Actually, there was one wonderful moment during Spy Hard: I was sitting near a pod of pre-pubescent boys, and at the end of the title sequence, when Weird Al Yankovich's head explodes, all three gasped "cool," heartily, in unison, with great sincerity. Of course. What could be cooler than Weird Al's exploding head?

So I am left with Mission: Impossible. I expected this movie to deliver a steady stream of gasp-inducing moments, especially given how impressive I thought it was when I was a kid. Probably though, Mission: Impossible would have been a better movie if it wasn't based on a classic TV series. The movie never even comes close to recreating the strange, obsessive structure that made the TV show great--always, in the show, a bunch of agents in suits would meticulously prepare a series of mechanical devices, laying a trap that wouldn't be sprung until the end of the show. They knew what they were doing but we didn't--you pretty much couldn't figure out an episode of Mission: Impossible until the very end. If you came in more than five minutes late, the story was an almost unintelligible jumble of scenes and characters. It was way cooler than Weird Al's exploding head.

By contrast, I figured out the basic plot of Mission: Impossible the movie after the first five minutes. I'm older now and figuring out events in movies before they occur seems to be my special gift (or curse); but still, it seems like they could have tried a little harder to surprise us. When I see a young hero who loves/admires an older man who is in turn married to an achingly beautiful woman half his age, I think, "Oh no, not another one of those damn Freudian Oedipal dramas."

Ah yes, it is another one of those damn Freudian Oedipal dramas. This particular one stars Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, the spy with a mission, and Jon Voight as Jim Phelps, the older man who leads the ultra-spy ring. The freakishly beautiful Emmanuelle Beart plays his wife Claire. Only in the movies do we routinely find lovely young women married to men old enough to be their fathers, and it was this lack of believability and sloppy character development that left me ultimately disappointed with Mission: Impossible. Okay, maybe Tom Cruise really could surf a fireball through a darkened tunnel and land on top of a speeding train. Who knows? But nothing could make me believe Emmanuelle Beart would go for Jon Voight.

What happens to the girl, though, is of little consequence. Though Beart is present throughout the entire movie, she's bizarrely extraneous to the plot. She keeps running around and getting in the way, doing things, and it seems like she might be included, or important...but no. As it turns out Ethan Hunt, like a good Hitchcockian hero, has been wrongly accused by his organization and so must spy on his own people to clear his name. His bosses know he's gone renegade and they contemplate this fact in a cavernous conference room with Hunt's face plastered up on a six-foot high computer screen. For some reason though, they fail to notice or care that The Girl has gone renegade too. Maybe she is supposed to be dead, but you'd think guys who can attach an amazing homing device to a little floppy disk could manage to sift through some debris for human remains.

If this is starting to sound confusing, it's probably due to the pressure of an incredibly intricate but completely inconsistent plot. The story, basically, doesn't make sense. I found it impossible to stay quiet during this movie, and I kept asking my friend questions like: Why don't they just go to their apartment? Or, how did he manage to stab her through that gate?

My friend sighed and told me it was just a movie. She had a point, but my suspension of disbelief was starting to seriously crack under the weight of illogic and my disappointment with the bimbo status of the female lead. Brian DePalma has a deft touch with action sequences--there were scenes in this movie that left me breathless--but one thing I learned from watching Mission: Impossible on TV was that a collection of scenes does not make a story. Somebody somewhere has to have a plan.