You can go only so far with a property like “Mission: Impossible.” Listen to that famous Lalo Schifrin theme, which bangs open the movie. You’ve got to be faithful to that rhythm, the beat of a pop genre. De Palma and Cruise have done that, adding the extra juice that high tech can provide. Mission accomplished. The script, worked on at various times by hotshot writers Steven Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”), David Koepp (“Jurassic Park”) and Robert Towne (“Chinatown”), has the IMF (Impossible Missions Force), led by Jim Phelps (Jon Voight, in the Peter Graves role), rigging a counterplot in Prague to stop a Russian spy from swiping a computer disc listing all U.S. undercover agents. Things go horrifically wrong, and agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is left to track down the responsible swine in a post-cold-war tangle of ambiguous identities and allegiances.
This whirligig of disguises and double-crosses is played out by an attractive international cast, including France’s Emmanuelle Bart and Jean Reno, England’s Vanessa Redgrave and Kristin Scott-Thomas, Canadian Henry Czerny and Yanks Emilio Estevez (in an uncredited appearance) and Ving Rhames. Holes in the script cause the narrative to burp at times. Originally there was an erotic involvement between Cruise and Bart as Claire, Phelps’s wife, but according to De Palma, that clogged up the action. These are the Jamesian elements in the film (James Bond, that is). Tricky trinkets like explosive chewing gum decorate the brilliantly executed action sequences. In one, Cruise and two cronies break into CIA headquarters to raid the agency’s mainframe computer, which is guarded by impenetrable layers of technology. They penetrate, with Cruise lowered on a cable from above. This is a direct lift from Jules Dassin’s 1964 heist movie, “Topkapi,” right down to details like the bead of sweat that threatens to drop on the pressure-sensitive floor and trigger the alarm.
What De Palma brings to his updating of the “Topkapi” caper is a rarity in action movies – total silence, an inaudible crescendo of suspense. And the movie’s climactic set piece is one of the best of all train chases, with Cruise and the exposed betrayer scrambling on top of a bullet train while the 175-mph slipstream tries to blow our hero off and a helicopter tries to blow him away. Said hero is played by Cruise with his appealing fierce boyishness – although at 33, he’s losing that preppy patina. But the real acting is done by Vanessa Redgrave as the sinister operator Max. Redgrave is so cool she’s hot, with her beautiful world-weathered face and bass-clarinet voice doing snaky, syncopated line readings that make everybody else seem like they’re in, well, an action movie.
It’s an action movie that took three years to make, from the moment Cruise decided he wanted it to be the first film from his production company. Cruise, whose 18 movies in 12 years have aggregated $2 billion, turned out to be a hands-on producer. Rumors of conflict with De Palma emanated from the film’s locations in Prague and London. The intense Cruise, who’s known as Laserhead, was even said to have held a stopwatch on the director during the shooting of the $64 million production. “It’s complete nonsense,” says Voight. “Tom and Brian were like one person, always huddling and making decisions together.” The stopwatch story is “ludicrous,” says Paula Wagner, Cruise’s producing partner. Cruise, who recruited De Palma (“I thought, “This guy! What he could do with a movie like this!’ “), insists, “There were discussions, but when Brian said “Look, I feel very strongly about this,’ I respected that.” De Palma says, “He has a directness unusual in this business. There’s no subtext with Tom Cruise. Of course at times he may be wrong, you have to argue with him.”
The movie, says Wagner, came in ahead of schedule and under budget. But there was a time when the mission seemed improbable. The script was rewritten during production to an unusual extent, says Towne. “On any given day you’d think it was a disaster. But after a while, you knew it was working.” David Koepp recalls a meeting with De Palma: “He suddenly started talking about a plot hole he had discovered. While he was talking, I was talking about a plot hole I had discovered. He didn’t hear mine; I didn’t hear his. We looked at each other, said “What?’ at the same time and broke into helpless laughter. That’s when we knew that the plot would beat us, we were never going to beat it.”
If you can’t beat it, special-effects it. The intrepid Cruise was “like a kid in a candy store” with the stunt stuff. He recites a litany of pain that sounds like a catalog of joy: “On top of the train where I’m raked across a grid … When I hit my chest and I’m hanging there … The explosion, when I’m flying across the stage into a close-up …” In addition to being tough, the guy definitely has a laser on his shoulders. In the CIA sequence there was a shot where he dropped from the roof to the floor on a rope. His head kept hitting the floor because he was off balance. “I told them to give me some of those English pound coins and I put them in my shoes. So we did, and I balanced myself that way just off the floor. It felt like an hour; it was probably three seconds. Then Brian said “Cut,’ and gave me a hug.”
De Palma has more riding on this mission than anyone else. “I haven’t had a big hit in eight years,” he says. “You can’t go on in this profession without making a hit every couple of movies. So I set out to make a successful mainstream movie.” Mainstream moviegoers have rarely been the audience for De Palma’s technically brilliant but often controversial films (“Body Double,” “Dressed to Kill”), with their violence and sexuality. Not that “Mission: Impossible” is just commercial. “There’s a theme of impotence in my films,” he says. “In “Casualties of War’ and ‘Blow Out,’ somebody witnesses horrific events he can do nothing about. The first sequence in “Mission,’ when Hunt sees what’s happening to his team, takes this idea to the nth degree.”
“I’ve never made a movie on this scale with this kind of superstar and these effects, the kind of thing that Spielberg has done over and over,” De Palma continues. “I was talking to Steven a couple of weeks ago. I said, “I may have done it.’ Now I want to make something that emotionally moves me, just like Spielberg made “Schindler’s List’ after “Jurassic Park.’ You’ve developed these skills and you want to use them to say something significant about the world.” This sounds unlike the man who used to claim he didn’t care about theme, that he was a “visual artist.” “I’m 55 years old,” De Palma says. “You don’t want to go out and make another movie like this. That’s what everyone will want you to do.”
De Palma, who at 17 wrote a prize-winning thesis on “The Application of Cybernetics to the Solution of Differential Equations,” designed entire sequences on the computer in “a kind of architectural program. I created the helicopter, the tunnel, all the physical things. We’ve been given this magic wand,” he says of the new technology. “It’s a tremendous responsibility. Now you can almost create a religious experience on screen. It’s the last terrain for the expression of something divine.” “Mission: Impossible” is just fun and games, a glittering thrill machine. But the divine would never hit the record summer gross.
