!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW GIVES AWAY A MID-STORY TWIST!!

Between 1966 and 1973, Bruce Geller’s Mission: Impossible rode the coattails of the 60s “spy-fi” boom, offering a cool, straight-faced action series with absurd but often intriguing premises. Every episode started the same way – Dan Briggs (Steven Hill) and later Jim Phelps (Peter Graves), senior agents of the Impossible Missions Force (IMF), receive details of their latest job from a disembodied voice, often delivered on a tape recording (though there were variations) that would “self-destruct in the next 5 seconds.” Curiously Briggs and Phelps were offered the chance to refuse the mission (“should you choose to accept it”) though they never did of course – or at least we never saw the ones that they did choose to turn  down – what dull episodes they would have been…

The agents then choose the team that they need for the mission – usually taking on Communist regimes, secret organisations or organised crime – that run the risk of being “disavowed” by the US government if they’re caught. The team was invariably made up of Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain), mechanics and electronics specialist Barney Collier (Greg Morris), Willy Armitage (Peter Lupus), the team’s muscle, and Rollin Hand (Martin Landau), whose expertise with make-up and disguises became one of the show’s most memorable elements. Introduced by an exciting title sequence made up of clips from the forthcoming episode and propelled by Lalo Schifrin’s iconic score, Mission: Impossible was a hit with the viewers who responded to its outlandish plots.

A big screen version had been on the cards for many years, but it wasn’t until 1996 when Jim Phelps, now played by Jon Voight, returned to action in Brian De Palma’s updated reworking. Although Voight plays the series star, the films would be the playground of Tom Cruise who would exert increasing control over the franchise which would become that rarity – a film series that seemed to get better as it went along.

The plot takes the unusual and unexpected decision to kill off some of a chunk of its cast members after just 30 minutes, leaving Cruise to inherit the mantle from Phelps. We first meet them on a mission to Prague to intercept rogue IMF agent Alexander Golitsyn (Marcel Iureş) who has made off with the CIA’s non-official cover (NOC) list. The mission is a trap and the bulk of Phelps’ team – Sarah Davies (Kristin Scott Thomas), Jack Harmon (Emilio Estevez), Hannah Williams (Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė), and Phelps among them – are killed. Ethan Hunt (Cruise), apparently the only survivor, comes to realise that his team were set up by the IMF themselves who were hoping to use them to lure a mole out into the open. Learning that the mole is working with an arms dealer known only as “Max,” Hunt goes on the run, is reunited with Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), Phelps’ widow and recruits two disavowed IMF agents, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames who, along with Cruise, is the only actor to appear in all of the sequels) and Franz Krieger (Jean Reno) to help him infiltrated the CIA headquarters in Langley and make off with a cop of the NOC list (curiously, some of the technology – Hunt uses a floppy disc to retrieve the data – serves to make the film version seem more dated than the small screen incarnation.. After being double-crossed by a still-alive Phelps (who was the mole all along), Hunt tracks down Max (Vanessa Redgrave) and agrees to meet on a high-speed Channel Tunnel train…

Clearly this Mission: Impossible was a very different beast to the television original. In an interview with MTV at the time of the film’s release, Landau noted that “It was basically an action-adventure movie and not Mission. Mission was a mind game. The ideal mission was getting in and getting out without anyone ever knowing we were there. So the whole texture changed.” But enough of the much-loved original was retained to offer some sort of continuity, no matter how flimsy it might have been. It wisely replicates those pulse-pounding title sequences and retaining Schifrin’s unforgettable theme tune – it’s an exhilarating and energetic start to the film and would be carried over into the sequels.

The plot, written by David Koepp and Robert Towne, is more intriguing and complex than most 90s action films could muster, crammed full of double and triple crosses, betrayals and excellent action sequences. Koepp and Towne made the wise decision not to reboot the idea straight away, positioning this first film instead as a continuation of the 60s and 70s incarnations (there was a small screen revival in 1988 but it wasn’t very good.) Some were understandably mortified by the film’s portrayal of a favourite character from the series – among them members of the original cast who were very vocal in their condemnation of turning Phelps into a traitor.

If the story sometimes feels a little episodic, that’s no real surprise – De Palma took the film before the cameras with a script that no-one was happy with and which has constantly tinkered with even with filming under way. De Palma staged the memorable action scenes while Koepp and Towne were left to find ways to link them all together. And it’s the action scenes that everyone remembers (the plot is sometimes a bit arcane and unnecessarily complicated for its own good – the NOC list is a particularly silly McGuffin.) De Palma pulls off some exceptional suspense scenes – the ambush in Prague and Hunt’s infiltration of “The Black Vault” in particular are masterclasses in tension. The action scenes are serviced by plentiful Bond-like gadgets and gizmos, among them the hi-tech face replicator that the team use to create their masks and some silly explosive chewing gum that ends up playing a key role in the climax.

Later films got a bit repetitive, with Hunt constantly being disavowed and forced on the run with his team, but also became increasingly spectacular. Mission: Impossible was a solid start to the franchise, setting out the playing field and allowing others to come along and build on it later. De Palma was one of the higher profile directors to work on the series – Cruise increasingly favoured taking chances on newcomers or inexperienced directors in later instalments, bringing in John Woo (who hadn’t fared well for much of his Hollywood career) for the second film, giving JJ Abrams his first feature directing gig with the third, allowing animator Brad Bird to take the fourth and sine then working with his regular script collaborator Christopher McQuarrie who has directed every instalment since 2015’s Rogue Nation.