'Mission: Impossible' Ready to Dominate the Weekend Box Office
by EG
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One enters theaters this week, and it is virtually certain to be the week's top movie. That's because it's expected to have decent ticket sales, and no holdover movie (especially not Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) is expected to be any real competition. That should be fine for fans, because M:I7 delivers everything they've come to expect from the franchise. Read on for details.
Via Vox.
In the very first scene of the very first Mission: Impossible film, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is interrogating a Russian guy. We don’t know it’s Hunt, though, because -- in perhaps the most iconic running bit in the M:I universe -- he’s wearing an extremely lifelike rubber mask. Two minutes into the scene, he walks over to the Russian, kills him, and then pulls off the mask, dramatically revealing the face of a slightly flushed and rumpled Cruise. (It’s hot under all that latex.)
Shortly after that first reveal, the walls of the room fall outward into a warehouse, which makes for a bigger reveal: The whole scene was faked. Not only was the now-dead Russian hoodwinked, but the audience was tricked into believing their senses. For us, the moment is delightful; for the dead man, not so much.
That opening parry for Mission: Impossible, created and produced by Cruise as a spy-action franchise for himself, showed up in movie theaters in May 1996, with Brian De Palma (of Carrie and Scarface) in the director’s chair. Compared to the latest installment in the franchise, frequent Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible -- Dead Reckoning Part One, the 1996 version is much sweatier, darker, and kind of erotic. (A Brian De Palma movie indeed.)
The omnipresent unmaskings, of which there have been at least 15 or 20 by now, are still a mainstay of the films. What’s so great about those reveals, in particular, is that you’re rarely actually expecting them. Dead Reckoning Part One plays with this a little, but for the most part, through all the films, any guy at any time could rip his face off and you’d still be like, “Wow, I did not see that coming.”
The new version is like its predecessors, employing a trope borrowed from the TV show that spawned the film: trickery around every corner, a sense that you can’t quite believe what you see. Dead people turn out to be not-dead people. Walls of rooms keep falling apart to reveal they’re constructed in some warehouse somewhere. Everyone could be a rogue agent or maybe not, and the movie sure isn’t going to wink at you about it till it’s good and ready.
That those twists and turns keep surprising us seven movies in points to what’s truly delightful about the Mission: Impossible franchise, and what makes it, in my opinion, both the most inventive and the most satisfying long-running franchise in Hollywood. On one level, M:I is wonderful because the convoluted plots are pretty much beside the point; if they can be said to have a consistent theme, it is “Tom Cruise likes almost dying on camera.”
Get the rest of the story at Vox.