And instead of an ensemble show, the films highlight Tom Cruise’s tireless multitasking capacities: he gets to wear the false moustaches and dangle down the lift shafts. The Mission: Impossible movies are very different – spectacular, splashy, relentless. One day, Cruise’s insurance documents will be published in a deluxe collected edition Every episode was executed with perfect economy and quietly nerve-jangling precision: it was as close as you could get to 007 filmed by Robert Bresson. You always knew what the mission was, but it was only at the end that you discovered how it was done. Each time the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) set about a new task, the viewer had to piece together the riddle of what was going on and work out how all the elements glimpsed in that week’s burning-fuse opening credits – say, a box of bees, fumes from a ventilator, someone dangling in a lift shaft, Martin Landau peeling off a false moustache – would combine into a coherent narrative.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 5 FULL MOVIE MOVIE
F ive films and nearly 20 years into the Mission: Impossible movie franchise, it’s still hard not to feel nostalgic for the original 60-70s TV series, the most rigorously formulaic thriller show ever.