Mission: Impossible (1996)
Directed by Brian De Palma
When Ethan Hunt, the leader of a crack espionage team whose perilous operation has gone awry with no explanation, discovers that a mole has penetrated the CIA, he's surprised to learn that he's the prime suspect. To clear his name, Hunt now must ferret out the real double agent and, in the process, even the score.
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What critics compared Mission: Impossible to
It’s, as you have guessed, a little Thanos, a little Terminator, with action scenes reminiscent of Mission Impossible’s, so much so you keep expecting Tom Cruise to pop up at every turn.
Despite those car chases — and a particularly “Fast and Furious” one near the end – the movie combines the type of high-tech spy stuff we might see in Bond or “Mission: Impossible” with a straight-up buddy action comedy.
Of all the plots from Mission Impossible movies to rip off, Hobbs & Shaw for some reason decides to borrow the premise of the unanimously agreed upon worst entry, MI2.
The sequence is somewhat reminiscent of Mission Impossible, reliant on slow-mo frames, yet retains the Fast and Furious style editing: close-ups of car parts: tires and rims, engines, and steering wheels, made more enlivening by a mounted backseat angle masquerading as a near-dashboard shot.
In a post-superhero summer with no new Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movie — yet hilariously cribbing almost the same plot as M:I-2 — it was only a matter of time before this pair of broad-shouldered box office beefcakes teamed up.
Reeves places his body in harm’s way often, not unlike Tom Cruise in a “Mission Impossible” film, but not as death-defying.
But for pure excitement and craft, the "John Wick" films have grown into one of our most reliable action franchises -- right up there with the "Mission: Impossible" series.
…the next “Mission: Impossible” has its work cut out for it, James Bond may have his license revoked and the “bullet time” from “The Matrix” is nothing compared to what a bullet from a silenced automatic weapon does under water.
All the intrigue, characters and subplots are enough to keep the series going into “Mission: Impossible” length.
For instance, I’m sure you have seen the beat where one character holds a knife really close to the unblinking eye of another; it’s in everything from Mission: Impossible to Spider-Man 3 .
He revels in the period detail (split-screen, Nina Simone on the soundtrack), and it's a canny move to locate U.N.C.L.E. in the same period as the original show, setting it apart from franchises like Bourne , Mission: Impossible and even contemporary Bond.
Unlike “Mission: Impossible,” another rebooted ’60s title now on screens, “U.N.C.L.E” had no catchy theme and no lasting cultural impact.
A movie version has been kicking around for development hell for decades -- George Clooney and Tom Cruise were rumored at various times to play dashing spy Napoleon Solo -- but unlike "Mission: Impossible" or the James Bond movies, there's no attempt at an update and no firm decision on whether to play it straight or camp it up and go all self-referential.
As the show no longer has much cultural currency, Ritchie doesn’t feel the need to pay due deference (no big deal in itself; neither did Tom Cruise with Mission: Impossible ), but he doesn’t establish the significance of the film’s acronymic title in a way that either justifies the ending or Hugh Grant’s casting as this secret organisation’s head.
Director Joseph Kosinski ( TRON: Legacy , Oblivion ) has studied the first film with an electron microscope, and a series of writers that includes star Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible collaborator Christopher McQuarrie (as well as Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer) have pieced together a story that beat-for-beat matches sequences and character types of the original to a degree that it’s somewhat alarming.
Although having almost fifty credits to his name, it is arguably the combination of his roles as Mission Impossible ’s Ethan Hunt and Maverick that are most synonymous with the actor.
This time he brought onboard his Mission: Impossible partner Christopher McQuarrie and it’s a sequel that outdoes the original, in some part because of how playfully and emotionally it handles the nostalgia and inherent silliness of the concept.
He brought Mission: Impossible a sophistication and elegance reminiscent of the James Bond movies at their best, without losing the fun.
It’s a long shot, if the details of the operation—explained to the aviator hopefuls in a rather “It can’t be done” style reminiscent of “Mission: Impossible”—are any indication.
The film opens with a sequence in which Maverick is testing an aircraft to its very limits in a way that kind of reminded me of Damien Chazelle’s First Man, and the film ends with the exhilarating mission that the TOPGUN training has been leading up to, and it is executed with the kind of heart-in-your-throat intensity that made the sequence feel like it could’ve easily been at home in a Mission: Impossible film.
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This premise serves adequately as a structuring device, despite such smart-pants sour notes as a riff from the “Mission Impossible” theme during one of Millicent’s more acrobatic wicked deeds.
There are cartoonish action sequences that knowingly borrow from the likes of the “Mission, Impossible” pictures.
But of course the Brown family—including live-in relative Mrs. Bird (Julie Waters), a neat-freak old biddy who correctly diagnoses the problems in the household that Paddington has been instrumental in solving—come to the rescue (cue echoes of “Mission: Impossible”), bonding in the process.
(Do we really need to hear the "Mission Impossible" theme during a daring museum break-in?
She's an uninspired villain who feels airlifted from a "Mission: Impossible" knockoff — a very discordant tone to pair with old-school British storybook charm.
As for Wahlberg, he certainly still has a youthful physique and energy to match, but he’s not exactly a charismatic action star like Tom Cruise who’s electrifying to watch in those Mission Impossible movies.
Nathan hooks up with Sully in New York City, where the former is working as a bartender, impressing hotties with moves straight out of Cocktail—a nod that, along with the Mission: Impossible-style daredevil opener, suggests some wannabe-Tom Cruise energy.
Similar stunts in, say, the "Mission: Impossible" movies are at least somewhat tethered to reality, or at least the version of the reality the films have created, where "Uncharted" never seems any more real than the video game series on which it's based.
For every Mission: Impossible sequel where Tom Cruise actually straps himself to an airborne plane, we can have one Uncharted, where the camera moves just fast enough to make the CGI never too egregious.
The action sequences are similarly tame, but for one death-defying skydive out of a cargo plane that is composed almost entirely of goopy CGI and is many steps removed from the thrillingly real stunt work of a Mission: Impossible movie.
I imagine Michael Bay, sitting down on his least-stained beanbag chair, cracking open his second Monster energy drink and occasionally leering at his half-torn Farrah Fawcett poster, had a Mission: Impossible marathon one day and decided “I can do this, too.”
6 Underground is a whirlwind collision of the Ocean’s heist films, the Fast & Furious franchise, the Mission: Impossible series, Vin Diesel’s XXX saga, and The A-Team.
6 Underground comes across like a mashup between Mission: Impossible, Charlie’s Angels, and Fast Five.
With its makeshift family, high-speed car chases, and elaborate heists, Netflix’s action blockbuster “6 Underground” is solid proof that Michael Bay would love to direct a “ Mission: Impossible ” or “Fast and Furious” movie.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: If the Mission: Impossible , Ocean’s Eleven and Fast and Furious franchises had a baby with naught but two cold nickels clinking around in its skull, it would be 6 Underground .
The movie is produced by David Ellison’s Skydance Media, which has also been involved in the most recent “Mission: Impossible” pictures, and it is hard not to feel like “6 Underground” is just some knockoff version of the “M:I” movies, without any of the gritty resolve or unexpected grace that filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie has brought to that series’ most recent entries.
Action movies now belong to long-running franchises like Fast & Furious and Mission: Impossible , a PG-13 landscape where characters are borderline superheroes.
Ironically while a much bigger franchise like the “Mission: Impossible” movies still feature Tom Cruise defying age itself, “Bad Boys for Life” acknowledges it.
The addition of AMMO also gives the production a Mission: Impossible vibe that hopefully will be explored even further in future films.
The set-pieces, meanwhile, are suitably muscular and over the top, weaving in some nice references to past sequences, while clearly mindful of the new benchmarks set by the likes of the Mission: Impossible movies.
John Wick , The Fast and the Furious , plus Mission: Impossible push the genre’s spectacle and change how an action hero can behave.
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Not only are there affectionate tributes and homages to cinema, with references to Buster Keaton (an ongoing in-joke between films), Walter Hill’s The Warriors , Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box , Mission Impossible and many more, but it traverses between genres.
Nor is this Mission: Impossible , which only went to that special level in its fourth movie.
Right behind is Mission: Impossible or The Raid , but what director Chad Stahelski and lead hero Keanu Reeves continue to achieve is pure action movie ecstasy.
Stahelski has always been open in interviews about how much time he and his teams put into preparing for their film shoots, and it shows; for the same reason, Christopher McQuarrie of Mission: Impossible fame, shares the crown with Stahelski as the two undisputed kings of American action cinema.
(Even Mission: Impossible had to struggle through a couple of wobblier entries before finding its virtuosic footing.)
Tarantula gets one of the best recent moments that form part of the never-ending nods at the famous, dangling from wires scene in “Mission: Impossible.”
With a gob of My Fair Lady (1964), a dash of Pulp Fiction (1994), a smidge of Mission: Impossible (1996), a dollop of Ocean’s 11 (2001), and a solid helping of Zootopia (2016), The Bad Guys becomes a charm-wrapped lesson that you can be anything you want to be, it’s never too late to change, and doing right by your friends is better than doing wrong to your enemies.