The moment the last image left the screen and the credits began rolling on Mission: Impossible, a man sitting behind me turned to his date and asked, “So what just happened?” She couldn’t tell him. Neither could my wife. Neither could I. Still bewildered on the ride home, my wife and I tried to puzzle through two solid hours of technical jargon, double crosses, secret identities, code names and hidden motivations. An hour, several thrown chairs, and a handful of Excedrin later, we decided for the sake of our marriage to extricate ourselves from the movie’s Gordian tangle of a plot.

This is as far as we got: A top-secret government task force for impossible missions, cleverly named the Impossible Missions Force, is dispatched to Prague to retrieve a disk that unscrambles the code names of undercover agents. When the mission goes awry, the blame falls on Ethan Hunt, an IMF agent instantly targeted as the mole who sold out his teammates. To clear his name, Hunt must contact an arms dealer, Max, who triggered the failed mission by paying off another IMF agent (“Job”) on the inside.

That much seemed clear after a half-hour’s meticulous reconstruction. What wasn’t clear was why we were supposed to care. Based on the agreeably preposterous late-1960s TV show, Mission: Impossible has moments of tremendous visual sophistication and wit, including one extended sequence that ranks with the most ingenious suspense filmmaking I’ve ever seen. But the movie’s labyrinthine plot and interchangeable characters fail to satisfy the most rudimentary requirements of storytelling. Mission: Impossible is all gimmickry, and too much of the gimmickry doesn’t work.

The cornball concept of the TV show was that every week this crack force of spies with specialized talents—mimicry, makeup, safecracking, etc.—would take on another ridiculously insurmountable task; the fun came from the way they applied their talents and personalities to the mission at hand. Goofy as it was, this premise had two surefire features: It gave every cast member a solo in the spotlight, and it made a virtue of its very implausibility. The show’s title was itself a preemptive strike against questions of believability.

The movie’s first big mistake is to spend several minutes introducing the IMF team—only to remove them from the plot. Just as we’re beginning to warm to the characters, especially Kristin Scott-Thomas’ elegant operative, they’re whisked out of the action, and the movie has to assemble another team from scratch. Unfortunately, the B team isn’t a very charismatic bunch, despite the presence of such fine actors as Jean Reno and Ving Rhames: Each character is apportioned exactly one standard-issue personality trait or scrap of background.

The same is true of the hero, Tom Cruise, who fuels this flivver on star power but can’t compensate for the lack of interesting supporting roles. This is one movie that cries out for hammy character actors showing off in bit parts. When Vanessa Redgrave arrives as a smashingly sexy villainess—a cross between The Avengers’ Emma Peel and Margaret Thatcher turned on by capitalist ruthlessness—the film suddenly snaps awake. But even she’s not in the movie enough to provide the strong central villain needed to drive the plot.

The diffuse script was concocted by three hot screenwriters, Robert Towne, David Koepp and Steven Zaillian, and anytime you see these gentlemen’s names in concert you should immediately expect trouble. Any one of these writers is perfectly capable of fashioning a solid script alone; the presence of all three suggests problem-solving rather than brainstorming. Put monkeys in a room with typewriters, the saying goes, and you eventually get Shakespeare; put the authors of Chinatown, Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List together, and you get a plot that hinges on the chance discovery of a Gideon Bible in a cosmopolitan superspy’s room. (You can picture Towne, Koepp and Zaillian pointing at each other and shouting, “He did it!”)

While the scenarists have managed to string together enough complications for two 007 vehicles with a John Le Carré novel to spare, they haven’t solved the basic problem: Little the characters do or say is very interesting. And the exposition overload—four different locales, three separate yet related missions, a dozen characters—is a screenwriter’s challenge and a viewer’s nightmare. Every few scenes, the script has to stop to explain what we’ve been watching, and the writers play catch-up for the duration of the movie, filling in gaps like plumbers patching leaks. It doesn’t work. (Example: In the train-car finale, a pursuing gunman inexplicably takes a seat and disappears from the action.) Moreover, the identity of the turncoat Job is so obvious so early in the film that the last-minute revelation actually confuses the audience.

The damburst of exposition stymies the enormously gifted director, Brian De Palma, whose strengths, to put it kindly, do not lie in scenes requiring lengthy dialogue or storytelling logic. De Palma tries a lot of cinematic sleight-of-hand to distract us from the leaden conversations: visualizing characters’ thoughts, tilting the camera and changing points-of-view; as often as not, he merely muddles our impression of what’s taking place. He also fails to establish the life-or-death urgency that would hold the movie together. He can’t work up the dreamlike momentum he achieved in classic thrillers like The Fury and Blow Out—the movie is all stops and starts.

That said, De Palma’s restless ingenuity is as frequently exhilarating as it is exasperating. No filmmaker can create a more voluptuous sense of unease and deceit than De Palma, whose principal motif is the seemingly innocuous action that conceals something much darker and deadlier. To convey the jittery sensation of navigating a world where everyone and everything has a double nature, De Palma tricks us repeatedly with faces and details hidden in the corners of the widescreen frame; the deviousness of his technique is perfectly suited to a film where pens conceal poison and chewing gum explodes. Always the gadget freak, especially where moviemaking, surveillance and voyeurism intersect, De Palma dazzles with hidden cameras and views that reveal more than we first see—the better to illustrate the unreliability of the medium he has chosen.

De Palma’s virtuosity results in one bravura sequence that justifies seeing the movie, flaws and all; it’s the only scene in the movie that fully exploits the fun of devising and solving impossible situations. The setup is perfection itself, a variation on the climactic heist scene in Rififi. Cruise must retrieve a list of names from a closely guarded computer in the bowels of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. The only catch: The computer is guarded by laser beams. In a climate-controlled vault. With a floor that will immediately activate alarms if it is touched by so much as a drop of water. The solution: Cruise, suspended only by a pulley, a trapeze and a twitchy comrade, must dangle upside-down from an air-conditioning vent to reach the computer. He reaches the desk—and then a rat snuffles around the corner of the vent. Then the pulley starts to give. Then Cruise starts to sweat.

De Palma and editor Paul Hirsch apply screws to the audience with nerve-racking restraint, adding new calamities and variations that escalate the tension ever higher. The sequence works on numerous levels: first, as a deliriously tense action scene; second, as black comedy; third, as an amusing demonstration of De Palma’s belief that the most powerful technology (and government) will remain eternally susceptible to chance and plain old human screw-ups. The scene as staged resembles a Mad-magazine parody of 2001: A shot of an actor dangling like an immobilized marionette in the sterile white vault is the most telling criticism anyone could make of Stanley Kubrick.

Nevertheless, the unbelievable mayhem only exacerbates the question of why people this talented would want to squander their gifts remaking a dopey 1960s TV show. While a movie entitled Mission: Impossible requires a temporary suspension of credulity, De Palma and his screenwriters abuse the privilege, from the novel ruse the heroes use to break into CIA headquarters (setting off the fire alarm!) to the conclusion, in which a speeding train pulls an airborne helicopter through a tunnel while combatants leap back and forth. (This sequence is the mother of all “yeah, rights.”) Instead of creating a sophisticated spy thriller from scratch, the filmmakers yoked themselves to the millstone of the TV concept and then ignored the few things that made it work. The gap between the paltriness of their intentions and the scope of their resources is maddening. Their mission was doomed from the start.—Jim Ridley

The Children’s Hour

The Iranian film The White Balloon is a slice-of-life story of the highest integrity. The screen carries exactly 90 minutes in the life of a 7-year-old girl, fading in as she sulks her way home from the market. It follows her as she returns to market to buy a goldfish; the credits roll just as she heads back home for dinner. This might seem a dull subject for a movie, but only a dullard would find it so. For the viewer with patient eyes, The White Balloon is captivating as few other films are, though there’s not a fantastical or whimsical frame in the film. It proceeds at the pace and timbre of life itself, only it unfolds in the rectangular box of the screen, thus commanding—and ultimately rewarding—our attention.

Written by esteemed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (Through the Olive Trees) and directed by Jafar Panahi, The White Balloon takes place in the last hour-and-a-half before the New Year. As shops prepare to close for the holiday, families make last-minute preparations for visiting relatives, and our wee heroine tries to convince her mother to give her some money for the plump, pretty goldfish that sits in front of a local store. The mother is hesitant but eager to get her daughter out from underfoot, so she ponies up the equivalent of a five-dollar bill and tells the girl to hurry back with the change.

Of course, she does not hurry back, or hurry forth. Rather, in that flighty way that children have, the girl runs until she finds something to distract her—and then she stops. The first diversion is a crowd of snake charmers, who almost succeed in conning the money out of her hands; the second diversion is the window of a pastry shop. By the time the youngster reaches her goldfish vendor, she reaches into her pocket and realizes, to her dismay, that her money is gone. A quick search reveals the location of the bill: between the grating of a storm drain in the cellar of an absent merchant. But how can she get it out? And who can she best trust to help her: her older brother, or one of the many passing adults?

Movies like The White Balloon offer a special kind of gift. By freeing the audience from the strictures of a conventional plot, they invite us to marvel at the small details of place and character that make up a livable world. The White Balloon is full of mysterious people and events, which have nothing to do with the attempt to recapture the lost cash but have everything to do with why the film is constantly fascinating. What are the intentions of the young soldier who converses with our heroine? How does the older brother get the black eye that turns up on his face halfway through the film? And why does the phone keep ringing in the building next to the grating? We appreciate these nuances the way we admire the placement of light in a photo-realist painting, gathering and highlighting the oft unseen wonders of the world in which we live.

We’re also free (as in life itself) to guess what’s going to happen next, to see the film’s predicament through the eyes of the young protagonists, and to remember what it was like to be a child, when humans twice your size had the power to fix everything but rarely did. The White Balloon is refreshingly unlike American movies about childhood, which romanticize and encourage infantilism. This little movie from Iran remembers things differently; it remembers the joy of solitary adventure, yes, but also the deep feeling of loss that children have when they let down their parents. This movie remembers what it’s like to be in trouble.

I wouldn’t want every film to be made in the leisurely, observational style of The White Balloon, but for the 90 minutes the movie unreels, the fears of these kids and their attempts to retrieve their money keep an audience alert and thinking throughout. Even at the end, we’re still guessing, pondering what might be going through the mind of a young Afghan balloon hawker who carries the titular object on a long stick—and whose face, the last that we see, reflects a loneliness that suggests yet another 90 minutes of invigorating cinema.—Noel Murray