30 Years Later, Mission: Impossible is Still the Popcorn Spy Thriller To Beat

30 Years Later, Mission: Impossible is Still the Popcorn Spy Thriller To Beat

Good morning, Mister Hunt.

The Hollywood spy thriller ain’t what it used to be. That’s not to say that spycraft as a narrative premise is washed, just that we haven’t seen a whole lot of great interpretations on the silver screen. The nature of espionage works better in the form of long-term storytelling like The Americans or Slow Horses, where the slow pacing and building tension of living a lie creates a suffocating sense of dread not entirely dissimilar to a horror movie. And maybe we don’t need spy movies in the traditional sense, anyway—after all, Mission: Impossible offered a definitive treatise on the entire genre 30 years ago.

The Mission: Impossible series has had its ups and downs over the years, but the first three movies at least took a genuinely fascinating approach to the idea of creating theatrical blockbusters based on an existing franchise. Each movie would be helmed by a different action cinema director, who would put their own indelible stamp on that entry and interpret the concept of the series in their own way. The only elements they’d share in common would be lead character Ethan Hunt (played by Tom Cruise with his usual manic charisma) and the U.S. spy agency to which he reported, the Impossible Mission Force. Beyond that, anything would go, which is how we ended up classic John Woo slow-motion gun fights in front of a flock of panicked doves and a JJ Abrams mystery box plot in succession.

But none of those sequels have quite hit the perfect sweet spot of compelling plot, cutting-edge style, and timely storytelling the way that the first movie did.

The 1988 team. Blink and you’ll miss them!

In a lot of ways, Mission: Impossible succeeded through sheer virtue of great timing. The original television series sprang up amidst a wave of Cold War spy shows like I, Spy and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., turning the paranoia and fear of east-versus-west espionage into compelling prime time viewing. Mission: Impossible made a return to the airwaves at the tail end of the 1980s, but the real world no longer really made sense for a show like that, as the glasnost initiative under Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev had paved the way for better international relations and, ultimately, the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The 1996 movie addressed that reality head-on. Literally, in the case of Emelio Estevez’s brief and uncredited role (spoilers: he gets stabbed in the face by a booby-trapped elevator)! Mission: Impossible kills off nearly the entire IMF during its first 15 minutes or so in a spy caper gone horribly wrong, leaving Hunt as the last man standing... along with, it eventually turns out, two of his other comrades. More spoilers: those other comrades were behind the disastrous mishap, framing Hunt for the team’s deaths.

Wiping the slate clean of familiar and beloved characters was a ballsy approach to a movie! Even more shocking was the revelation that Jim Phelps, the team’s leader on television, turned out to be the traitor who stabbed his allies in the back. But this twist followed directly from the real-world state of affairs that made the ’80s revival feel a bit archaic: Phelps was driven to treason by the resentment he felt over having been sidelined by politics. If there was no Cold War to prevent turning hot, Phelps reasoned, there was no reason not to cash out and get his due in the brave new world of the 1990s.

The tense computer room sequence set the bar for innovative action sequences subsequent movies... and launched Cruise’s fixation on doing his own crazy stunts.

The Mission: Impossible script addressed the new realities of spycraft at the dawn of the internet age. The entire film revolves around pursuit of the U.S. government’s NOC list, a file that revealed the identities of America’s undercover agents around the world. That’s the kind of thing that the Soviet Union would have loved to get ahold of back in the day, and that information remained equally valuable even beyond the Cold War... but now the primary actors in the scheme were information brokers and rogue agents, and shadow drops were replaced by FTP uploads. The computer tech in Mission: Impossible is a little silly in its presentation, but ultimately the entire thing feels reasonably grounded and elegantly modernizes the entire Mission: Impossible premise for a new era of intrigue.

It helps that the movie has great casting. Even beyond the initial IMF stunt casting, which surrounded Cruise with a host of recognizable film stars like Estevez, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Jon Voight to make the IMF’s betrayal and demise all the more shocking (movies aren’t supposed to kill off that many big-name celebrities in the first act!), the remainder of the movie featured a fantastic set of actors. Vanessa Redgrave as the mysterious information broken Max! Ving Rhames as Luther, the stylish and unflappable giant of a super-hacker! Jean Reno as Krieger, the mercenary who clearly had no one’s best interests in mind but his own! Henry Czerny as Kittridge, the CIA handler assigned to track down Hunt with ruthless, remorseless efficiency!

And, of course, Tom Cruise. Love him or hate him, Cruise inhabited the role of Hunt in the way that only he could. Twitchy, a little wild-eyed, and clearly cunning behind that toothy smile, Hunt essentially weaponized Cruise’s actual public persona. You always get the sense that there’s something unsettling lurking just behind Cruise’s jovial charm, a wary sort of calculation in the eyes, and the script plays that up—culminating in Hunt’s epiphany regarding his boss’ heel turn, openly describing the scheme while veiling the true meaning of his words to fool Phelps into believing he’d bought the mastermind’s ruse.

And let’s talk about that conversation, one of the greatest plot revelation sequences ever filmed... or rather, ever edited. There are a lot of things happening during the big plot reveal, all sliced and intercut together to present a conversation and a private epiphany at the same time. Phelps presents Hunt with something very near to the truth while pinning the blame on Kittridge. Hunt smiles and goes along with it, but the movie rapidly cuts to flashbacks of earlier events interspersed with Hunt’s own deductive interpretations of those events, at which point you realize that Phelps is talking about himself and Hunt realizes it. It’s a lot to take in so quickly in the space of about two minutes, but as the pieces come together the viewer’s entire perception of Phelps’ monologue shifts from accusation to confession.

It’s a surprisingly challenging bit of filmmaking for a tentpole Hollywood production based on a legacy media franchise! Mission: Impossible hinges the resolution of its plot on a complex multilayered conversation, demonstrating an unusual degree of faith in the audience to follow along and keep up. Admittedly, not everyone followed on their first viewing... but that’s OK, because the movie featured plenty of cool action setpieces to satisfy those who just came to the theatre to zone out and enjoy the ride. The final chase scene between a helicopter and a bullet train is a bit improbable and let down a bit by the effects, but it’s fast and punchy enough that you don’t even mind how silly it looks and the fact that it’s all a big scheme to create radio interference to block a cellular modem connection. And then there’s the iconic data center break-in, a scheme involving acrobatics, silence, and laxatives which somehow ranks among the most gripping and anxiety-ridden spy plots ever put to film.

Hunt figures it out... and hopefully the audience does, too.

All of which gets back to the original vision for the Mission: Impossible films: Namely, letting auteurs put their mark on the movies. The original M:I was directed by the legendary Brian De Palma, the man behind landmark works like The Untouchables, Carrie, and Scarface. Rather than simply phoning it in after taking point on a big-screen adaptation of a television show, De Palma give it every bit as big and ambitious an effort as he’d taken with his award-winning classics. Mission: Impossible could have simply been little more than a bloated episode of the television series, like the worst of the Star Trek movies, but instead he worked with Cruise to give it style and substance, reinventing the Mission: Impossible concept for a new era.

Which is probably why you don’t get a lot of great spy movies anymore. The whole point of this movie was that the concept of spies had changed. The world’s modern conflicts don’t really fuel classic espionage escapades like Mission: Impossible or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. And Mission: Impossible slyly reinvented the spy thriller to become more of a secret agent thriller—like James Bond, but cooler and smarter than GoldenEye. You don’t get Jason Bourne without Tom Cruise struggling not to break a sweat while suspended on a wire in a soundproof computer room. Mission: Impossible didn’t just reinvent the series, it rewired a genre.