Mission Impossible

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

uuid: DF0203CF-50EC-4913-933E-A22200636873
upc: 0097361549729
title: Mission Impossible
theatricalDate: 22-05-1996
stars: Tom Cruise Jon Voight Emmanuelle Béart Henry Czerny Jean Reno Ving Rhames Kristin Scott Thomas Vanessa Redgrave Dale Dye Marcel Iures Ion Caramitru Ingeborga Dapkunaite Valentina Yakunina Marek Vasut Nathan Osgood John McLaughlin Rolf Saxon Karel Dobry Andreas Wisniewski David Shaeffer
purchase date: 07-09-2006
publisher: Paramount
published: 17-11-1998
price: $14.98
net Rating: 3.5
MPAA Rating: PG-13
minutes: 110
last lookup time: 179361696
genre: Thrillers Betrayal Tom Cruise Action & Adventure
fullTitle: Mission Impossible
features: AC-3 Closed-captioned Color Full Screen Letterboxed Widescreen NTSC 2.35:1
director: Brian De Palma
currentValue: $5.31
created: 179361696
country: us
aspect: DVD
asin: 6305181772