Watching the remake of Ocean’s 11 over the weekend, I was suddenly struck by the fact that this movie had what the Mission Impossible movies have lacked – a team of people working to solve an impossible problem and get away with it at the end.
Taking it from about the point where they all move to Vegas, it had all the elements that made the old Mission Impossible TV show so much fun to watch – we had crosses, double-crosses and setbacks, with the audience not always being in on the trick. I really liked the use of the short “flash-backs” (flash-sides?) to show how some of the stuff went down. And they even drove off at the end in one of those Grumman panel vans (usually a dead giveaway).
Sorry if this particular horse has been flogged to death already. But I was very disappointed in the Mission Impossible movies – they owed more to Austin Powers than Jim Phelps. This weekend, I had the epiphany that this is what the movie could have been.