Impossible, but not that impossible

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE Brian De Palma (PG)

THE GODFATHER Francis Ford Coppola (18)

On the way into Mission: Impossible, audiences should be given an industrial winch with which to suspend their disbelief. Here is a film where people slip in and out of latex disguises like they are trying out loafers in a shoe store, two men scramble about on the roof of a speeding Chunnel train in a battle which involves a low-flying helicopter and a stick of exploding chewing-gum, and there's even a scene where someone uses a pay-phone in Liverpool Street station without having to queue.

Even more unbelievable than those things is that a thrilling movie should have been made from such a tepid TV show. The original Mission: Impossible series is the sort of thing that people who enjoy watching paint dry will turn to when they want to unwind. Lalo Schifrin's punchy theme tune always promised so much more than the show could ever deliver - comedy, excitement, danger. Brian De Palma's film finally makes good on those promises. The movie isn't snappy or consistent, but it's bolstered by a handful of set- pieces which are dazzling enough to compensate for entire stretches when the most interesting thing on screen is Tom Cruise's haircut.

Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, an Impossible Missions Force agent suddenly cast out by his organisation after a routine operation in Prague goes disastrously wrong and his colleagues are killed. As the sole survivor, he is suspected of being the Force's traitor. You won't be surprised to learn that, in Cruise's quest to expose the real double agent, the screenplay ropes in such reliable standbys as the top-secret computer disk, the pen that squirts poison, and the character who appears to die but is really alive and well and wearing a macintosh with an upturned collar.

Wisely, De Palma has shunned elements likely to recall the TV series, except for the odd catchphrase, and some judicious snatches of the theme music, though even that has been beefed up so that now each blast of brass is like being slapped in the face. The cast cope well without substantial direction, and simply file on to the screen to represent their respective countries, much like the performers in an Olympic Games opening ceremony. So from France, Emmanuelle Beart and Jean Reno are both shifty and duplicitous, while Cruise and Ving Rhames are dependable Americans, and from Britain, Kristin Scott-Thomas is icy and sensual while Vanessa Redgrave is mumsy and even more sensual. Nobody serves any purpose other than to give the illusion that the plot actually matters (it doesn't). Although Cruise struggles hard to summon some passion, the emptiness in his eyes and heart betrays him. "You seem hell-bent on blaming yourself," his superior observes after the massacre of his colleagues, but you're not convinced that Cruise could ever be hell-bent on anything, except getting home in time for Beavis and Butthead.

But his shortcomings cannot sabotage a film which relies so heavily on sheer spectacle. De Palma's forte has always been constructing protracted set-pieces, and Mission: Impossible features one of his most daring, as Cruise and Reno attempt to pass into the womb of the CIA's headquarters. The area they must infiltrate is a blindingly bright computer room protected by every security measure in existence (except, curiously, the common- or-garden video camera). It's a sequence which could make a cadaver's palms sweat.

When Cruise warns Reno of the complexity of the mission ahead, it feels like we're eavesdropping on the screenwriters' brainstorming session: what if the room was sensitive to minute changes in weight and temperature? What if you couldn't enter before passing four security checks, including voice and retina scans? Well, then there's always the ventilation shaft. Cruise could dangle on a rope held by Reno, who might have ... would an imminent sneeze be pushing things? What about a rat scuttling towards him? Would that be impossible enough? The strength of these 10 minutes of dizzy, audacious cinema is that nothing feels impossible enough. When Reno pops a gadget which looks like a tiny periscope through the air-vent grille, you hold your breath - is it a little laser gun?No, it's a tray to catch the grille's falling screws. Simple. You imagine De Palma adores that point, where the audience stumbles ahead of itself - he's lulled us into a false sense of insecurity.

One of De Palma's peers, Francis Ford Coppola, also has a film released this week - a new print of his 1972 gangster epic, The Godfather, absent too long from the cinema screen, and shown too frequently in a bastardised version on TV. It's a picture which has been absorbed into the collective consciousness to such an extent that it's easy to regard it simply as a succession of grotesque tableaux. Of course it's more than that - a social document of the dissipation of the family in post-war America; an idealistic love letter to a country and a crime structure which are as mythical and utopian as one another. Yet it is naggingly episodic, and without the scope and pervasive tragedy of The Godfather Part II (re- released on 26 July), Coppola's fawning portrait of the Corleone family's values feels a trifle aspirational; he might be the playground wimp who never stopped wanting the school bullies rubbed out.

Time has made these things clearer. But it hasn't diminished the picture's glories: the stately photography and bruised colours; the morbid majesty of Marlon Brando, investing subtle shades of light into Don Corleone, a man immersed in death; not to mention every scene involving the Don's respectable son, Michael, played by a haunted Al Pacino, whose cheekbones look sharp enough to sever a horse's head. These are the things which drive people to cinema, and keep them there.

n On general release from tomorrow

RYAN GILBEY