So, which Cruise Mission Impossible movie is this? Ethan Hunt and maybe his team are in trouble, members Hunt is captured or about to be, one to three minutes of the Tom Cruise character running or riding a motorcycle or both, and lots of gunshots or explosions? Give up?
If you guessed any of them , you could be right. And let’s not forget about Ethan Hunt’s main two team mebers in the films is Cruise’s ego and persecution complex. Compared to the original TV series, these films don’t stack up, and here’s why.
Not a team effort-Through all seasons of the TV series, we saw the different characters have a chance to shine on a mission. Any member could be a team player, an engineer, or back up at any given time. To finish the mission everyone worked together.
Greg Morris’s Barney Collier-Inthe first IMF movie Ving Rhames character started out as a disavowed outlaw hacker/agent and has remained a background character ever since. However, in the original series, Barney Collier, as portrayed by Greg Morris, was a multi-disciplined science genius, a millionaire, spy, skilled fighter, and forensics expert. He was also seen as a trusted friend and partner of all of the team members. Ving Rhames character is often second or third banana to Cruises Ethan Hunt.
Brains Versus Boom-In the movie series most situations call for explosions, motorcycles, gunfights, stuntwork, bigger explosions, and a bigger Cruise-in-your-face stunt, whereas the TV series usually used guile, science (60’s TV spy show science), timing, engineering, and knowledge to thwart the bad guys. Thanks for dumbing us down, Mr. Cruise
The Plan-In the old TV show, the scheme/con/plan was most of the time what the win over the bad guys hinged on. The movie series may or may not use that, but usually, the plans are bad, last minute, or improvised where it seems the world is saved by random luck and TomCruise ability to grimace while on a cliff.
So, you can see, we need more original IMF type stories, rather than Ethan Hunt and company blows stuff up while Tom Cruise runs.
