Mission: Impossible (1996) - Review

April 23, 2026

Brian De Palma's 1996 film opens with a mission that goes catastrophically wrong, and the camera stays close enough to Ethan Hunt's face to register the exact moment he understands he has been set up. It is a precise and unsettling hook. Mission: Impossible is not the action spectacle the series would eventually become. It is a suspense thriller built on misdirection, paranoia, and the mechanics of the heist genre, handled with a formal control the franchise's later entries would largely trade for spectacle.

At a Glance

Director: Brian De Palma
Runtime: 110 minutes
Starring: Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Emmanuelle Béart, Henry Czerny, Jean Reno, Ving Rhames
Release: 1996
Critics Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5/5 stars, a suspense masterclass)
Audience Rating: ★★★★ (4/5 stars, a beloved original)

Plot

Ethan Hunt, an IMF agent, is the sole survivor of a mission that goes catastrophically wrong and finds himself framed for the deaths of his team. To clear his name and uncover who betrayed them, he assembles an unauthorised crew and plans an audacious heist of the CIA's most secure facility. The narrative is the franchise's most carefully constructed, a spy thriller that deploys its reversals and paranoia with a confidence that keeps the experience engaging throughout. Its key structural achievement is the first-act twist, in which the apparent mission is revealed to be a trap. The CIA vault sequence is the film's centrepiece: a masterclass in procedural tension and spatial precision that remains one of the great set-pieces in the genre.

Characters

Ethan Hunt is established here as a character of moral complexity and resourcefulness. Cruise plays the paranoia and determination with a physical authority and focus that makes Hunt feel credible at every turn. Jon Voight's Jim Phelps is the picture's most dramatically compelling presence, a man whose apparent trustworthiness and eventual betrayal give the film its most significant development and its most affecting dramatic moment. Henry Czerny's Kittridge functions effectively as an institutional antagonist, a CIA official of authority and cool suspicion. Jean Reno's Krieger is the most purely enjoyable supporting turn, a character of considerable capability and dry wit whose role in the vault sequence gives the film's centrepiece its most entertaining secondary element.

Meaning / Themes

At its core, the film is about loyalty and betrayal, about the institutional trust the IMF demands of its agents and the discovery that that trust has been comprehensively violated. Phelps's betrayal delivers the franchise's most emotionally affecting gut-punch. The treatment of the IMF as an institution of moral ambiguity gives the series' central concern with deception and identity its most complete initial expression.

Direction

De Palma's direction is formally inventive and assured, with a command of suspense mechanics and a feel for the film's paranoid atmosphere that makes this the most rigorously controlled entry in the series. The vault sequence is the film's directorial high point: De Palma's spatial mastery reaches its apex here, building precision into every cut and camera movement. The visual style, rooted in his characteristic use of split screens, slow motion, and careful framing, gives the film a visual identity as distinctive as its dramatic register. De Palma pitches the film at a register of suspense and narrative complexity, and the approach is wholly successful. Mission: Impossible has a tonal discipline and rigour that the franchise's more overtly action-focused later entries would largely abandon. Its most effective sequences are those in which tension is generated through spatial control and careful staging rather than through spectacle. The sustained, sweat-drenched vault sequence is the purest expression of that approach: an exercise in suspense craft the series has never quite replicated. Danny Elfman's score, built around Lalo Schifrin's iconic theme, gives the film a sonic character to match. The film was a major critical and commercial success on its release, widely regarded as one of the finest spy thrillers of the decade and as a demonstration of De Palma's command of the genre. Its reputation has remained strong since, consistently ranked among the franchise's best entries.

Final Verdict: A masterclass in suspense filmmaking and the franchise's most purely cinematic entry. Cruise's Hunt is established as one of the action genre's most compelling protagonists, Voight's Phelps is the series' most dramatically resonant villain, and De Palma's direction brings a structural precision and atmospheric control the franchise's later entries would largely trade for spectacle. It has lost none of its grip.