Directed by Brian DePalma

In the closing days of the Cold War, Impossible Mission Force legend Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) leads a young team including his wife Claire (Emanuelle Beart) and Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), his brilliant, energetic point man. There’s no job they can’t do, until in one terrifying night, the entire team are butchered, Ethan is framed for it and goes on the run.

It feels like damning with faint praise to say this is still one of the most fun entries in the series but it really is! DePalma never met a high-tension moment he didn’t like and the direction suits the panicky tone perfectly. Plus, introducing the entire cast and slaughtering them pretty much instantly is an incredibly gutsy move even now.

Cruise is flat out great in this one too. Frantic, nervous, showy and desperate, Ethan never stops running mentally even on the rare occasions he slows down physically. You don’t just buy him as an espionage agent but as one horribly out of his depth and frantically making it up as he goes along. That also makes him seems dangerous in a way that the later movies would build on. Ethan is a closed fist of absolute focus and in later movies that focus is built on experience. Here it’s built on total bloody minded refusal to accept defeat. That gives him a surprisingly subtle arc, and there are beats here that work really well because of that foundation of panic. The second half especially trades off that works brilliantly, even now.

Verdict: Janky, panicky and fun as hell, this is a great start to the series, even if it would take another two movies to remember that these movies are most fun when they’re ensembles. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

Highlights: ‘Kittridge, you’ve never SEEN ME very upset’, the CIA heist and the deliriously fun Channel Tunnel train fight. Oh and the fact Netscape is a vital part of the story!