Mission Improbable

The Baguette Winner is out of town. I know absolutely nobody else in Paris - well, except “Adele”, the waitress at our nearby café Les Anemones - and by ‘know’, I mean she recognises me as the guy who speaks English at her - which means I am staying in, enjoying cheap bottles of Stella Artois, and watching Mission Impossible. As has become custom, I have made note of my thoughts:

-       Emilio Estevez is in this film. That’s how you know this movie was made in the Nineties.

-       Kristin Scott Thomas is in this film, and is not speaking French. This is further evidence that this film was made in the Nineties. I happen to like Kristin Scott Thomas, as she made her film debut in a Prince movie.

-       Jon Voight instructs the crack team of carefully selected specialists that they will meet back at “4am. That’s 0400.” This team can’t be all that elite.

-       Tom Cruise just performed an internet search. I am delighted to report that he does this using an acceptably low (and therefore realistic) number of keystrokes. One of the great grievances in popular culture is the depiction of computer use in late 90s - early 2000s film and television. An ‘internet search’, apparently, typically involved wild mashing of keys and virtually no use of a mouse, which resembles no internet search I’ve ever performed. Kudos to the Mission Impossible team.

-       Wikipedia informs me that the team that Tom Cruise’s character is/was a member of is the IMF, the “Impossible Missions Force”. That’s a little fatalistic. Why can’t it be the “Improbable Missions Force”? Or something more optimistic. Perhaps the “Missions Which Are Destined To Succeed Force”? If you think positive thoughts, good things will happen. [That last sentence is the premise behind The Secret, just FYI. I’ve just saved you time and money. You’re welcome.]

-       Ving Rhames plays the computer nerd Luther Stickell. This is the very antithesis of type-casting.

-       The famous “Tom Cruise hanging from the ceiling scene” (or Sporty Spice, if your only reference point in life is Spice World): It really is a good scene. Of course, surely they could have imagined that the foreign guy might get tired of holding Tom Cruise, but no harm done. They also could have waited until the CIA vault guy goes for lunch, so that he doesn’t keep intruding (as opposed to making him sick for about 5 minutes, which seemed like a strange plan). They could have just made him so sick that he had to go home… But these are minor details.

-       The whole peeling-your-face-off-to-reveal-you-are-someone-else thing is also pretty great, if totally unbelievable.

-       Even more unbelievable is the scene where A HELICOPTER FLIES THROUGH A TUNNEL TO KEEP UP WITH A HIGH-SPEED TRAIN! 

-       After the aforementioned helicopter/train scene, Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames meet up at a café for a beer, and discuss something-or-other. In the background, almost imperceptively quiet, you can hear Dreams by The Cranberries. This is both pleasant, because it’s a nice enough song, but also strangely jarring, as the rest of the soundtrack is action-movie-esque.  

      And it’s not just that it was a hit song at the time; Dreams is from 1992, and Mission Impossible is from 1996. Now, if Dreams was featured in the soundtracks to Aladdin, Home Alone II, Beethoven or The Mighty Ducks, it’d make a lot more sense.

And with that Emilio Estevez full-circle callback, I will end this post.