Critics reviews

While the franchise has passed through many hands over the years, you never forget your first, and in these hair’s breadth escapes the movies still bear the imprint of the perverse pasticheur De Palma, who’d made a speciality of stretching time to the agonising breaking point in the Hitchcockian rush-to-the-rescue sequences of Blow Out, Body Double (1984) and Raising Cain (1992).

De Palma's biggest commercial hit may be a slick and glossy franchise one-off, but it remains the nimblest and most endlessly rewatchable picture in that durable Tom Cruise franchise: It's a movie I keep coming back to — each time grasping a bit more of the head-spinning plot, each time realizing how little it matters.

Then there's the invasion of CIA headquarters by Ethan Hunt's scratch team in Mission: Impossible (1996). In [De Palma's] search for pure cinema, this might be the purest of all. The invasion sequence runs an astonishing eighteen minutes and, as typical of a film's Development section, constitutes almost pure delay. You can imagine doing it in a couple of minutes, or a lot more.

As far as I could tell, the only reason these people and intrigues exist is to set up the action scenes — not to keep the "free" world safe for democracy or to say anything about the human condition. So as long as the moment-to-moment spectacle absorbed me, I couldn't have cared less why Tom Cruise had such a sour expression or could make floppy disks disappear like coins or playing cards — or why Billy Zane in his purple tights kept grinning when there wasn't any reason to.