The Original Mission: Impossible Is Now Free to Stream

Considering the screen persona he has cultivated over the past two decades, Tom Cruise built his stardom on a very different archetype. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, he routinely played arrogant, swaggering men whose cockiness pushed them to the brink. Audiences loved the routine, turning Cruise into the biggest movie star on the planet.

Most of those roles followed an arc toward maturity and heroism. Maverick in Top Gun offered a cartoonish version of that journey, while Charlie Babbitt in Rain Man delivered a grounded portrait of redemption. Some earlier films let his characters embrace their edge, such as The Color of Money, or treated youthful recklessness with a shrug, like Risky Business. Later efforts played clever variations on the pattern. In A Few Good Men, his rigid moral certitude serves as his primary flaw. In Jerry Maguire, Cruise plays a self-absorbed sports agent who undergoes a crisis of conscience in the opening minutes, spending the rest of the film waiting for everyone else to catch up.

That cocky energy defined Cruise when he took on the role of Ethan Hunt in the original 1996 film Mission: Impossible. Hunt begins as an entirely different character from the self-sacrificing operative of modern entries. He sports spiky hair, a leather jacket over a V-neck, a sly grin, sharp one-liners, and a penchant for mocking sleight-of-hand magic tricks. Cruise, already an established star for a decade, exuded youthful brashness.

With the first three Mission: Impossible films now streaming on Tubi, the movie that launched the franchise stands out for how it transformed Cruise’s screen identity. The film subtly began shifting Hunt from a smug operative toward an isolated savior, establishing that transition within its opening thirty minutes.

Director Brian De Palma introduces Hunt as the point man for an elite Impossible Mission Force squad featuring Jon Voight, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emilio Estevez, and Emmanuelle Béart. Across a tense sequence set during an atmospheric Prague night shoot, De Palma uses subjective camera angles and precise staging to pull viewers into the operation while concealing key details. Within half an hour, nearly the entire team dies, and IMF director Eugene Kittridge, played by Henry Czerny, frames Hunt as the mole responsible for their deaths.

The sequence shocked audiences who expected an ensemble franchise built around high-profile stars. Instead, Hunt ends up on the run, left with nobody to trust except computer hacker Luther Stickell, played by Ving Rhames. While the series later surrounded Hunt with dependable allies such as Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn and Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust, the dynamic grew increasingly isolating. Following romantic subplots in Mission: Impossible 2 and Mission: Impossible III, the filmmakers established a consistent rhythm. Hunt enters each mission from the fringes, saves the day at immense personal cost, and disappears back into the shadows.

The original film focuses on personal stakes rather than global extinction. Hunt merely wants to clear his name and expose the real traitor. The conflict revolves around the recovery of an encrypted computer file listing undercover CIA agents, culminating in an intricate heist at Langley. The tone leans closer to a cynical Cold War espionage thriller than an escalating stunt spectacle.

The narrative tragedy of those opening thirty minutes ultimately mirrored Cruise’s real-life public pivot. Following the grueling production of Eyes Wide Shut, his divorce from Nicole Kidman, and his eerie mania on Oprah’s sofa, Cruise withdrew into an untouchable action-star persona. The early betrayal of Ethan Hunt provided the blueprint. The brash young man gave way to a solitary savior who cares deeply for his colleagues but keeps them at a distance, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Mission: Impossible is streaming on Tubi.

Source: Polygon