The Mission: Impossible films, A.K.A. Tom Cruise’s retirement plan, A.K.A. the most exciting stage of your wealthiest friend’s mid-life crisis, have become famous for their death-defying stunts. Specifically, each installment desperately tries to endanger its mega-star in thrilling new ways. For instance, much ado has been made about Cruise’s upcoming “filmed in actual outer space” collaboration with The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman, but nobody has had the courage to ask which Mission: Impossible film will feature the cannon that fires him into orbit.
However, when the series made its comparatively inauspicious start back in 1996, Mission: Impossible was just the latest big-budget attempt to revive a dormant television property from the 60s. The first half of the 90s had already seen feature film reboots of The Addams Family, The Brady Bunch, Maverick, George of the Jungle, The Flintstones, The Fugitive, and Sgt. Bilko, and we still had projects like The Saint and Wild Wild West on the horizon. Even though Cruise’s involvement set expectations considerably higher for Mission: Impossible, there wasn’t any reason to think it was going to be anything more than a fun popcorn blockbuster. Certainly, nobody expected Cruise to still be cranking out impossible missions nearly three decades later.
But this first installment wasn’t an action movie. It’s a suffocatingly tense spy thriller directed by Brian De Palma, who unless I am mistaken has never directed an action film in his life. Rather than setting up the daredevil spectacle for which the franchise would come to be known, Mission: Impossible steers much closer to the tension, interior drama, and confusion of earlier De Palma films like The Untouchables or Dressed to Kill. And at no point is this clearer than during the film’s truly unforgettable first act, which follows Ethan Hunt and his team of IMF agents on a seemingly routine mission. The mission abruptly falls apart in the most dramatic way possible, and every single member of Ethan’s team is killed.
It might not be as awe-inspiring as clinging to the side of an airplane mid-takeoff or freeclimbing the world’s tallest building, but the franchise’s inaugural botched mission remains one of its most intense sequences. It immediately establishes the tone of the film by figuratively cutting the legs off both Cruise and the audience and throwing us all into the deep end. It’s designed to communicate that Ethan is in over his head, that he has no idea what is going on, and that he has even less of an idea of who he can trust or who might die next. The only “stunt” Cruise performs in this sequence is frantically sprint from one location to another to witness a bunch of murders. So, when Ethan spends the rest of the movie drenched in paranoia, we do not question it for one solitary moment, because we feel the exact same way.
De Palma already had several notable thrillers under his belt before Mission: Impossible, and his experience in the genre absolutely shines during the film’s first act. It opens by introducing us to the IMF and to Ethan’s team, including Genuine Famous People like Emilio Estevez and Kristin Scott Thomas. Right off the bat the audience is being lulled into a false sense of security because we assume there’s simply no way stars like Estevez and Thomas will get beefed in the first 20 minutes. It’s a familiar stunt-casting trick – Ridley Scott used it to great effect in Alien (Tom Skerrit was the most famous face of that ensemble cast), and Renny Harlin turned it into a legendary meme with Samuel L. Jackson’s role in 1999’s Deep Blue Sea. But for most audiences in 1996, this trick still worked, so we were primed for maximum disorientation when the bodies suddenly start dropping.
Interestingly, the bait-and-switch of Ethan’s team was originally supposed to involve the cast members of the original Mission: Impossible TV series, but every one of them turned the movie down. While I can’t deny that the idea of a lifelong Mission: Impossible fan settling in to watch their favorite spies return for an all-new adventure only to see them get obliterated in the first half-hour is irresistible, the original cast's refusal to participate arguably made the film better. As a middle-schooler going to see the new Tom Cruise movie in theaters, I knew almost nothing about Mission: Impossible other than the general premise and the iconic theme song. I certainly couldn’t have picked any of the show’s stars out of a lineup, so if De Palma had trotted them out in front of me, my first question would’ve undoubtedly been, “Why is this elite spy team nothing but a bunch of old people plus Tom Cruise?” And I would’ve immediately (and correctly) assumed that none of them would survive the first act. However, I did know Kristin Scott Thomas, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a middle-schooler in America who didn’t recognize Coach Gordon Bombay on sight. Mission: Impossible took what could’ve been a disappointing mark against the film and used it as an opportunity to surprise its audience.
The other element that makes the botched mission such an effectively bewildering sequence is the film’s pacing throughout that first act. As I mentioned, we open with a cheeky introduction to Ethan’s IMF team that serves to establish everyone’s specific skill and personality as they expertly coast through a fun bit of espionage. It’s like a truncated version of a “putting together the crew” sequence from a heist movie, which only adds to the audience’s false sense of security. And the team is equally glib for most of their doomed mission, which tasks them with stealing a valuable disk of information from some asshole. Everything has moved at such a predictable, comfortable pace up to this point that we’re practically knocked out of our chairs when Emilio Estevez is abruptly (and graphically) crushed to death by an elevator. The film explodes into chaos at that point as the team rapidly dies one by one while Ethan and his handler/mentor Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) desperately try to make sense of what is happening. It’s intense, it’s dizzying, and at times it’s downright scary. In short, it’s exactly what you want a sequence in a spy thriller to be, because it immediately knocks the floor out from under the audience and makes them suspicious of everything and everyone.
There are other, more celebrated sequences in Mission: Impossible (the Langley heist that leaves Ethan dangling less than an inch above the floor has been endlessly spoofed), and The Last Ride of Ethan’s Team doesn’t pack the same thrill as watching Cruise’s death wish antics in subsequent installments. But in terms of a sequence that instantly gets us into the headspace of its protagonist, nothing else in the franchise comes close.