There's this hesitancy in contemporary adaptations to experiment with the legacy of the source material in fear of upsetting their fanbases. Phelps' turn was considered a betrayal of everything the character stood for, to which I say, that's what makes it so great. If you want what you enjoy about the television show, De Palma doesn't negate it. Voight's Phelps doesn't exactly conjure images of Graves' performance anyway. The twist plays into the larger picture of using familiar iconography and team tactics to lull the viewer into a state of security before kicking their chair out from under them.

Phelps' sleight-of-hand was always there, such as the moment where he utilizes the IMF mission tape's self-destruction to mask his own puff of cigarette smoke. The audience, like Ethan, could never fathom the original series' ringleader as the domino to bring it all down for nefarious reasons. A common criticism I would hear lobbied against "Mission: Impossible" was the plot being too confusing, which is hilarious in hindsight. There's a lot going on, but De Palma is such a delicate craftsman who knows how to keep track of everything, even when he's not directly telling you. It's incredibly effective when De Palma, Hirsch, and Cruise display a metatextual recollection of events that show one thing while Ethan says another. By the time we get to the train chase, we have seen the truth in Ethan's perspective and are now fully onboard his crusade to fight for what's right.

Q: When the first “Mission: Impossible” came around, where were you in your career?

A: I was doing the David Mamet play “Oleanna,” touring around Wales. I got a call from my agent, saying they wanted me to audition for a Tom Cruise movie. I said great, I took a three-hour train ride to Pinewood Studios near London and I met with Brian De Palma for three and a half, four minutes. I thought, well, that was a waste. I thanked the casting director for calling me in, but told her I didn’t think it went very well. And she said, “No, no. No! Oh, no. He loved you! You were in there the longest of anybody.”

Q: So you got the part. How long was the gig?

A: They offered me the gig, but I had another film job to finagle a little, to make them both work. It meant working three or four weeks, seven days a week, which was fine. Great, actually. Three weeks on “Mission,” then another week or so finishing up while I did this other film. I was younger then.

Q: At that point in your career were you thinking, well, good gig, small part, big movie? Or did you have anything like a hope of it turning into something more?

A: No! I mean, I got to do a Tom Cruise movie directed by Brian De Palma, and to be honest, if it hadn’t been for those two, I probably wouldn’t have gone in for the audition, because it meant six hours on the train back and forth from Wales and I had a show that night. Donloe was a tiny part, walk-on stuff. That’s how it started, although it did develop a little bit more as shooting went on.

Q: How so?

A: I was very at ease on set, having a good time, and I was sort of messing around one day, you know, cutting up, making people laugh. I don’t even remember how. But then I got a tap on the shoulder from the first assistant, who said: “Mr. De Palma wants to speak to you.”

Q: And he fired you.

A: (laughs) You’re joking, but believe me, that’s what I thought was happening. The look on the first assistant’s face — we’re still in touch today, a great guy — seemed to indicate exactly that. All he said to me, as we walked over to De Palma, was: “Watch me. Watch me when you’re talking to him.” So he stands behind De Palma and De Palma says to me, “I saw you messing around up there.” And I say, “Yes, sir.” And he says, not smiling at all, “Yeah. Everybody seemed to be enjoying that.”

And I started to say something, and right then Chris, the first assistant, who’s standing behind De Palma, just does this (holds his finger up to his lips in a “shush!” gesture). So I didn’t speak. De Palma says, “Uh, well, could you do that again, whatever it was you were doing?” And I said sure, and he said, “Because I have an idea for something. After lunch we’ll film for an hour or two.” So that afternoon, and then the next morning, we improvised all the throwing-up bits, and Donloe running to and from the bathroom. And that came from just messing around on set. Most of it ended up on the (cutting-room) floor, but it was fun.

Q: You barely talk in that entire scene, which for a lot of people was the best thing in the first movie. It makes Donloe seem like an accidentally crucial figure.

A: That’s De Palma. I’m forever in his debt for that scene. A masterful filmmaker.

Q: And you had no reason to hope, any time over the last 25 years, that Donloe might find some excuse to return to the “M:I” universe?

A: Only in my own mind (laughs). I did draft a letter years ago: “Dear Tom: What about if we did this?” Some ridiculous excuse to bring back Donloe, you know. Then I thought, who am I kidding? I crumpled it up and threw it away. And then years later this happens.

Being only in the first movie and the last movie you have an interesting perspective. What’s the difference between a Brian De Palma-directed “Mission: Impossible” and a Christopher McQuarrie-directed “Mission: Impossible,” other than a lot less Dutch angles?

Brian, from what I remember, was under a considerable amount of pressure. For a variety of reasons. He was dealing with technical aspects of the film rather than with the actors.

What do you mean by that?

He’s not a great people person. He’s a genius filmmaker. To say that I worked with him and to watch him work, that’s amazing. That’s a wonderful thing. And, of course, with my character there wasn’t a lot there. That was sort of left up to me. And that was great, I was happy with that. And Chris is a different kind of director.

In my experience, he’s very cerebral and in the weeds with filmmaking.

He’s also in the weeds when it comes to working with actors. It was a very unique experience working with someone like him. He improvises a lot. A lot of improvisation. It took me a minute to realize it’s not he didn’t like what I was doing, he just wanted to see what else could come up. And once I got a hold of that, it was great.

Speaking of the first movie, that has to be an odd scene to do with Tom Cruise just hanging above you the entire time.

Well, he’d been up there for quite a while, a couple of days. So I had seen him up there a lot.

You had to know that was going to be a showstopper of a scene, right?

No.

Really?

What happened with that sequence, I was messing around on set one day, just joking around, it was a long day. I got a tap on the shoulder from the first assistant director, Chris Soldo. And he says, “Mr. De Palma wants to see you.” “What?” He says, “I’m going to stand behind him, just follow my lead.” I’m going, oh shoot, this is not going to be good.

I came up to him and he said, “I saw you messing around over there.” I said, “I’m sorry, sir, if I was being distracting.” He says, “No, no, no. It was funny. People were laughing. People really seem to enjoy what you’re doing, can you do it again?” And Chris is behind him mouthing, “Say yes.” So we spent the whole day after lunch and the whole next day doing the vomiting thing. It wasn’t in there before. The thing with the knife I think was there, but the whole vomiting thing was brought in.

I’m glad Donloe kept the knife. A nice souvenir for him.

I love that. I did ask because it isn’t the real one. They said they had to remake it. They are like $100,000 now.

What?

They are really expensive, so they couldn’t get them. One of them is in a museum. So they just remade them.

Yeah, maybe you should have kept that knife like Donloe did.

No kidding! “What knife? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Premiering in 1996, the first Mission: Impossible had director Brian De Palma at the helm, which in and of itself was a statement of intent. De Palma’s work has frequently drawn comparisons to that of Alfred Hitchcock—albeit with a liberal sprinkling of sex and violence—and that sentiment carries over to Mission: Impossible. The film opens with Hunt and his team on a mission in Kyiv that ends with everyone other than our hero dead; in what becomes a recurring theme in the series, Hunt goes on the run, as his own agency mistakenly believes he’s betrayed them. While Mission: Impossible culminates with an explosive train and helicopter sequence, the film is more in its wheelhouse as an exercise in suspense—nothing if not on-brand for a Hitchcock heir.

That willingness to make Mission: Impossible an auteur-driven tentpole extends to the three sequels that follow it. Mission: Impossible 2 is an unmistakable John Woo joint—all the way down to the white doves—in which Hunt becomes less of a traditional spy than a gun-wielding, motorcycle-driving martial artist. (Mission: Impossible 2 wasn’t for everyone, but I see the vision.) Mission: Impossible III hails from J.J. Abrams, who, taking some world-building cues from his work on Alias and Lost, adds some new dimensions to Hunt, including a fiancée in peril (played by Michelle Monaghan). Were it not for an all-time villain performance from the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, however, I suspect Mission: Impossible III would be viewed as the franchise’s low point, which is more indicative of Abrams’s limitations as a filmmaker than anything to do with the plot. Then came Ghost Protocol, wherein Brad Bird makes a seamless transition from the world of animation to live-action filmmaking. Indeed, some of the best set pieces in Ghost Protocol have a playful, cartoonish quality to them—in a good way.

Hollywood is littered with the bloated corpses of movies that were made with the intention of kicking off long-lasting franchises (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, John Carter, The Dark Tower, etc.). But it was obvious right out of the gate that Brian De Palma’s first Mission: Impossible would lead to a series of legs (even those legs wouldn’t be attached to De Palma). We were lured into the theater by the name-brand cache of the vintage TV series and, of course, Cruise’s star power. But we were immediately put on notice that the M:I movies wouldn’t really have all that much to do with the small-screen storytelling of the show—that these movies would be massive Rube Golberg-ian exercises in pyrotechnics and triple-cross pretzel logic. So this is really where it all begins. And now, it seems like a quaint throwback to a time when blockbusters could be…smart. Clearly, it’s hard to discuss this film without talking about the trickle-of-sweat hanging-spider break-in at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Twenty-five years later, movie magic has come so far. But this set-piece really hasn’t been topped in terms of pure ingenuity and suspense. Over time, the M:I series’ trademark set pieces would get bigger and louder and more lavish and expensive, but nothing has yet come close to topping this economical masterclass in dangling, white-knuckle delirium.

Film scholar and returning guest James Kenney has a knack for uncovering lost and forgotten cinematic treasures. You can listen to episodes 18 and 32 of the Movies In Focus podcast to learn about his headline-making work on Peter Bogdanovich’s Squirrels To The Nuts and the rediscovery of the original version of the Keanu Reeves and Ana de Armas film, God’s Daughter.

James now returns to discuss his latest find: Brian De Palma’s ‘lost’ film script, Ambrose Chapel. The now-published screenplay features an introductory essay from James, which examines De Palma’s fascinating and stylish career as a master of suspense.

Written by De Palma in the 1990s between Carlito’s Way and Mission: Impossible, audiences can finally catch sight of De Palma’s ‘screwball noir’. Virtual reality, mind control, and De Palma’s famed voyeurism are the order of the day for this Hitchcock-inspired, Mexico City-set thriller. James digs into the origins of Ambrose Chapel, exploring how it fits within many of De Palma’s signature themes.

The conversation takes a broader look at De Palma’s legendary career, tracing his evolution as a filmmaker and examining how Ambrose Chapel fits into the director’s cinematic legacy – ultimately offering a look at one of Hollywood’s most misunderstood auteurs.

The book, originally written and published in French and now translated into English by Paul Cronin, is available from Sticking Place Books in hardback or paperback. (Keep in mind that while both have photos included, only the hardback edition includes full-color photos, while the paperback includes them in black-and-white.)

In the introductory chapter, Réra discusses his approach and lists the people he interviewed for the book:

I quickly realized that my project would make sense only if my research was as broad as possible. Without aiming for completeness - which is ultimately illusory - I decided I would embark on a quest to pull together the recollections of Casualties of War's crew, and, in doing so, assemble a new archive." In total, including the filmmaker, producer and screenwriter, I interviewed thirty-three people. I spoke with the production manager (Fred Caruso), the production coordinator (Sallie Beechinor), the director of photography (Stephen H. Burum), the Steadicam operator (Larry McConkey), the on-set photographer (Roland Neveu), the second unit director (Eric Schwab), two assistant directors (Brian W. Cook, Carl Goldstein), the production designer (Wolf Kroeger), the chief makeup artist (Paul Engelen), De Palma's personal assistant (Monica Goldstein), the props master (Mickey Pugh), a special effects technician (Yves De Bono), a historical advisor (Deborah Ricketts), two military advisors (Mike Stokey and Art Smith), a costume designer and Thai stand-in (Pasiree Panya), a Thai assistant (Charlie Sungkawess), seven actors (Sean Penn, Don Harvey, John C. Reilly, John Leguizamo, Thuy Thu Le, Erik King, Holt McCallany, Dale Dye), the San Francisco extras casting director (Nancy Hayes), the editor (Bill Pankow), the head of the sound department (Maurice Schell) and one of the sound designers (Marko A. Costanzo).

I opted for semi-structured interviews, most of which took place by phone, though videoconferencing applications were also employed. Whenever possible I met with my interviewees in person. In a few cases, only written correspondence was exchanged. Our discussions, which ranged from half an hour to over two and a half hours, often led to additional exchanges via email or phone so I could clarify details or ask new questions. I transcribed each conversation in its entirety and sent the result to the interviewee for review. I extracted the essence of these conversations, which are spread throughout the second half of this book. Contacting several of these individuals meant trading the methods of an art historian for those of a detective, and sometimes-as was the case with Sean Penn-great patience was needed.

Though it looks almost quaint in comparison to the ambitious, muscular chapters that followed, O.G. auteur-turned-crowd pleaser Brian De Palma delivers a franchise-starter that codifies all of the essential ingredients needed for a “Mission: Impossible” film (with proportions to be determined by each subsequent director). The vault heist remains an all-time gold standard for action set pieces (here or elsewhere), and it’s where Cruise first really began to hone the smoldering, delicately-cheeky intensity that has made him an A-list mainstay for decades. Those old enough may remember David Koepp and Robert Towne’s script absolutely bewildering audiences at the time of its release, but in retrospect not only was it deceptively — and delightfully — complex, but ultimately a template for intriguing misdirection that, like so many other elements in the film, has become a franchise hallmark.

Two complaints were frequently lobbed at Mission: Impossible when it arrived in theaters in the summer of 1996: The plot was too convoluted to follow, and the finale didn’t live up to the rest of the film. Of the two, only the second still sticks. Byzantine but clever plots are as much a part of the M:I films (and original TV show) as masks and explosions. The climax — a battle involving a train, a helicopter, and the Channel Tunnel — isn’t bad, but it does feel more conventional than the film’s other set pieces. That’s largely because they’re so exquisitely choreographed by director Brian De Palma, one of the best-ever creators of suspense sequences and a filmmaker capable of wringing as much tension from a bead of sweat falling to the floor as from a high-speed chase (and of paying homage to the Jules Dassin heist classic Rififi in the process). It also lays down a solid foundation for future films, establishing Hunt’s gift for improvisation, willingness to break rules, and a sense that no one on the team is safe from harm (except maybe Hunt).

There are a lot of self-reflexive montages in The Final Reckoning, which runs nearly three hours. In addition to his confab with the Entity, Ethan gets treated to a personalized super-cut of the previous Mission: Impossible movies, a highlight reel delivered via VHS cassette. The presence of this tape and the old-school VCR it’s played on ramps up the subtext of what comes billed, from its title on down, as the ultimate installment of the 21st century’s ranking blockbuster franchise. (For the record, we’ll count the original Mission: Impossible as a millennial movie, even though its Brit pop–heavy soundtrack has an I Love the ’90s vibe.) On the one hand, Dead Reckoning is primarily a movie about the necessity of flesh-and-blood heroism as an antidote to the tyranny of algorithms. On the other, it’s an extended victory lap over hallowed ground, strewn with reminders of the IMF’s glory days and haunted by the ghosts of its failures.

There’s a lot to keep track of in The Final Reckoning, and not everything works equally well. Suffice it to say that the script’s Luddite allegory, with its callbacks to analog spycraft in the form of Morse code broadcasts, floppy disk backups, and some makeshift, on-the-fly surgery, is more compelling than the stabs at fan service. All those clips and callbacks from previous installments wind up being double-edged. Sure, it’s fun to see footage of an almost impossibly young-looking Cruise dangling from the ceiling of a secret CIA vault in the original Mission: Impossible; the vitality of those images serves as a reminder that Brian De Palma’s movie was not just lean and mean (and filled with sexual energy) but also relatively modest in scope and scale. On the other hand, that reminder also makes one realize how far we’ve come. Of all the qualities displayed by M:I’s various sequels, modesty is not one of them.

Sadly, Final Reckoning’s montage does not include Alec Baldwin’s deep state power broker referring to Ethan Hunt in hushed tones as “the living manifestation of destiny” (probably the best monologue in the entire series). But it doesn’t have to because the notion of this particular secret agent as a kind of secular deity—a world-beating savior on par with Cruise himself—has become fully baked into every single plot point and character interaction. In a movie in which the world’s nuclear powers are all poised to launch simultaneously, the bulk of the discussion is about Ethan and how awesome he is. It’s not enough that his teammates—from old heads Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) to new recruits Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff)—idolize and swear fidelity to their fearless leader, or even that Ethan’s old rival Kittredge (Henry Czerny) is willing to violate the chain of command to get his licks in. Ethan’s reputation precedes him to the point that the Entity, which has absorbed the sum total of human knowledge, respects and fears its adversary enough to see him as an equal. From the bottom of its Deep Blue CPU, it understands that in a world where everybody else is playing checkers, Ethan is playing chess.

Ethan’s quasi-psychedelic encounter with the Entity (and Cruise’s agonized close-up blinking as he goes all parallax view) is easily the most enjoyable part of The Final Reckoning’s first hour. But there isn’t much competition. Typically, M:I’s resident director and Cruise whisperer, Christopher McQuarrie, is adept at moving things along; what he lacks in visual style or personality, he makes up for in sheer momentum. This time out, though, the opening is so heavy on exposition and apocalyptic portent that it just sort of sits there on the screen, as if waiting for something to kick in. The announcement a couple of years back that Mission: Impossible would be splitting its finale across two movies was in line with the increasingly supersized nature of tentpole blockbusters, but there’s a difference between a story that feels genuinely epic and one that’s been stretched to the breaking point. Ethan’s determined pursuit of a bejeweled cruciform key that can potentially unlock a box containing the Entity’s source code—and thus reverse its across-the-board restructuring of international economics and missile defense systems—doesn’t have much juice as a MacGuffin, even after the revelation (tied to the increased emphasis on franchise mythology) that he’s actually responsible for letting the digital genie out of the bottle. Neither does the main human villain, Gabriel (Esai Morales), a well-dressed cipher whose menace remains mostly hypothetical. All it takes is one swift glimpse of Philip Seymour Hoffman as the arms dealer Owen Davian in M:I:III—the monster ruthless enough to kill off Felicity Porter—to remind us what it looks like when a bad guy is truly cooking with gas.

Of course, trying to kill Tom Cruise is a thankless task—one that’s probably best handled at this point by Cruise himself. It’s a shame that the actor’s proposed Harry Houdini biopic never worked out; at this point, the real question is who will play Cruise in the movie about his own life and whether they’ll do their own stunts in the process. The comparisons to Houdini, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin stick in terms of both choreography and psychology. As a movie star, Cruise is a great dictator. And his fanatical commitment to showmanship—defined specifically by the consistent risk to his own life and limb—has grown from an endearing trait into a legitimately kamikaze pathology. It’s a fine line between giving an audience its money’s worth and exercising a death wish, and Cruise’s insistence on tap-dancing all over it at the age of 62—about the age when Clint Eastwood sent himself toppling off a horse in Unforgiven as a joke about his own encroaching obsolescence—is more enthralling than anything pertaining to Gabriel and the Entity. I myself had been hoping for a deeply symbolic, mano a mano showdown between two Cruises: one real, one a doppelgänger in one of those bespoke IMF masks. Sadly, it was not meant to be.

What’s funny is that after so many years of literal publicity stunts, Final Reckoning’s money shots feel weirdly routine. It’s cool that it took “years of development” to create the sequence in which Ethan plunges hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the Bering Strait to explore a sunken submarine; the sequence is a silent, drawn-out immersion into pure suspense. It’s meant to generate terror as well, however, but what it really conjures up is awe. That’s not a bad trade-off, but so much awe can get boring after a while. It’s telling that The Final Reckoning has fewer jokes than its predecessors, a certain grayscale grimness being a by-product of when a franchise Really Means It This Time. (See also: No Time to Die, which seemed to place a moratorium on one-liners.) The problem isn’t that we’re being asked to take Ethan’s quest to save the world seriously so much as that the ostensibly serious moments blend, sometimes haplessly, into comic relief, like when a bedraggled, barely resurrected Ethan and Grace roll around together half naked in a portable decompression chamber.

This is the closest The Final Reckoning comes to anything sexy, and it isn’t really that close. All Grace wants Ethan to know is that she has faith in him to wield the absolute power of the Entity, if and when the time comes for him to do so. He can’t wait to get dressed and back into the field. The first Mission: Impossible was a De Palma movie in every way; it pivoted on themes of adultery and illicit desire and made them count. When Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust made eyes at Ethan back in Rogue Nation, she seemed turned on by being a spy (Ferguson is missed here, as is Vanessa Kirby, the comic MVP of Dead Reckoning). Atwell is a charming performer, but after making a winning impression in her debut, she gives the sensation here of an actress shanghaied and hypnotized. She’s happy to be there, and that’s about it.

Mission: Impossible’s slick and sensuous surface bears no trace of the drama behind the scenes making it. During production, the screenwriters of Jurassic Park (David Koepp) and Chinatown (Robert Towne) sent in duelling script pages for director Brian De Palma and producer Tom Cruise to wrestle over. The magnificent outcome is an intense tango between the modern blockbuster and a classic film noir, circling each other warily, and beautifully, like no Mission: Impossible that would follow. De Palma’s original is a sexy wrong-man thriller, a Hitchcockian affair that comes disguised as an action-heavy corporate product (or maybe the mask is worn the other way around?). In it, Cruise’s coiled IMF agent, framed for the murder of his entire team and surrounded by slippery allies, is constantly trying to play it cool through the plot’s knotty parlor games, all while feeling the noose tightening around him. If Cruise’s career up to this point was all about often leaving his relaxed boyish middle-American charm on the surface, Mission: Impossible pushed him to try on layers – not just the latex ones – while also pulling off those incredible high-wire stunts, which would only escalate but never improve on the hair-raising tension the first time out.

If you are only going to be in one part of a movie, it’s best if it’s the most memorable part. For example, a thrilling set-piece that sets the template for an entire franchise.

So it was for actor Rolf Saxon, who appeared as a befuddled CIA analyst in the very first “Mission: Impossible” film. The sequence, in which Tom Cruise dangles from the ceiling of a stark white vault room to infiltrate the computer system overseen by Saxon’s character, is now the stuff of action-cinema history.

From a throwaway punchline in that 1996 film — exiling Saxon’s William Donloe to a remote radar station in Alaska — comes one of the most unexpected storylines in the new “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.” His part in the new film is substantially larger and provides the film with some of its emotional heft, making Saxon’s return as Donloe a triumph. (A rather memorable knife makes a comeback as well.)

For Saxon’s work in the first film, he was in the same physical space as Cruise but their two characters never interacted and had no dialogue together. So a moment late in the new film when Donloe makes a heartfelt expression to Cruise’s Ethan Hunt of what his life has been like all these years in Alaska provided relief for the character of Donloe — and for the actor portraying him too.

“It was something I was hoping for, and then it happened,” says Saxon, 70. “It’s a great scene. Working with one of the biggest movie stars in the world, that’s kind of cool too.”

Finally sharing a proper scene with Cruise also gave Saxon some insight into the reason Cruise has been one of the world’s biggest movie stars for more than 40 years.

“There’s no question why he is,” Saxon says. “The energy that he personally brings into a room, I’ve never witnessed before. It’s focused, it’s practiced. I know this sounds like I’m supposed to say this about him, but it’s true. This guy’s unbelievable. And he does those effing stunts.”

Saxon is impressed, too, by the real-life mission Cruise is often vocal about. “His whole raison d’être is to enhance the industry that’s given him so much and bring people in, bring them back to theaters. And I just applaud that on my feet.”

Having had a steadily successful career between his two “Missions,” Saxon lives in the Sierra Foothills of Northern California but was recently on a Zoom call from New York City the day after attending the new film’s U.S. premiere there. It was Saxon’s second time seeing the movie, having also attended a premiere in London just a few days earlier.

Born in Virginia, Saxon studied acting in England, where he would land parts in numerous British TV series as well as assorted film and theater roles. Throughout his career he has also done voice-over work for video games, including the “Broken Sword” series, and was the narrator for the American edition of the popular children’s show “Teletubbies.”

According to Saxon, much of the business of what Donloe does onscreen in the first movie directed by Brian De Palma came from an unexpected interaction on set.

“I was given the script,” he recalls, “I read it and I thought, OK, there’s not a lot to do here. And then one day I was messing around on set, joking around, there was some downtime. And I got a tap on the shoulder from the first [A.D.], who said that Brian De Palma wanted to have a word with me. And I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’

“And I walked over and he had a very stern demeanor. Great guy, but he just always looked angry and he said, ‘You’re playing around on set.’ I said, ‘Yes, Mr. De Palma.’ He said, ‘Could you do that again?’ I said, “Sure, of course.” What am I going to say to say, no? He said, ‘OK, after lunch, we’re going to have you messing around onstage. We’ll film that.’” All of Donloe’s memorable physical mishaps — the vomiting, the double take — were Saxon improvs.

The vault sequence has become one of the signature set-pieces of the first film, seemingly lifting from both the silent heist in “Rififi” and the spacewalk of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and setting a stunts-centric guide for the franchise to come. To perform the scene, Cruise spent hours in a harness suspended from the ceiling.

“I mean, it was a long time,” says Saxon. “And they’d bring him down sometimes, but he’s that guy. He does what needs to be done. I was in the room a number of times with him, while he was filming it, but [our characters] never were supposed to meet.”

Amy Nicholson, Los Angeles Times

CANNES, France — Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt arrived in France in 1996’s “Mission: Impossible” clinging to a high-speed train through the Chunnel, pursued and nearly skewered by a helicopter. It was, as the French might say, une entrée dramatique. In 2018’s “Mission: Impossible — Fallout,” he leapt from an airplane to plummet 4½ miles down to the glass roof of Paris’ Grand Palais, and now, for the big finale of his franchise, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” he’s come to conquer the Cannes Film Festival. One boisterous fan outside the premiere shoved her Chihuahua at Cruise so he could see it was wearing a pink sweatshirt with his face. Another brandished a DVD of 2000’s “Mission: Impossible 2,” arguably the worst entry in the series. Cruise took a photo with her anyway. “Le selfie!” the red-carpet announcer cried.

The series hasn’t been kind to its French actors: Emmanuelle Béart was shot, Jean Reno blown up by exploding chewing gum, Léa Seydoux kicked out of a window at the Burj Khalifa. (Pom Klementieff, whose character’s name is Paris, has survived to co-star in this eighth entry.) Yet, you didn’t have to parler français to glean the excitement on the ground.

This is only Cruise’s third trip to Cannes, and it took him nearly half an hour to walk the 60 yards of red carpet, an exhausting amount of waving, even for someone lauded for his cardio. He took care to acknowledge everyone who’d come to cheer, even trotting back down a few steps to make eye contact and thump on his heart for the fans in the corner flank.

In 2022, as part of the lead-up to “Top Gun: Maverick,” the blockbuster that would defibrillate the pandemic box office, Cruise received an honorary Palme d’Or and a salute from eight zipping French jets. During his first visit, for 1992’s “Far and Away,” times were different and he felt free to be outspoken, telling the press that the then-recent Rodney King verdict “sickened me.” Today, he seems to feel the weight of championing the theatrical experience, just as Ethan Hunt is repeatedly forced to shoulder the burden of saving the world. Neither of them truly has the freedom to “choose to accept it.” More than any of his movie star peers, Cruise seems aware that someone has to symbolize an increasingly bygone era of filmmaking, to be this century’s Charlie Chaplin.

The vibe before the screening of “Final Reckoning” was a bit bar mitzvah. The DJ alternated between dance-floor classics — Kool & the Gang, Joan Jett — and remixes of Lalo Schifrin’s pulsating “Mission: Impossible” theme, one by four beatboxers who mimicked police sirens, another classed-up by a live saxophone and violins. This year’s big Cannes fashion headline is that women are no longer allowed to wear “voluminous” frocks on the steps. Nevertheless, Hayley Atwell, who plays Grace, a pickpocket-turned-secret-agent, wore a gown on the daring end of puffy. Red with large flares at her hips and ankles, she resembled the vintage biplane Cruise dangles from in the film. He could have clung onto her elbow for a teaser.

But when the movie started, the mood turned funereal. This farewell to Ethan Hunt begins with a three-decade-spanning montage of Cruise that could double as the intro to his inevitable honorary Oscar. “I want to thank you for a lifetime of unrelenting and devoted service,” Angela Bassett’s President Erika Sloane tells Ethan in the opening minute. Later, she slips him a code with an important date — May 22, 1996 — which also happens to be the day the “Mission: Impossible” movie franchise launched. The whole film is a panegyric: big speeches and weighty moments with very little sense of play. Tonally, it starts with an ending and keeps on ending for the next two hours and 49 minutes.

The eight “Mission” films can be cleaved into two groups. The first four made a point of swapping directors and moods and even Ethan’s core identity: Brian De Palma made him a jaundiced naif; John Woo, a hot-blooded flirt; J.J. Abrams, a devoted husband; Brad Bird, a near-mute human cartoon. The last four are all helmed by Christopher McQuarrie, who’s co-written this script with Erik Jendresen, but neither has added much to his personality. We’re told, over and over, that Ethan is a gambler and a rule-breaker — and paradoxically, that he’s the only human worthy of our trust, an odd thing to say about a spy who wears masks of other people’s faces like party hats.

Of all the “Mission: Impossible” films, this is the only one that needs you to remember what happened in the previous entry, 2023’s “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” which introduced an all-knowing AI villain called the Entity and its equally unemotional minion Gabriel (Esai Morales) that made a fun foil for Cruise himself, as a sinister duo that values digital trickery over human sweat. Now, the Entity intends to annihilate humanity in four days unless it can be taken offline by a key that accesses a gizmo in the Arctic Sea that connects to a whatsit that Ving Rhames’ weary Luther is attempting to invent from a makeshift hospital bed somewhere in the subway tunnels of London. A grunting Cruise batters a goon while huffing, “You spend! Too much time! On the internet!”

That last film managed to introduce Atwell’s Grace and collect the key while still enjoying a sense of play, like an axle-cracking Fiat chase through Rome and flirtations manifested via close-up magic. Here, the plot weighs everything down. Not just the threat-of-extinction stuff, which includes Bassett’s POTUS debating which American city to blow up as a preemptive gesture, but by its own irritating God’s-eye omniscience that rarely allows the suspense to spool out in the present. The editing is always cutting to the past or the future. There are flashbacks to things that happened five minutes earlier and flash-forwards to how a stunt could look instead of just getting on with it.

Just as exhausting is how the entire cast trades lines of exposition to explain Ethan’s daredevil feats before he actually does them. There are almost no conversations, only premonitions and plans delivered in bullet points like a group research project. No one steps on anyone else’s dramatic pauses. They may as well be reciting how to build an IKEA Billy bookcase. I can’t think of anything more thrill-stifling, even with cinematographer Fraser Taggart lighting everybody’s eyeballs to look so shiny that the actors continually appear on the verge of tears. Still, even within those limitations, Simon Pegg is delightful as Hunt’s longtime tech-whiz teammate Benji, as are new and returning ensemble members Tramell Tillman, Lucy Tulugarjuk and Rolf Saxon, the latter of whom plays a throwback character once threatened with manning a radar tower in Alaska — a punishment that did, in fact, come to pass.

But Cruise is the reason audiences will, and should, see “Final Reckoning” on a large and loud screen. His Ethan continues to survive things he shouldn’t. (One too-miraculous rescue tries to distract us from asking questions by inserting an out-of-place close-up of Atwell’s heaving bosom.) Yet, what I’ve most come to appreciate about Ethan is that he doesn’t try to play the unflappable hero. Clinging to the chassis of an airplane with the wind plastering his hair to his forehead and oscillating his gums like a bulldog in a convertible, he is, in fact, exceedingly flapped.

About halfway through “The Final Reckoning,” as Ethan descends into the frigid depths of the Bering Sea, something overdue and wonderful happens: the movie falls silent. Until now, there has been a chatty overabundance of micro-logistics, even for a “Mission: Impossible” movie: there are aircraft carriers to be commandeered, secret coördinates to be transmitted, and laws of physics to be preposterously circumvented. (Also, fine actors playing top government and military leaders to be acknowledged, including Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer, Hannah Waddingham, and, most impressively, as a submarine captain, Tramell Tillman.) So much information is laid out—and so much emphasis placed on risks, stakes, and disastrous potential outcomes—that you strongly suspect only a fraction of it will matter in the end, and you’re right. For perhaps the first time in McQuarrie’s assured handling of these movies—for my money, “Rogue Nation” (2015) remains the underappreciated best of the lot—he makes the mistake of detailing the action so thoroughly in advance that actually dramatizing it becomes almost superfluous.

But, finally, the expository blather dies away, and the mission is upon us: Ethan Hunt, meet shipwrecked submarine. His aim is to retrieve a chunk of hardware holding lines of digital code (it is written!) with the power to override and perhaps defeat the Entity for good. For a few spellbinding minutes, Cruise does everything he could possibly do underwater, short of singing “Eat your heart out, James Cameron” into his oxygen tube. He sloshes his way through waterlogged chambers, juggles unexploded Russian torpedoes, and, in a delightful and probably unintended homage to “Risky Business” (1983), briefly swim-dances in his underwear. It’s action cinema at its purest and most existential: “The Ethan Hunt for Red October.”

For all the dangerous missions that Hunt has embarked on solo, I can’t recall one that has conveyed such a primordial sense of abandonment. For a moment, Lalo Schifrin’s irresistible theme is a distant memory, and the fate of humanity really does seem to rest on the shoulders of the most unreachable man on the planet. Such loneliness is another I.M.F. occupational hazard, but a self-imposed one: again and again, both “Reckoning” movies emphasize that Ethan’s most heroic virtue—his refusal to sacrifice his teammates for the greater good—is simultaneously his gravest weakness. It explains why, beyond a valedictory sense of full-circle symmetry, McQuarrie piles on so many callbacks to the first “Mission: Impossible” film, in which Ethan’s teammates were murdered before his very eyes—a formative trauma that he seemed to forget for long stretches of the series, but which has been selectively retrieved, like sublimated source code, for this movie’s narrative purposes.

More than once, McQuarrie splices in an indelible image from the 1996 film: a knife falling into a top-secret vault, the blade embedding itself in a desk. It’s a reminder that the director of that movie, Brian De Palma, remains the series’ most intuitive visual stylist and most concise storyteller. Not that I craved concision from McQuarrie’s film; God knows he and Cruise have earned their double-decker climax. But, amid the brooding sprawl, I wanted less big-screen doomscrolling, less self-indulgent gravitas, and less of the unspeakably boring villain Gabriel (Esai Morales), who bears the name of an archangel but never achieves the stature of an archenemy. There are also far too many repetitions of the I.M.F. creed—“We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close and for those we never meet”—which soon starts to sound like greeting-card John le Carré.

I also wanted more from the teammates whom Ethan professes to care about so much—particularly the women, with no shade intended to Luther or Benji (Simon Pegg). I suspect that the apocalypse will rob more than a few of us of our wits and personalities, but must our movies be so willing to prove the point? As Grace, the wily pickpocket who joined Ethan’s team in “Dead Reckoning,” Hayley Atwell has been stripped of humor and playfulness. And I missed the vicious verve of the still formidable, now reformed Paris, although I suspect that Klementieff’s days as an action star are just beginning. What new adventures could bring out—and deepen—her combustible mix of vulnerability and ferocity? Finding that out will be her mission, and I choose to expect it.

Forty years ago, Barbara Crampton was at the beginning of her screen career when director Stuart Gordon cast her in his debut film “Re-Animator,” a wildly funny and audacious horror movie based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft. “I had come from the theater and it was one of my first jobs,” Crampton told IndieWire. “I had worked with Brian De Palma for a minute and on a soap opera, but I think I was too green to understand that we were doing something special.”

“Re-Animator” was something special indeed, a bold and original film that not only ignored the boundaries of good taste but demolished them, yet exhibited an artistry that earned it positive reviews from critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert. “Re-Animator” quickly attracted a cult following, thanks to Gordon’s rollercoaster script, cinematographer Mac Ahlberg’s dynamic and expressive visual style, and performances (from Crampton as well as co-stars Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, and David Gale) that felt more grounded and assured than what one was used to seeing in low-budget horror.

Gordon who, like Crampton, had a background in theater, rehearsed the actors for three weeks before shooting, a choice that Crampton said was instrumental in giving the actors the confidence they needed to hit the ground running once the arduous low-budget shoot began. Because De Palma had been similarly thoughtful and rigorous in his approach when Crampton worked on “Body Double,” the actress was surprised to learn later how exceptional her experience on “Re-Animator” had been.

“Working with Stuart and Brian, I thought, ‘Oh, this is how it is in Hollywood,'” Crampton said. “You get three weeks of rehearsal and then you make the movie. And that’s never happened to me again.” During the rehearsal process Gordon and the actors delved into the characters’ motivations for each scene and over the course of the film as a whole, which helped Crampton stay focused during the long days covered in gore. “Most days we were on the set for a minimum of 13, 14, 16 hours, because Stuart wouldn’t stop filming. Everything on the set was slippery and gooey. But I learned to use that as part of the reality in the moment,” she said.

Well, I originally had three scenes. They were conversations with Craig Wasson, where he was trying to reconcile with me after we broke up. The day before shooting, they said they were cutting the two dialogue scenes and I'd only have the one; you know which one that is. I was like, "Darn, oh well, it's Brian De Palma; I'm sure it will lead to something." And it didn't; I'm still waiting for Brian to call me with something else. For what it's worth, we did that scene about 60 times, which was sort of interesting.

We had scenes together," says Pom Klementieff, a Mission superfan who remembers watching the first movie on an old black-and-white TV in her native France. "And I saw him do a scene with another character that is very important to the story, and I was tearing up. It's a beautiful link between the movies."

The Langley Heist

For some, it’s still the signature sequence of the Mission: Impossible series, even though it doesn't involve a life-threatening stunt. Ethan Hunt infiltrates the CIA headquarters at Langley, to retrieve vital information from a high-tech, temperature-controlled computer vault that is seemingly impossible to access. Enter Ethan, gliding down from the ceiling in complete silence, showing perfect balance and poise before making off with the info...

“I was in Japan promoting a film, and De Palma called me and pitched me this. It was Rififi, but how do we do it? I knew this rig and I came back and showed him the rig that I wanted to wear. I was showing him different kinds of equipment and movement, and I would find out, ‘What could I do? How could I move through this space? What looks elegant?’ I would practise to make it look elegant. And we were testing different metals (to hold Cruise in place).

“The first metal I tested was soft, and it broke. If I’m up high and it breaks that's a problem. I’ll never forget that day, because when I go from the computer down to the floor, it was very challenging, physically. We wanted it all to be in one shot. And my face kept hitting the ground as I went down. So I went to the crew guys and said, ‘Empty your pockets’, and put British [bank] notes in my toes, and balanced myself. And I went from the computer down, and didn't hit the ground. I’m holding, I’m holding, I’m holding it, and I was sweating. Everyone’s holding their breath, and then I could hear Brian start laughing. He goes. ‘Alright! Cut!’ And we both laughed and hugged each other.”

It all started with a tweet that caught my eye. It was a shot that featured both the batter and the pitcher, and many people on X likened it to the work of Brian De Palma.

And when you see it, you feel an emotional swell as you witness the inherent beauty of the game.

How did we get here?

Enter Mets Director for SNYtv John DeMarsico, who is a self-described film junkie and who has been putting some of the most insane shots into broadcasts of Mets games. Shots that are so beautiful and cool that they have sort of reignited people's love of the game, and have also encouraged them to explore the movie homages.

DeMarsico tweets with the tag #Baseballiscinema, and he's living up to it. Just cruising through highlights, I was in awe of shots with shallow focus, shots that homage Lord of the Rings, split screens, cross fades, and many more neat ways to edit, cut, and shoot America's pastime.

It really is cinema.

The only downside is that, as a Phillies fan, I hate that the Mets have this guy, and I demand we find our own auteur to step things up.

But that's beside the point.

Honestly, all of Major League Baseball should be lauding these efforts. Sports are often shot in boring and standard ways. But it is a game rife with emotion and tension and stakes, so we should have these edits. We should lean into the story of the game and get different angles.

The touch here is flawless. It doesn't distract, it only enhances. It makes a sport with 162 regular-season games feel important, and it gives gravity to shots that sometimes can bear no weight.