Mission: Impossible

When is a spy thriller less than thrilling? When the story is so convoluted that even the screenwriters couldn't figure it out.

Which is the first major strike against Mission: Impossible. The script is as tangled and confusing as current Eastern European politics. The movie also has a climax that is almost as silly as the American presidential campaign.

So maybe Mission: Impossible really is a post-modernist statement about post-Cold War politics. However, it is more likely the result of too many writers pounding out way too many rewrites. Rumor has it that several scriptwriters are still locked away in a London hotel room, working on new scenes in hope of explaining this movie.

In which case, Mission: Impossible may be a coolly ironic statement about the dubious process that currently passes for film making in Hollywood. But the glass-is-half-full theory doesn't hold much water when the whole container is obviously cracked and leaking. Nobody in Hollywood is so ironically cool as to spend major big dollars on self-effacement. Especially Tom Cruise. After all, he even pumped up his muscles for this particular mission.

Instead, he is presenting himself as the last all American boy in the espionage racket. With his bad haircut and goofy smile, Cruise rolls through Mission: Impossible looking as if he just got off a bus from Iowa.

As Ethan Hunt, Cruise is more of a Jimmy Bond rather than a James. Perhaps that is appropriate since the movie Mission: Impossible plays like a young readers version of John Le Carre. Though loosely based on the old television series, Mission: Impossible has substituted an odd mix of naivete and cynicism in place of the wooden professionalism of the original.

Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) and the Impossible Mission Force is still plying their unique brand of conman ship upon the enemies of the free world. But the movie quickly acknowledges that the enemies are seemingly fewer and the world alot more constricted rather than free. Even the assignment that sends the IMF to the Czech Republic initially appears to be an elaborate approach to a simple trap for a suspected traitor. But when most of the team is murdered, Hunt discovers that the CIA views him as the only traitor.

Since Hunt is a master of disguise and carries enough phony passports to equip the United Nations, he easily evades a massive manhunt. He is also a masterful computer hacker and apparently has continuous free access to the Internet. In fact, Hunt has so many skills that it never make sense why he has to recruit two disgraced IMF agents (Jean Reno and Ving Rhames) for their hot computer and electronic savvy.

Likewise, he seems a little confused about what to do with Claire(Emmanuelle Beart), Phelps' widow and the only other surviving member of the team. She is young, exotic, and extremely alluring. She also has absolutely no function anywhere in the plot. But then, lots of things serve no purpose in the movie's scrambled storyline. Mission: Impossible unloads enough plot twists for a dozen other movies. Unfortunately, few of them make any sense.

Which means that the film is a long wait for the two or three major moments that director Brian De Palma has lifted from other films. The break-in at a CIA computer vault is a masterfully combined "quoting" of both Topkapi and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The climatic helicopter-and-train chase through the chunnel plays like a Wild West version of 007. These scenes provide Mission: Impossible with some brief flashes of excitement. But they also help to reinforce the movie's half-baked sensibility. The whole film has been stitched together from mismatched pieces of cloth and the seams stick out everywhere.

Mission: Impossible has one solidly good performance, courtesy of Vanessa Redgrave in a minor role. It also has the old Lalo Schifrin theme as its main link to the TV show. But the movie virtually drowns in its own dour spirit as Cruise and his team slowly discovers that the only enemy they have is the one they see every time they look in the mirror. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the American intelligence community seemingly has no one to pick on but themselves. Or as the movie's villain belatedly insists, "The Cold War was over and I was bored."

Some viewers may find themselves sharing in this chap's sentiment.