Year:  1997
Genre:  Action, Spy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  George Clooney, Nicole Kidman, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Marcel Iures, Alexander Baluev
Director:  Mimi Leder
Run time:  123 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The best thing I can say about The Peacemaker, which gets a Blu-Ray release on September 21st from Paramount Home Entertainment, is that it doesn’t feel at all like a two-hour movie.  It’s so fast-paced that the time really flies by.  But, like a marathon session at a Chinese buffet, the movie left me feeling decidedly empty when it was all over.  Moments after the final credits, I found it hard to remember details.  I suspect that within a few hours, I will have forgotten major plot points and much of the rest of the film.

     The Peacemaker is slick.  It’s fast-paced, it’s glossy and shiny, and it looks great on Blu-Ray.  With the exception of a few scenes (like an early one on a train and a few later ones) that don’t look great.  But it’s the kind of movie that has no soul.  The stars (George Clooney and Nicole Kidman) have no distinctive traits that mark them as human.  Every time they start to provide a window into their thoughts and feelings something blows up or a car chase erupts out of nowhere.

     At the beginning of the film, a very small effort is made to humanize both.  Kidman gets a bunch of flowers from (presumably) a lover who has wronged her in some way.  It never comes up again.  She shows a moment of indecision when she discovers she is in charge of the American operation dealing with the nuclear weapon that has just been set off.  She is overwhelmed and terrified, but it’s a fleeting moment and that emotion never returns.  Clooney is just presented as a charming, tough-guy plays-by-his-own-rules military commander.  That’s it as far as his depth goes.

     There are really two movies here – the nuclear detonation, the theft of nine nuclear weapons, and the mad scramble as the Americans attempt to hunt down the thieves.  Then there’s the one weapon that makes it out, gets into the U.S., and the mad scramble as the Americans attempt to hunt down the bomber before he blows up a piece of America.  The first part is more interesting – the second part is a little sad.  Like, of course an audience will care only if the bomb goes off in America, right?  Near some important landmarks, perhaps?

     The villain in the first part is a cartoon – a rogue Russian general (Alexander Baluev) who has stolen the nukes for profit and is presumably going to sell them to Iran.  He is bad.  You know he’s bad because he shoots his OWN men when they question him!  The villain in the second part (a terrific Marcel Iures) is a little more nuanced.  An attempt is made to humanize him – he’s a reasonable man driven to unreasonable measures after the murders of his wife and daughter…but really this is just a glossy half-assed attempt to make him identifiable and give him motivation.  But really – a reasonable guy who responds to the death of his family by murdering millions of others?

     The movie is as pretty, as charming and as soullessly dead-eyed as Nicole Kidman herself.  For the first time with this movie, I paid close attention to how Kidman looks in HD.  That flawless porcelain doll look she has couldn’t possibly be real, right?  There MUST be a few blemishes that show up in high definition!  Well…nope.  Kidman is as gorgeous, as perfect and as flawless as she looks the rest of the time.

     I realized that this is the problem I have with Nicole Kidman.  She is absolutely flawless.  She is perfectly symmetrical and beautiful in every way and maybe the prettiest woman alive.  I know what you’re saying – that’s a problem?  Well, yes.  Kidman looks more like a computer-generated image of “the perfect woman” than she does a real person.  She’s an artist’s rendering of a gorgeous movie star, a blemish-free goddess who has no need for airbrushing or touchups but has a desperate need for something that gives her character. 

     Kidman really is a terrific actress, but her appearance alone sucks some of the soul out of every role she plays.  I may be alone in thinking this.  I have a similar opinion of many things – I think Rush are an extremely talented band who play with remarkable technical precision.  But I can’t hear the soul in the music, and I lose interest fast.  Same goes for Glenn Gould, Yngwie Malmsteen and The Peacemaker.  Which gets one extra star for looking great on Blu-Ray (for the most part).

“It bothers me that I can’t tell people what I do.”

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     The reason Robert Redford is sour about not being able to tell people what he does is that he reads books.  That’s about it.  He reads books for the CIA in Sydney Pollack’s 1975 classic spy thriller Three Days of the Condor.  And so when his entire office gets slaughtered by some unkown bad guys, he is not equipped to go on the offensive.  He isn’t a field agent - he just reads books.  We don’t really know who attacked his office.  The CIA doesn’t know if he’s a rogue agent or if he’s working for them or for other people.  Redford doesn’t know who’s a friend and who’s an enemy.  And basically, the movie starts out being exteremely confusing.

     But it’s confusing in a good way.  This film is masterfully constructed, and wonderfully acted by both Redford and Faye Dunaway.  Dunaway is an innocent woman who is taken hostage by a desperate Redford.  He doesn’t know who he can trust, or where he can go, and although it doesn’t make sense that he would take a random woman as a hostage and use her house and truck, he doesn’t know what else to do.  After all – once again – he isn’t a field agent.  And he is totally panicked.  All his friends have been brutally murdered, and it makes sense that he would do things that make no sense.  That make sense?

     It turns out that the whole plot hinges on something that Redford discovered, in his office, at the very beginning of the movie.  I love how Pollack passes over that discovery very quickly, almost ignoring the small detail, and only later do we realize the significance of what is going on in that office.  As the movie becomes more and more tense, and moves toward its pulse-pounding conclusion, everything becomes clear and we learn what’s really going on.  And it’s immensely satisfying.

   “You miss that kind of action, sir?”
   “No, I miss that kind of clarity.”

     In the end, it’s all about oil.  Which makes this movie as relevant today as it was in 1975 when it was released.  The Blu-Ray transfer looks great, but it comes with no special features (outside the trailer, which is not really a special feature).  It’s a magnificent movie, and I think everyone should see this film, but Blu-Ray isn’t totally necessary.  The Blu-Ray comes out May 19th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

   “You’ve done more damage than you know.”
   “I hope so.”

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it…”

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Years:  1971, 1972
Genre:  TV series, Spy, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Greg Morris, Peter Lupus, Bob Johnson, Peter Graves, Lynda Day George, Sam Elliott
Guest stars:  Joe Don Baker, William Shatner, Tyne Daly, Anthony Zerbe, Jon Cypher
Creator:  Bruce Geller
Run time: 20 hours plus
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Related reviews:  TV sets: Action Packed, Mission: Impossible Season Five, Mission: Impossible Season Four

   Every season of Mission: Impossible is distinctly different.  And that’s a good thing.  Oh, the structure is still the same, and the characters fulfill basically the same roles, and the team still goes after the same sort of bad guy.  But the approach in, say, Season Six is a little different from that of Season Five.  Season Six comes out April 28th, from Paramount Home Entertainment, and the show is still very good.  Gone are Barbara Bain, Martin Landau, and Leonard Nimoy, perhaps the three most recognizable actors in the series.  Sam Elliott is still around (you may know him from such films as The Big Lebowski and The Golden Compass), but only for two episodes, then he’s gone too.

   Replacing Bain (and Leslie Ann Warren) is Lynda Day George, as the designated Hot Chick, and her style is of course different, which changes the series a bit.  She certainly is smoking hot, and that appears to be all she needs in order to get close to the bad guys.  Every bad guy in Season Six seems to be some kind of horny gangster, and as soon as Lynda Day George walks by they follow her like puppies with their tongues hanging out.  The few bad dudes who don’t pay attention to her are the Hardcore Bad Guys – like, they have trained their minds SO thoroughly with evil, and they are SO consumed with their evil mission, that they can’t be bothered with this sexy babe.  And THOSE guys were the ones to reckon with!  I guess there were just no gay bad guys in the ’70s.  And personally, I miss Leslie Ann Warren.

   The central core of the cast – Jim Phelps (Peter Graves), Wily Armitage (Peter Lupus), Barney Collier (Greg Morris), and that annoying voice on the tape (Bob Johnson) – remains intact for Season Six.  The standard episodes ensue – Jim Phelps kicks off the season posing as a blind secret agent to take doen a mob organization, then William Shatner guest stars in an episode where the gang makes him believe he has been transported back in time to the ’30s.  A lot of it (like this episode) is far-fetched and ridiculous, but that’s part of the charm.

   I found myself missing Leonard Nimoy.  I liked his character, not least because his name was The Great Paris.  Like some kind of superhero.  I can’t tell why he left, really – it wasn’t Star Trek, because the original series of Star Trek had been canceled by the time he joined the cast of Mission: Impossible, and I’m not sure he had anything else to do.  Burnout maybe.  On the plus side, Star Trek, The Original Series Season One is out on Blu-Ray today as well, so I can get my Leonard Nimoy fix this week one way or another.

“How long have I got?”
“Thirty seconds.”
“That doesn’t give us a lot of time.”

Year:  2008
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Daniel Craig, Jesper Christensen, David Harbour, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Joaquin Cosio, Judi Dench
Eye candy:  Olga Kurylenko, Gemma Arterton
Director:  Marc Forster
Run time:  105 minutes

   Wrack my brain as I might, I can’t for the life of me remember what the title Quantum of Solace means.  Or what scenes in the movie were relevant to this title.  I’m at a loss.  I really can’t understand where this title came from.  It doesn’t, really, even sound very cool, or very James-Bondy.  It could just as easily be the title of one of those sci-fi movies about cute children and magical bunnies.

   The word “quantum” means only “a specified amount”.  Quantum physics refers to the smallest discrete amount of some physical property that a system can possess.  And the word “solace” means “comfort or consolation”.  So, really, this movie could have been called A Specified Amount of Consolation.  Or, A Modicum of Revenge.  Or A Certain Amount of Vengeance.  Because I suppose, the idea behind the film is that James Bond is getting revenge upon those who caused the death of his girlfriend Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale.  Perhaps that’s what it means.

   But just because I don’t understand the title does not mean that Quantum of Solace isn’t cool.  Because it is.  It’s very, very cool.  Just like in Casino Royale, Daniel Craig is the most badass Bond of them all, with less charm and more hardcore skills-of-a-badass.  I remember saying when I watched that first film that he reminded me, (and I mean this) more of George Lazenby than of any other Bond, in that he puts more emphasis on being tough and mean than on being clever and charming and slick.  And I like that.  But now, having watched this second Daniel Craig installment in the Bond series, he no longer reminds me of George Lazenby.  And even though he ends the movie bloody, beaten up, and exhasuted, he doesn’t remind me of Bruce Willis either.  He reminds me of Daniel Craig.  And that is a terrific thing.  I said it in the last movie, and I will say it again about this one – Daniel Craig is the best actor to play James Bond.  Ever.

   Quantum of Solace kicks off right where the last one left off.  We see a car chase through the mountains, and before Bond destroys the opposition with some fancy driving and some gunfire, we know what’s going to happen when he opens the trunk.  Mr. White (Jesper Christensen) is going to be in there.  Possibly still alive, more likely dead, what with all the crashing and bullet holes.  This is one of those car chases where a bunch of stuff is happening all the time, and the camera leaps from the road to the car to the hand on the gearshift and then back to the road.  Bond’s car appears to be headed toward an impossible gap between say, two dump trucks, where not even a bicycle could fit, then we flash to his gearshift and then back to the road, where his car comes out of some mess of traffic where it had clearly not been split seconds before. 

   This must be one amazing gearshift.   In Quantum of Solace, we don’t see a single one of those fancy James Bond gadgets that are a staple in this series, and I think it is safe to assume that this gearshift is one of them.  There is no Q to explain how it works, but it appears to be able to teleport Bond’s car from one side of a snarl-up to the other.  This would be an extremely useful gadget for the average commuter, but until it hits the mass market it’s best that such a prototype would be used to save the life of James Bond.  Now, I have no idea how the henchmen chasing him manage to execute similar manouevers, perhaps they have stolen this same amazing technology and they are chasing Bond to get his copy of the instruction manual.

   There are other chases in this movie, some that make more sense (editing-wise) than others.  There is a terrifically intense rooftop-chase scene on foot, and while it doesn’t compare to the one in Casino Royale where Bond chases that guy with the mad monkey skills, it is pretty cool nonetheless.  There is a plane chase, where Bond is able to make a fighter plane crash through a combination of smoke from his engine and…turning left…I think.  Either way, there is a fireball and the other pilot loses and Bond made it happen somehow.  Then there is a boat chase.  It flows rather nicely but is based on a rather questionable premise. 

   You see, a woman named Camille (the smoking hot Olga Kurylenko) has just mistaken Bond for an assassin.  And she has tried to shoot him.  He divines that she is in league with the bad guys he is chasing, so after she attempts to kill him he follows her.  So far so good.  She is one of the bad guys, she will lead him to the other bad guys, and he will exact his bloody revenge for the death of the Woman He Loved in the first movie.  He watches Camille interact with the bad guys on a pier, and then watches her get onto a boat with some other bad guys.  He manages, telepathically I suppose, to figure out that the bad guys on the boat are going to kill her.  She is still one of the bad guys, as far as he knows, and she has already tried to kill him.  Yet he decides, in a situation that must be against his better judgement, to rescue her by stealing a boat and ramming a yacht and then kidnapping her.

   Perhaps the twenty seconds he spent with her in her car before she decided to kill him were enough to convince him that she was alright, basically a nice person, with a warm heart and a purity of purpose.  And that her decision to murder him with a gun was really just an unfortunate but understandable misunderstanding and he holds no grudge.  He clearly doesn’t need her for anything.  She gets knocked out during the boat chase.  Now, she IS in league with these bad guys, and must know something that could help Bond get his men.  But he didn’t save her to find out what she knows.  He merely hands her unconscious body to a perplexed bystander and continues on his way.  So…why did he save her life?  What was that all about?  Perhaps he knew (because she is obviously the hottest chick he’s met and it’s a James Bond movie) that she will resurface later and feel kindly toward him for all that life-saving boat-chasing action.

   So, the boat chase is gratuitous.  But it is cool, and John Woo himself might even be impressed with that one.  The chase on foot makes sense, the chase in the plane makes sense, and it is easy to understand how the car chase could have come about.  All that was missing in Quantum of Solace was a submarine chase and a space-shuttle dogfight.  Next movie, perhaps.  Actually, that wasn’t all that was missing in the film.  There are no gadgets.  There is no Q, although there is an M.  He only sleeps with one woman, and it isn’t the one we expect.  There are no duplicitous women.  Not once did I hear him say “Bond.  James Bond.”  Nor did he mention a martini, shaken, stirred or otherwise.  He is drinking something that looks suspiciously like a martini on a plane at one point.  And he makes quite a point of letting us all know that he has no idea what the name of this silly, fruity drink might be.  Which is far cooler than actually ordering one.

   Because this Bond has no need for fruity drinks or charming cleverness or slick lines.  He is not Pierce Brosnan, after all.  He is Daniel Craig, and he’s a bull in a china shop compared to Brosnan, who was more like fine china at a rodeo.  Does that make sense?  Maybe not.  Who cares.  Brosnan was all hair gel and arched eyebrows, Craig is all guns and fists and scowling.  Which is far more badass, makes for a far more badass movie, and enhances my enjoyment considerably. 

   I was worried a few times near the beginning of the movie.  For a while, it looked like it was going to be one chase after another without a break for explaining the story.  When those concerns were alleviated, it appeared as though Quantum of Solace might fall into that middle-years-Bond trap of having too many characters and too much intrigue and a story that was difficult to follow.  Like, who’s that bad guy?  How does he relate to that other bad guy?  What exactly is the plan here, and how does Bond even know these people are evil?

   But fortunately, that is not the case either.  Soon, we learn exactly what is going on.  The American spies (including Felix, played by Jeffrey Wright, who was also in Casino Royale) are doing business with the Bad Guy Boss, Dominic Greene (played by Mathieu Amalric).  Greene is a rich, shadowy businessman who runs some kind of bizarre clandestine organization, apparently the same one responsible for the death of Bond’s girl Vesper in Casino Royale.  He is setting up a deal with a deposed Bolivian dictator, which would return that dictator to power in return for some abandoned desert in the middle of the country.  Greene has managed to convince the Americans that there is oil in that desert, and that is why the Americans are willing to look the other way during this Bolivian coup d’etat.  However, he is deceiving them.  His real target is water.

   And that’s what made me enjoy this movie most of all.  The bad guy.  Sure, Bond is a badass.  And yes, Olga Kurylenko and Gemma Arterton are ridiculously hot in the Bond-girl tradition.  But this bad guy is a little more layered than the standard Bond villain.  He is similar to the other villains in the series, in that he commands a cartel of bad-news international players who can make things like coups take place.  But he is different in that he doesn’t have a crazed plan for world domination.  He isn’t after uranium or plutonium or even oil.  He is after water.

   The idea here is that he will control, from his “useless” patch of desert, Bolivia’s water supply.  And he will make the people of that country pay him for their own water.  And he will get richer.  That’s about it.  Not only is it a rather small-scale evil plan for a Bond villain, but it is also plausible.  Sure, it is the kind of evil plan that shows a complete disregard for human life, but it could really happen, in this world.  In fact, it often does.  We all know there are corporations who buy up water rights in poor countries.  So Dominic Greene, in Quantum of Solace, is not only the most realistic evil villain in a Bond movie, but he is also an amazingly plausible villain for any movie.

   Then again, there are still the implausible James Bond touches.  Like the final showdown in the five-star hotel in the middle of the desert.  This just wouldn’t work.  It may be an amazing place, but if it’s hundreds of miles away from everything else, then who would ever go there?  Even the richest people on earth, who want the solitude that comes from such complete isolation, would much rather have that solitude in the mountains near lakes and rivers than in the middle of the open desert.  I assume. 

   Not only is this hotel fiscally unrealistic, but it also contains far more tanks of hydrogen than one would anticipate.  This is a pretty poor architectural plan if this building will be your evil-guy hideout.  After all, if one wayward truck say, backs into the garage and explodes, this could (conceivably) lead to a chain reaction of hydrogen-tank explosions that would destroy the entire place.  Perhaps.  I can’t complain too much, if that (hypothetical) giant explosion ending came after both the leading man and the leading lady got their respective sweet revenge on the people who had done them wrong in the past, and had a badass walk off into the sun.  And also if that leading lady was the ridiculously hot Olga Kurylenko, and that leading man was the totally badass Daniel Craig.  That would be OK.  If it happened like that.

I must admit that, although I have slammed both Mission: Impossible and especially Mission: Impossible 2 many times, seeing them on Blu-Ray has caused me to give both of them an extra star.  Blu-Ray really is the ideal format for slick, visual action movies with no soul, and these two flicks certainly qualify.  The two films come out together, as a package, on Blu-Ray for the first time March 17th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.  Really, this set is for people who already enjoyed the movies, and want to see them kick ass in high-def.  The way I watched them, they merely sucked a little less in high-def.  But that is something.

Mission: Impossible (*******7/10)

“This is the Mount Everest of hacks.”

A phrase used, in the film, to describe the task of hacking into the CIA computer.  But one that could also apply to the direction of Brian De Palma, a terrific director of such films as Scarface and The Untouchables.  De Palma has always been fairly good, but with movies like those two he was really working above his level.  De Palma is, really, the absolute top of the heap of hack directors in movies.  He is the best, but he’s just a very, very good hack.  And Mission: Impossible is the Mount Everest of movies made almost entirely by hacks.

That does not extend to the cast – Jon Voight is by no means a hack, nor is Emmanuelle Beart or Henry Czerny or Jean Reno.  Even Tom Cruise is not a hack.  I might give you Ving Rhames.  But he is at least a very, very good hack, and the perfect actor for roles such as the one he plays in this film.  But the script is weak, the direction able at best, and the special effects are pretty good.  But the story is basically nonsense, the special effects are gratuitous, and there is a ton of unnecessary gadgetry and computer hacking and manufactured tense moments.  The opening scene is the first and best example of this – they’re trying to catch a guy after he steals a thing, but rather than just sit there and wait for him and then catch him, they have to use fifty computers and wires and fake faces and sneaking around.  Why?  No reason.  It just looks cool and they have all this crap to use.

Then Emilio Estevez dies, real early on, and the conspiracy that is setting up Tom Cruise gets (sort of) explained, and the movie is under way.  Fortunately for those of us watching this in HD on Blu-Ray, much of the time Cruise is accompanied by Emmanuelle Beart, one of the hottest women ever to grace a film screen.  (For those of you who might watch this movie just for her, I might recommend a different film – La Belle Noiseuse, a French art film where Beart plays a nude model who inspires an artist and spends the entire movie pretty much naked.  Not only that, but the film is absolutely brilliant.  Far more so than Mission: Impossible.  It’s available on DVD, but not Blu-Ray.)

“Ethan, you’re not making any sense.”

Ethan Hunt, played by Tom Cruise, really doesn’t make a lot of sense if you really sit and pick apart this movie.  But of course, that is not the idea here.  The idea is to sit back and let wave after wave of mindless entertainment wash over us as Mission: Impossible draws to it’s obvious conclusion, after an unnecessary break-in to CIA headquarters, and several scenes where no character asks the obvious questions that would lead to a faster resolution or questions the obvious flaws in the plans.  If you’re not willing to shut off your brain, ignore this film.  If you are willing to do so, you could do a lot worse than Mission: Impossible.  It is an awful lot of fun in Blu-Ray.

Mission: Impossible 2 (****4/10):

“This is not Mission Difficult, Mr. Hunt, it’s Mission Impossible.”

Good thing Anthony Hopkins put Tom Cruise in his place like that early on in this film.  Otherwise, we might be confused into thinking this was a James Bond movie, or a Hong Kong Chow Yun-Fat action flick.  Or both.  Thank goodness we keep being reminded that it’s Mission: Impossible 2! 

Years:  1970
Genre:  TV series, Spy, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Greg Morris, Peter Lupus, Bob Johnson, Peter Graves, Leonard Nimoy, Sam Elliott, Lesley Ann Warren
Guest stars:  Dana Elcar, Sal Mineo, Anthony Zerbe, George Sanders
Creator:  Bruce Geller
Run time: 20 hours plus
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Related reviews:  TV sets: Action Packed, Mission: Impossible Season Six, Mission: Impossible Season Four

     I enjoyed Season Four of Mission: Impossible, certainly more than I did those three crappy Tom Cruise movies. Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing Season Five on DVD Tuesday, October 7th, and it’s even better. The main reason it’s better is because they have added a hot chick. Now, normally that wouldn’t change the quality of a show, except to make it worse. The addition of a hot chick normally (these days anyway) means that the writers and producers feel the show has jumped the shark, but they can hang on for a few more years simply by providing their weirdo viewers with some eye candy.

     But when it came to Season Five of Mission: Impossible, this was actually a good move. The addition of Lesley Ann Warren as Dana Lambert was terrific. She provided the team with something it had been lacking – instead of simply using a bunch of gadgets to set up their targets, they began using actual people and deception a lot more. Dana was able to seduce the people who needed seducing, and get close to the men who were the targets of the team. In a bizarre way, this was actually more realistic spy stuff.

     Also great in Season Five is Sam Elliott, one of the great gravelly-voiced, made-for-westerns actors in the world. He comes and goes, and isn’t in every episode, but his role just adds a little more oomph to a series that already has plenty. The fourth season was good, the fifth is great.

Years:  1969
Genre:  TV series, Spy, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Greg Morris, Peter Lupus, Bob Johnson, Peter Graves, Leonard Nimoy, Sam Elliott, Lee Meriwether
Guest stars:  Barry Williams, Barry Atwater, John Aniston, Diane Baker, Sid Haig
Creator:  Bruce Geller
Run time: 20 hours plus
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Related reviews:  TV sets: Action Packed, Mission: Impossible Season Six, Mission: Impossible Season Five

     When I was a kid, after a long game of tennis, I saw an episode of Mission: Impossible at my friend Oliver’s house. I loved this show! It was one of the best things I had ever seen on TV! It had everything – espionage, international bad guys, gadgets, and missions! And that theme music! So distinctive, so cool! However, Oliver had some channels that I did not, and I never saw the show again until today. When I grabbed Season Four of Mission: Impossible from Paramount Home Entertainment on May 13th, I wondered if it would be as good as I remembered. After all, my favourite programs growing up were MacGyver and The A-Team, and I can’t watch those now without laughing at what an idiot I must have been to have enjoyed such crap.

     As it turns out, however, Mission: Impossible really does hold up over the years. Of course, over those years it has been the source of some of the worst pop culture has to offer. Those three horrible movies with Tom Cruise. The music has been used as background for the irritating Scientology video, also starring Tom Cruise. The phrase “your mission, should you choose to accept it” has been overused ad nauseum, and the self-destructing message has been a concept taken to asinine proportions. By the way, I DID watch Inspector Gadget as a child, and I could never understand the self-destructing message. The chief would always pop up in a garbage can, a dryer, a potted plant, and hand Inspector Gadget the message. Then, he would be told that the message would self-destruct. And Gadget would throw the message right into where the chief was hiding, and it would blow up the chief. Every time. Every time, it happened! And I would always wonder, as a child – if the chief was so adept at finding these hiding places for himself, in order to give Gadget his mission, why wouldn’t he just pop out of the dishwasher and tell Gadget the message, rather than having to hand him paper and wait while he read it? That always bothered me.

     Season 4 of Mission Impossible is yet another example of when network TV used to be good. It’s like the A-Team, only without the terrible writing, the ridiculous gunfights and the lame acting. It’s like Counterstrike, only less slick and less Canadian. And it is far, far better than those absolutely idiotic Tom Cruise-John Woo movies.