By: Harry Georgatos

Harry Georgatos — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:17:56 +0000

De Palma was given a travesty of screenwriting and made the film more interesting then it should have been. This wasn’t the story I was expecting. De Palma’s style of fillmaking would have always made a definitive IMF sting operation. The twists and turns in this movie any smart 15 year old kid would have worked them out. The premise to M1 doesn’t ring true! There is no way CIA would implicate ETHAN as the mole and assassin of his own IMF team without recovering all the dead body’s first! Unless CIA had JIM PHELPS and CLAIRE’S dead body’s on a morgue slab there is no way ETHAN would be implicated! This is the goddamn CIA not some underfunded police department. In the bonecrunching classic THE FUGITIVE when Dr RICHARD KIMBLE dived off the spillway into that torrential river US MARSHAL SAM GERARD wanted an all-out search of the river for KIMBLE’S body. When Phelps threw himself into the river the water was extremely calm and would have washed up somewhere down the river. That’s a huge question mark hanging over the credibility of the film. The set-pieces in M1 are put together with great skill by De Palma. The CIA computer heist sequence is still the most sophisticated set-piece in all three bland and boring mission films. MI is efficinetly edited, has a great soundtrack, amazing cinematography and production design but an appalling plot! I was hoping De Palma would have made a mission film that was a hybrid of films like BLOW OUT, THE FURY, SCARFACE and Oliver Stone’s paranioa of JFK, with a mindbending IMF sting operation. De Palma was a director for hire and was given a dreadful script by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner and made it more interesting then it should have been. These mission films are for an undemanding 15 year old mentality!

Comments on: Hand-made Proof on Spy TV

By: Harry Georgatos