Entrapment (Jon Amiel, 1999)
Mission Impossible (Brian De Palma, 1996)
Mission Impossible II (John Woo, 2000)
This is the first movie I ever rated on Netflix. It was and is a forgettable caper movie with a kind of creepy love angle between Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery, which mostly shows my own ageism. The only scene I have clearly in my head is the totally stupid “laser trip wire training sequence” that involved Z-J doing some pretty extreme cat suit yoga and which was in all the trailers. Why do security companies leave holes in their laser trip wire cages large enough for humans to squeeze through?
This last is also a problem for Mission Impossible, which I recall seeing in theaters, but not really understanding. Hardly strange, since I was ten at the time; I believe I subsequently rewatched it and was even surprised by the twist ending. The video game was one of the few N64 titles I actually played all the way through, even getting to, but failing to complete the final auto-scrolling turret section (we didn’t call it that in those days). Or am I conflating the film with the game? Did the film have lasers that Tom Cruise couldn’t have fallen through and they needed deactivating? The video game involved dodging laser grids.
I have checked. No lasers. Or rather, they had to be dealt with differently. I am coming to the realisation that this may not have been such a silly movie as I thought it was. The sequel Mission Impossible II annoyed me deeply. I remember little else than it wasn’t an interesting watch. It involved a virus that was called chimera and some part of it was set in Australia. I have not watched another film in this series.
My music teacher often remarked that the original series’ theme tune was in 5/4 time and thus “impossible” to dance to and that the films recomposed it to fit into 4/4.
As a final note, Tom Cruise’s character is called Ethan Hunt, which may explain my habit of confusing Ethan Hawke with Tom Cruise.
Stranger than Flixion 