up surprisingly well. Although an improvement over the bare-bones original DVD release, there's a distinct feeling that the reverential special features on the new special edition are there merely to reassure Cruise and his fans that he is indeed the most special and wonderful person in the world. |
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MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (HD-DVD) (ENG/ENG SDH/FRENCH dvd movie.