Mission: Impossible - Impossible

Adventure, Thriller, Mystery, Action

Tom Cruise	Ethan Hunt
Jon Voight	Jim Phelps
Emmanuelle Béart	Claire Phelps
Henry Czerny	Eugene Kittridge
Jean Reno	Franz Krieger
Kristin Scott Thomas	Sarah Davies
Vanessa Redgrave	Max
Dale Dye	Frank Barnes
Marcel Iures	Alexander Golitsyn
Dougray Scott	Sean Ambrose
Ving Rhames
Kristin Scott-Thomas
Emmanuelle Beart

Director	Brian De Palma; Robert Dornhelm
Producer	Tom Cruise; Lawrence Schiller; Paula Wagner
Writer	Daniel Taplitz; David Koepp; Robert Towne

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