Post
by Ben » July 3rd, 2011, 5:22 pm
Your link isn't working.
I don't think the first M:I got it right either, except for the pre-titles sequence when they really were working as a team unit (and under Jim Phelps).
Once it became The Tom Cruise Show, that was really it for the rest of the movies, with Cruise basically using some co-stars to help him out, which isn't what M:I was about anyway, especially after they made Phelps - one of the most incorruptible heroes on TV - the bad guy! Oops!
M:I-2 was just a bunch of Cruise vanity and John Woo (remember him?) tricks that he'd already played out in better movies, and the whole point of M:I was that Phelps used different agents each week (or, okay, at least the choice of different agents, though due to actors' contracts they were mostly the same guys). In a movie version, the lead operative should have been able to pick different people for each film, given their distinct specialties.
Both the first and second films didn't follow the basic Bruce Gellar template because they threw it out by removing Phelps and turning it into a man on the run thriller...the same as any other. By the third, it was too late to return to the TV concept; the M:I film franchise was a Cruise on the run series, but at least they brought back the IMF infrastructure, and that did make it a bit more like Gellar had intended.
But, really, they should have kept Phelps, or made Cruise the Phelps character (with Phelps himself the IMF chief), so that they could have continued with the basic TV idea. By the second movie, after setting Cruise up in this way, they could have played out the "he's been framed" idea then, but they should never have made Phelps a villain. Just wouldn't have happened.
For what it's worth, I liked III a whole lot better, and this at least looks like more of the same of that. The M:I films are decent Cruise on the run capers, but faithful M:I movies based on the TV show they are certainly not.