MOVIE: IMPROBABLE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A McGuffin, a mole, a master criminal. Many minor characters of menacing mien, dubious loyalty and short life expectancy. Computer and explosive technology to die for (many will). An imperturbably resourceful undercover agent (in this case Tom Cruise) who must, among other strenuous chores, penetrate a supposedly impregnable vault wherein reposes a secret, sacred document that everybody else is pursuing too. And last but not least: a helicopter/train chase ending in the predictable fireball that equally predictably fails even to singe Cruise's beetle brows.

Check, check, check. Yep, they're all here, all the spy-movie conventions--right down to the hoariest of them all, two agents meeting at a park bench and identifying one another with a coded phrase. What is not present in Mission: Impossible (which, aside from the title, sound-track quotations from the theme song and self-destructing assignment tapes, has little to do with the old TV show) is a plot that logically links all these events or characters with any discernible motives beyond surviving the crisis of the moment.

They don't construct thrillers anymore, they deconstruct them. That is to say, they reduce them to a succession of spectacular set pieces either so familiar that they require no explanation or so spectacular that they momentarily overwhelm disbelief. It's as if they were making a musical that was all production numbers, no book; or an infinite trailer that is all effects, no affect.

You can argue that this is postmodernism for the masses or that it represents the ultimate in cynicism, depending on how forgiving your mood is when you encounter something like Mission: Impossible. But old-fashioned narrative connection, unchic though it may be, is not to be sneezed at. For it is out of those little throwaway scenes where people hint at loves, hates, beliefs, disbeliefs, that connections between audience and movie--what Hollywood's wise old hacks call "rooting interest"--arises.

Without it, the straying mind turns subversive. By what magic, it wonders, is Cruise, who co-produced the movie and is presumably not without clout in these matters, sporting the worst haircut ever worn in public by a major movie star? How does a supposedly desperate team of rogue spooks acquire all the exotic, expensive equipment they need to support their complicated activities? I mean, how do you rent a fire truck, vital to the burgling of the aforementioned vault--located at CIA headquarters in Virginia--when you're calling long distance from Prague? Finally, why did director Brian De Palma permit Vanessa Redgrave to act in this movie? She's good and funny as a woman of a certain age, and an evil genius besides, reduced to mewing kittenishness in Cruise's presence. But she makes everyone else look bad. She also makes us realize what we and the movie so desperately miss: recognizably human behavior.

--By Richard Schickel