Third ‘Mission: Impossible’ still has the stuff

There’s always a point in each “Mission: Impossible” movie in which the improbable becomes clearly impossible, and the picture drifts into — no, embraces — pure fantasy. It usually has something to do with those ridiculous masks, which have become increasingly gimmicky and hard to buy. Or it may be the stunts, which need too much help from Industrial Light & Magic to come off as credible.

You may remember the train-and-helicopter chase from the first film, directed by Brian de Palma, but can you say how it fit into the plot? David Koepp, who shared the screenplay credit with Towne, complained that “we had a lot of cooks on that one, which is not good for a movie. The fax machines were humming. It was terribly unsatisfying; the scattering of viewpoints was damaging.”

So why did it become one of the three top-grossing movies of 1996, snagging $180 million and topping the American ticket sales of Cruise’s own “Jerry Maguire” by quite a margin? According to Cahiers du Cinema, it’s really quite simple: the movie “makes of Brian de Palma the key analyst of the transformation of our society into a civilization of image and technology.” Overseas, it did even better, collecting an additional $275 million.

John Woo’s “Mission: Impossible II” is best-remembered for Cruise’s gravity-defying cliff-climbing episode — and little else. Some critics spotted elements of Hitchcock’s “Notorious” and “To Catch a Thief” in the Cruise/Thandie Newton love affair, but more common was Variety’s verdict: “even more empty a luxury vehicle than its predecessor ...[it] pushes the envelope in terms of just how much flashy packaging an audience will buy when there’s absolutely nada inside.”

Has anyone been able to sit through Cruise and Dougray Scott’s climactic motorcycle duel in “II” without laughing out loud? Perhaps the series has produced something truly new: action-movie spectacle that closely resembles slapstick. “III” carries on the tradition, especially during the final final half hour, which requires remarkable gun play on the part of a character who has few qualification for nailing bad guys.

Still, Woo’s “II” clearly topped the box-office success of the original. It was also one of the three top-grossing movies of its year, handily beating that year’s Oscar winners, “Gladiator” and “Erin Brockovich,” in ticket sales. In the U.S., it collected $215 million. Overseas, it made $330 million more.

Hence, “Mission: Impossible III.”

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