Mission: Impossible Special Collector’s Edition

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Dom Robinson reviews

Mission: Impossible Special Collector’s Edition
Distributed by

Paramount

    Cover M.I. Special Edition:
    M.I. 1 & 2 Boxset:

  • Cert:
  • Cat.no: PHE 8956
  • Running time: 105 minutes
  • Year: 1996
  • Pressing: 2006
  • Region(s): 2, PAL
  • Chapters: 13 plus extras
  • Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
  • Languages: English
  • Subtitles: 4 languages available
  • Widescreen: 2.35:1
  • 16:9-Enhanced: Yes
  • Macrovision: Yes
  • Disc Format: 2*DVD 9
  • Price: £19.99
  • Extras: Mission: Remarkable – 40 Years of Creating the Impossible, Mission: Explosive Exploits, Mission: International Spy Museum, Mission: Spies Among Us, Mission: Catching the Train, Agent Dossiers, Excellence in Filmmaking: Cruise, Two Acceptance Speeches, Theatrical Trailers, TV Spots, Photo Gallery, M:i:III Teaser

    Director:

      Brian De Palma

    (The Black Dahlia, Blow Out, Body Double, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Carlito’s Way, Carrie, Casualties of War, Dressed To Kill, Femme Fatale, The Fury, Mission To Mars, Obsession, Raising Cain, Scarface, Snake Eyes, Toyer, The Untouchables, The Untouchables: Capone Rising, Wise Guys)

Producer:

    Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner

Screenplay:

    David Koepp and Robert Towne

Music:

    Danny Elfman

Cast:

    Ethan Hunt: Tom Cruise
    Jim Phelps: Jon Voight
    Claire: Emmanuelle Béart
    Eugene Kittridge: Henry Czerny
    Franz Krieger: Jean Reno
    Luther Stickell: Ving Rhames
    Sarah Davies: Kristin Scott Thomas
    Frank Barnes: Dale Dye
    Alexander Golitsyn: Marcel Iures
    Hannah Williams: Ingeborga Dapkunaite
    Train Engineer: David Schneider
    Jack Harmon: Emilio Estevez
    Max: ?

Mission: Impossible is the big-screen action remake of the classic sixties television series with a new cast, with new gadgets for the nineties, and a new version of Lalo Schifrin’s theme tune updated by U2’s Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen. The film also has an original score from Danny Elfman.

The story is quite complex for your typical Hollywood summer blockbuster, the film easily holding its own against 1996’s other offerings including Twister, The Rock and Independence Day. While I was impressed with The Rock, the other two films were tales of plentiful SFX strung together with little or no plot, even if they were an equally good workout for your sound system like this one.

The plot involves the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) on the trail of both parts of a NOC List, a record of all the CIA’s deep cover agents working in Eastern Europe, one half of which has been stolen by Golitsyn, a traitor within the CIA who plans to steal the second half from the Embassy in Prague. The NOC List is split into two for security reasons: the first part which Golitsyn already has contains the code names, but that half is useless without the other which matches up to provide the agents’ true names.

However, as double-cross follows double-cross, and the plan to apprehend Golitsyn goes awry, members of the IMF are getting bumped off at an alarming rate. The question is, as one of the few left alive, can Ethan get to the truth without getting caught as he’s been framed for the deaths of his espionage team? With Tom Cruise in the lead role, is that a question that really needs answering…

The film also contains some fantastic action set-pieces including a chase in the Channel Tunnel between a helicopter and the train itself, as well as what must be the most nail-biting scene in all the films made in 1996 as Tom Cruise and his accomplices attempt to retrive the NOC List from within a unit so secure it makes Fort Knox look like their having an open season. As they begin the operation, Tom Cruise whispers to his men, “From now on in, I want complete silence”. When I saw that in the cinema, not a single person made a sound, which is a rarity in the cinema these days.

For me, Tom Cruise is an actor who never fails to disappoint, and one who has been in the A-list since the role that brought him to fame, as Maverick in Top Gun, and who received an Oscar nomination for his latest film, Jerry Maguire. However, the second film was disappointing by comparison, despite the appearance of the achingly gorgeous Thandie Newton. More recently, the takings for the third MI film, released in cinemas in May 2006 as this Special Edition DVD hits the shelves, have been down on the usual expectations with suspicion that the Cruise backlash is beginning, following events like him showing off by jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch to declare his love for Katie Holmes, and then insisting that she give birth in silence, courtesy of his completely loopy Scientology fixation.

If you’re wondering what happened to the original cast of the television series, they all declined to take part as the original plan was to feature them only in the opening scene before killing them off, and replacing them with a new team, and they felt they were worth more than that.

Hence, the 1990’s team is led by Jon Voight as Jim Phelps, who always has to listen to the recordings that are due to self-destruct within five seconds. First making a name for himself in 1969’s Midnight Cowboy, he has recently come to the fore again in films such as Heat and Anaconda.

The rest of the IMF team are rounded out by Emmanuelle Beart as Jim’s wife Claire; Kristin Scott-Thomas who appeared in the worldwide hit, The English Patient; Ingeborge Dapkunaite who starred in 1995’s Burnt By The Sun, Oscar winner of Best Foreign Film; and Emilio Estevez who for some reason appears in an uncredited role.

As Cruise puts the pieces of the puzzle back together he is helped out by two top-line actors who are now making their mark in Hollywood films, Jean Reno and Ving Rhames.

Henry Czerny is Kittridge, the man that the IMF team must answer to and who provides the voice in the film for the “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds”… who deserves to be in many more films than he has been given to date. Also in the extensive cast is established actress Vanessa Redgrave but I won’t reveal the name of her character so as not to spoil part of the plot.

The picture and sound quality of this disc are excellent, and the 2.35:1 widescreen framing is essential for De Palma’s complex visuals. If you’ve only seen this in a pan-and-scan version on video or cropped to 16:9 on BBC1, then you’ve not seen the film properly as it does no justice to the film’s tribute to the original series with its extravagant use of tilted shots.

On the sound front, the Dolby Digital 5.1 is great, but where’s the DTS soundtrack? This DVD release was a chance to fix things like this but it’s clear they’ve just used the same disc content which is a shame. We even still have only a mere 13 chapters for the 105-minute running time. It’s not enough, but it’s the same amount as the previously-available PAL Laserdisc. The DVD menu is still the same static and silent affair and the only extra on disc 1 is a 2-minute Theatrical trailer, with subtitles for the film in English (and hard of hearing), Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. That’s lazy, Paramount.

Don’t be put off with the film being given a PG-certificate either. Despite some rather un-PG-like violence, the BBFC must like Brian De Palma as they awarded this film a PG-certificate in its uncut version, whereas the same film is a PG-13 in the USA (the equivalent of a BBFC 12). This particular DVD, however, is a 15-certificate, due to the content of some of the additional material on the second disc.

Let’s hope Disc 2 is where it’s at, since we finally get some extras to accompany this film, given that as you can see above we had next to nothing beforehand. All the info is detailed below:

Firstly, the supplemental material has more languages for subtitles than you can shake a stick at. There’s 22 here, including English. The inclusion of English might sound obvious but there are some distributors who are happy to add subtitles for every language under the sun on some DVDs… apart from English, for no apparent reason.

    Mission: Remarkable – 40 Years of Creating the Impossible (11:27): A featurette showing how we got from the original 1966 TV series to the three films made in the past ten years (the TV series didn’t even last that long). That said, the TV series is really just a brief mention as this concentrates mostly on the movies and contains many a soundbite from the cast and crew on each one at the time of filming.

    This featurette, and all the others except where stated, is in 4:3 with letterboxed film clips.

    Mission: Explosive Exploits (5:10): Tom Cruise does his own stunts, we are told here, showing how he ran away from water in the first film as the restaurant explodes before being suspended from the ceiling in the scene where no-one must make a sound…

    Mission: International Spy Museum (6:31): Peter Earnest, executive director of this joint, details the gadgets that are required in espionage shenanigans. Bugs to listen in to conversations, hole-in-the-wall cameras, radio transmitters to keep track of people’s movements – whether hidden in someone’s shoes or a fake dog poo to also pick up on chit-chat, devices to inject poison to someone, secret video cameras and disguises aplenty are all featured here.

    Mission: Spies Among Us (8:41): A segment on how the Mission: Impossible Force (IMF) are just so damn better than the CIA and how they should be able to exist in the real world. You also get an insight into the training required for joining the CIA.

    Mission: Catching the Train (2:40): A brief featurette on how the exceptional train sequence was created which ran for 7:20 and consisted of 152 separate shots.

    Agent Dossiers: No film footage here, just CVs for the characters in this movie.

    Excellence in Filmmaking: Cruise (9:15): No chat from any one person as we take a tour of film clips galore through the movies of Tom Cruise throughout the last 20+ years, showing how he’s been on top of his game the entire time. However, the ‘Also Sprach Zarathrustra’ music from 2001: A Space Odyssey at the start makes it sound like they’re elevating him to godlike status.

    Acceptance Speech for BAFTA/LA Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellent in Film (3:20): This piece in anamorphic 16:9, Tom Cruise kisses corporate ass, gushing about how wonderful filmmakers are, including Stanley Kubrick, who directed him in Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s final film.

    Acceptance Speech for MTV’s Generation Award (3:42): Katie Holmes presents Tom Cruise with the award. She’s looking very smiley there, a lot moreso than after trying to give birth while keeping schtum, as recent pictures show.

    Theatrical Trailers (3:00): A teaser and a trailer for the first film.

    TV Spots (3:57): 9 brief TV trailers. Very cool to have these here.

    Photo Gallery: Some pretty pictures from the original movie to take a look at.

    M:i:III Teaser (1:31): A trailer for the new movie, which reunites Tom Cruise with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who he last worked with in 1999’s unsurpassable Magnolia.

So, almost a full hour of footage in the above which is a good set of extras, but a lot of this stuff should have appeared on the original DVD in the first place and the majority is the kind of thing you’ll flick through once and that’s about it.

This review will self destruct in five seconds…

FILM CONTENT
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS


OVERALL
Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2006.

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