Cinema
Mission: Impossible (PG, selected cinemas)
Spooks but no sparks
Mark Steyn
Ihappened to see Mission: Impossible the same week I saw Spy Hard. One of them comes on like a parody of every spy-movie cliché in the book as its vain hero is whisked from one absurd situation to another; the other is a comedy with Leslie Nielsen, Both begin with an assignment tape — 'your mission, should you choose to accept it' — that subsequently self-destructs, and from then on it's hard to shake off the feeling that Mission: Impossible is merely Spy Hard with 64 million bucks' worth of special effects and a less coherent plot.
The Nineties big-screen Mission retains nothing from the Sixties television series except the self-destructing tape and the super-groovy Lalo Schifrin theme-tune, which is all most of us can remember from the show anyway. The old Mission was about teamwork: an ensemble of equals led by a determinedly unflamboyant man called Jim Phelps. The new Mission is a star vehicle for Tom Cruise, who happens also to be the film's producer and thus arranges for the rest of the team — including even the Phelps character — to be killed off ten minutes in, during one of those spies-in- tuxedoes-undercover-at-an-embassy-ball- in-Eastern-Europe scenes beloved of spy thrillers. In this as in so much else, the genre's response to the collapse of the Iron Curtain seems to be to carry on regardless. Thereafter, Cruise, on the lam from his own agency, passes the film happily enough shuttling from one set-piece to the next with a minimum of plot to connect them up. In no particular order, there is the bit where the two agents meet on a park bench and exchange the secret password, the bit where they sit at a screen and try to hack into the top-secret computer, the bit where they try to keep the guy on the telephone long enough to trace the call, and, of course, there's a big fireball. Cruise plays a super-secret agent known as a 'ghost', as indeed does Arnold Schwarzenegger in his new film The Eraser; Cruise is pitted against a mole on his own side, as is Arnie; Cruise is trying to stop the mega-super- secret computer disc from falling into the wrong hands, as is Arnie; and it all winds up on a high-speed train — likewise Arnie. As for the film's high point, in which Cruise is lowered into the ultra-mega-
super-secret vault at CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia, Brian de Palma has lifted it wholesale from Jules Dassin's Topkapi.
Incidentally, it's lucky for Tom that, even for its state-of-the-art secure vault, the CIA continues to install air ducts the entire Radio City Rockettes could comfortably tap-dance down. A couple of years ago, at a loose end in a skyscraper, I tried crawling down an air duct and got as far as my shoulders. Possibly you could have got Kate Moss down there if you'd greased her up with Vaseline first. But, in the CIA duct, there's room for Tom and his accom- plice, a camera team and probably a couple of other film crews: 'Arnie I Queue surprise! What are you doing here?' I'm breaking into the CIA for my new movie The Eraser, Tom. Vot brinks you?'
Personally, I missed Kristin Scott Thomas, who got bumped off in the embassy scene. It's irritating to see her con- tinually wasted in crummy supporting roles: as Four Weddings and a Funeral fades from memory, the brief scene where she confess- es her love for Hugh Grant seems more and more the truest moment in the picture, and a zillion times better than any of his scenes with Andie MacDowell. It's the same here. Once Scott Thomas is gone, we have to make do with Emmanuelle Beart as the gal sidekick. It's no wonder their erotic interlude was cut from the movie: they can send Cruise flying along the side of a high-speed train, they can deck him out with high-tech laser-beam neutralisers, but no one in the special-effects depart- ment can invent a gadget which would make him look as if he and his leading ladies have any sexual chemistry.
Compared to the insouciance of 007, Cruise is foursquare and earnest, without ever persuading the audience of any gen- uine human motivation for his actions. His most expressive features are his curiously overdeveloped arms. When droll arch-vil- lainess Vanessa Redgrave shows up look- ing to make a big arms deal, you know she's wasting her time: in this picture, Tom's big arms have got the best deal going.
'This must be it, "One room apartment, central London, all M.O.D. cons."'
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