Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible arrived in American theaters on May 22, 1996, carrying a tagline that doubled as a dare: “Expect the impossible.” The film runs 111 minutes and stars Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, the pointman of an Impossible Missions Force team wiped out during a botched operation in Prague. It is the first entry in the Mission: Impossible film series, based on the 1966 television series and its 1988 sequel, and it set the template the franchise has never abandoned: a star doing his own stunts, a director treating a spy story as a visual exercise, and a plot built to be reassembled rather than merely followed.
Trailer, via Paramount Pictures.
A Prague Job That Goes Wrong
The premise is a trap dressed as a mission. Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) leads a team sent to Prague to stop a rogue agent, Alexander Golitsyn, from stealing the CIA’s NOC list — the document that reveals the identities of every undercover agent in Europe. The list is stolen anyway. The team is killed one by one, Golitsyn among them, and Ethan Hunt walks out the only survivor.
The debriefing is where the film turns. Over a restaurant table, IMF director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) lets Ethan understand that a second IMF team was on site, that Golitsyn was posing as the rogue, and that the whole operation was a setup to flush out a mole. The mole is thought to be working with an arms dealer called Max under the label “Job 314.” Kittridge suspects Ethan. Ethan runs, using a plastic explosive disguised as chewing gum.
That sequence is the film’s first real argument for itself. De Palma stages the reveal as a conversation, not a chase, and lets the paranoia do the work before a single punch is thrown.
Claire, Max, and the $10 Million Wager
Back at the Prague safe house, Ethan works out that “Job 314” points to Job 3:14 and that “Job” is the mole’s code name. Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), Jim’s wife, arrives alive — she faked her death during the mission, she says, after Jim warned her they were compromised.
Ethan then sets a meeting with Max (Vanessa Redgrave) to tell her the NOC list she holds is fake and carries a tracking device. She does not believe him at first. They escape a raid by Kittridge’s team together, and Ethan makes his offer: he will get Max the authentic list for $10 million, plus the true identity of Job.
It is a clean piece of plotting, and it gives Redgrave the film’s best single scene — a villain who negotiates rather than monologues.
Recruiting Luther and Krieger
To pull the job, Ethan brings in two disavowed IMF agents. Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) is a high-level hacker. Franz Krieger (Jean Reno) is a pilot. With Claire, they infiltrate CIA headquarters at Langley, steal the genuine NOC list in an elaborate heist, and get out to London.
The Langley break-in is the sequence the film is remembered for, and rightly. It is close to silent, built on suspended wire, controlled breathing and a single drop of sweat. De Palma designed most of the action sequences himself, and this one shows a director trusting geometry over cutting.
Krieger takes the magneto-optical disk holding the list. He reveals the list is real.
A Cast Built Around Cruise
Cruise produced the film through Cruise/Wagner Productions, the company he founded in 1992, and chose Mission: Impossible as its inaugural project. He did most of his own stunts. The supporting cast is unusually deep for a star vehicle: Voight, Czerny, Béart, Reno, Rhames, Kristin Scott Thomas as Sarah Davies, and Redgrave as Max.
Smaller roles fill out the IMF world. Dale Dye plays agent Frank Barnes, who helps Kittridge track Ethan. Karel Dobrý and Andreas Wisniewski play Max’s henchmen. Annabel Mullion appears as an IMF agent posing as a flight attendant on Ethan’s plane. Morgan Deare and Laura Brook play Donald and Margaret Hunt, Ethan’s uncle and mother.
The Script That Took Four Writers
Paramount spent years trying to adapt the television series, and the attempts stalled. Development began with filmmaker Sydney Pollack before De Palma took over. The screenplay is credited to David Koepp and Robert Towne, from a story by Koepp and Steven Zaillian, though most of the final script was finished after De Palma, Zaillian, Koepp and Towne were all hired.
That history shows on screen, and not entirely in the film’s favor. The plot is a chain of reversals that rewards attention but rarely rewards feeling. Ethan is framed, cleared, framed again by his own choices, and the movie keeps its footing because Cruise plays him as a technician rather than a romantic.
Principal photography ran from March 1995 to that August, with locations including London, Pinewood Studios in England, and Prague — a choice that was a rarity in Hollywood at the time. The Prague streets give the first act a cold, unglamorous texture that later entries in the series traded away for scale.
What the Score Says
Mission: Impossible received mixed reviews from critics, with praise for the action sequences, De Palma’s direction and Cruise’s work. Our score is 7.0 out of 10, matching the published critical score.
That number is honest about what the film is. The Langley heist and the restaurant debriefing are as good as mainstream spy cinema got in 1996. The middle stretch — the recruitment of Luther and Krieger, the maneuvering around Max — is functional rather than thrilling, and the ending resolves a mystery whose solution lands with less force than the setup deserved.
KEY FACTS BOX
- Release date: May 22, 1996 (United States, Paramount Pictures)
- Runtime: 111 minutes
- Director: Brian De Palma
- Screenplay: David Koepp and Robert Towne; story by Koepp and Steven Zaillian
- Cast: Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Henry Czerny, Emmanuelle Béart, Jean Reno, Ving Rhames, Kristin Scott Thomas, Vanessa Redgrave
- Genres: Adventure, Action, Thriller
- Tagline: “Expect the impossible.”
- Published critical score: 7.0/10 (TMDB audience score, 10,252 votes)
- Clay Tribune score: 7.0 of 10
Where It Sits in the Series
Mission: Impossible is the first installment in a franchise that has now outlasted most of its 1990s competition, and the film’s influence is easy to trace. The chewing gum explosive, the wire heist, the mask reveals — these became series furniture. What has not been replicated is De Palma’s willingness to let a scene be quiet.
The film’s biggest liability is its own cleverness. The Job 3:14 reveal is a good trick, but it is a trick about a code name, not about a person. When the mole is finally named, the emotional payoff is thinner than the plot mechanics that surround it. The movie asks you to admire its construction, and you do, but admiration is not the same as attachment.
Still, 7.0 of 10 is a strong score for a franchise opener, and it is earned. Cruise bet on himself with Cruise/Wagner Productions and picked a property that let him hang off a wire and call it acting. De Palma got a studio budget and used it on a silent robbery. The result is a film that has aged better than its mixed reviews suggested it would, and one whose best sequence — no dialogue, no score, one drop of sweat — remains the standard the rest of the series has been chasing ever since.
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