Back in the days when television was a “Great Wasteland” (Newton Minow) — before it became the Even Greater Vacuum that it is today — there were a very few shows that stood out because of a certain level of imaginativeness. One of these was Mission: Impossible. Every week, a small team of what were, in effect, prestidigitators would go out and solve some major world problem through sleight-of-hand and misdirection. Special effects being expensive and primitive in those days, there were not a lot of explosions, and the body count was just about as low as it would later, more intentionally, be in The A-Team.

Times change. Today, special effects are cheap and … well, effective, and action movies seem to earn money in proportion to their body counts. So it is with the wide-screen reincarnations of Mission: Impossible. In the first foray four years ago, the film series broke with the TV series by wiping out the entire former team, ultimately including its leader Mr. Phelps, who, it turned out, had decided to turn his coat. ⁽¹⁾

Turning one’s coat seems to be a common occupational option in working for the Impossible Mission Force as currently constituted; the main villain in the current film is an IM operative who has decided to strike out on his own.

An emigre Balkan scientist, working for Biocyte Pharmaceuticals in Sydney, Australia, has, through experimentation, created a serum (code-named “Bellerophon”, like the ancient Greek hero or the lost spacecraft in Forbidden Planet) that will cure all forms of influenza. Unfortunately, to reach this point he had to develop a test subject — a super-influenza, not dissimilar to that in Stephen King’s The Stand, code-named “Chimæra” (the monster that Bellerophon slew). For various reasons, never totally clear (the death of an old friend may have played a role), the scientist decides to take samples of both superflu and superserum to Atlanta — the CDC is never mentioned, but presumably this is his destination. He requests that his old friend Dmitri, aka Ethan Hunt, aka Tom Cruise, accompany him, and Dmitri appears as requested. Unfortunately for our scientist, Ethan Hunt was on vacation, so IMF has sent a stand-in in a rubber mask (see below), Sean Ambrose, who has decided that a thousand bucks a week government salary is hardly enough to keep him in chicks and Corvettes; he arranges with some friends to effectively hijack the flight to Atlanta, steal the briefcase the scientist is carrying, and destroy the passenger plane in the Rocky Mountains to cover his tracks. Unfortunately, he realizes far too late that the briefcase contains a sample only of the serum; the scientist was carrying the disease in his own body, now gone down in flames. So Ambrose (Dougray Scott, Prince Henry of Ever After) is in possession of what appears to be the solution to a non-existent problem… And all this, including upping the body count to a couple of hundred, happens before the opening credits. During and after the credits, of course, IMF calls in Ethan Hunt to recruit his team, go chasing off after Ambrose, make sure that no samples of “Chimæra” still exist anywhere, and recover “Bellerophon”. He is also allowed to leave a trail of destruction behind him that would do credit to World War III; a global plague of superflu might be preferable.

There were a lot of things about this movie that bothered me, but they largely had to do with (a) the chick, (b) the team, and (c) the director.

The heroine, an international thief who has a romantic history with Ambrose, is one Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandiwe Newton). “Nordoff-Hall”??? Well, maybe a new generation won’t immediately think of Charles Nordhoff & James Hall, authors of the Bounty trilogy, whose second volume, Men Against the Sea, treated the epic small-boat journey across the Pacific of Captain Bligh, who would later be Governor of New South Wales, where most of the action here takes place. This “coincidence” stuck in my mind all the way through the film. (Newton herself looks vaguely Polynesian, though actually her father was English, her mother was Shona, and she was born in Zambia. I would have guessed that she came from Pitcairn Island…)

Furthermore, Nordoff-Hall’s main role in the film seems to be to worm her way back into Ambrose’s double bed, giving Hunt — who has fallen in love with her — an opportunity to stand out in the middle of the Australian outback, staring at the magnificent sunset and romantically grinding his teeth. She has basically two chances to play a genuinely constructive role in the film, in one of which she actually gets to demonstrate that she is an accomplished international thief. The rest of the time, she is largely decorative. At one point she is ready to commit suicide; whether this is actually part of the plot, or simply despair at the paucity of her role, is arguable.

In the original series, the team was a team; everybody had a role to play, and if some roles were subordinate, they were not very subordinate. In the movie, Hunt’s team exists mainly as support personnel for Hunt. In addition to Nordoff-Hall, there is a helicopter pilot who can double as a doorman and there is a computer expert. Mostly, these sit in the background and talk to Hunt over the radio. Meanwhile, he wanders around racetracks, invades buildings, and kicks the hell out of people. Sometimes he races around on motorcycles a la Top Gun, destroying cars and villains, leaping over obstacles, and flying through the air. The film is built around Hunt alone.

I suppose I should also mention Cruise’s smile, since even Ambrose complains about it (he, after all, had to imitate it while wearing a rubber mask of Cruise’s face). It seems to be fixed to his face through the entire film. Cruise here is a sort of anti-Colin Firth. ⁽²⁾ He looks as though he has a bad case of lockjaw, or perhaps somebody wired the corners of his mouth upwards. If anybody every decides to do another visual version of Stephen King’s The Stand, Cruise is a shoo-in for the role of the demon Randall Flagg, who, if I remember the book correctly, is described as displaying “a horrible joviality”.

Finally, we have the director. Wu Yusen, better known here and today as John Woo, a graduate of the Shaw Brothers school of filmmaking in Hong Kong, has a large following in America, where he now makes his home and career. I am not sure why. Even had he not been in the credits, the viewer could easily make out the strange idiosyncrasies of his filmmaking style. This mostly involves people spinning in slow motion — enough slow motion that it probably added five or ten minutes to the length of the film. Sometimes the people kick each other while spinning. Sometimes they shoot each other while spinning. Woo is willing to have his actors do the one-gun spin, but he favors the twin-gun spin. The guns must be large and intimidating (about .90 caliber, I think), and they contain clips holding as many as 97 bullets each. The number of shots is not, as in old Westerns, totally unlimited; every now and then the characters have to stop and negotiate a bit so they can pop out their old clips (clang!) and slam in new ones (clank!) before starting to spin and shoot again.

Ah, and from the really obnoxious Face / Off Woo has learned to have one character replace another by putting on a rubber life-mask of the other character. Usually this requires a lot of preparation (fortunately, off-stage), but every now and then one character will whip up a couple of such masks on the spur of the moment, perhaps while otherwise engaged in fighting his way through an underground installation, and swap places with one of the villains whom he happens to capture. If he is finicky, he may stop and dye his hair on the spur of the moment as well. At least Ambrose and Hunt have not dissimilar bodily and facial structures, unlike Nicholas Cage and John Travolta in the earlier film.

The writer is Bruce Geller, who was perhaps the best known writer for the original series. I have a suspicion (only that, mind you) that he was required to do some extensive rewrites to get rid of anything intelligent or thought-provoking from his original script. Either that or he has become senile.

Shall I add some faint praise? The cinematography is excellent, particularly when Hunt is on vacation, as are the (unfortunately short) nighttime aerial shots of the city (presumably Sydney). Those who like pure action, and who don’t mind the body count, and who enjoy seeing a pretty woman whose t-shirt falls a couple of inches short of her belt, and who start drooling at lots and lots of explosions, will find this film highly appealing. Those who enjoy seeing grown men do back flips and one-and-a-half gainers while trying to maim and kill each other will find this film highly appealing. Those who hate automobiles and like to see them smashed and bashed will find this film highly appealing.

The accomplished actor Anthony Hopkins makes an appearance as Swanbeck, head of the IMF. The appearance qualifies as a cameo, no more. No doubt he will be glad to get back into a more appealing role — say, as Dr. Hannibal Lecter (“Hannibal the Cannibal”) in next year’s Hannibal.

The sad fact is that the seeds of a good, classic Mission: Impossible story are present in this film. Give the heroine more to do, to justify her existence — create some problems that only she and the two spear-carriers, not the high-salary star, can solve — find a director who’s more interested in presenting an interesting story than in having two guys kick and shoot each other to death (in slow motion) — and you have a real story! But that’s just not this movie.

There’s enough scenery here to justify seeing it on the wide screen. I’m not sure that it would be worth buying, or even renting, the video when it comes out; save your TV set for reruns of the original series instead. They’ll probably show up on a Nickelodeon marathon weekend sooner or later…

⁽¹⁾ There were rumors that Peter Graves refused an appearance in the film because of this. Old-timers like myself sympathized with him. I doubt whether a younger generation cares all that much.

⁽²⁾ Fans of A&E’s version of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice will remember that Mr. D’arcy went through all six hours of the miniseries without cracking a smile, as though he had eaten a very bad pickle or accidentally used a cholla cactus as a suppository. But at the very end he demonstrated his grin-capability. It is not clear that Cruise has another facial expression than his fixed smile…