The Double
(2011/Image Blu-ray)/Mission: Impossible: The ’88 TV Season (CBS
DVD Set)
Picture:
B/C Sound: B/C+ Extras: C+/D Main Programs: C+
Hollywood
is stuck in the 1980s for the worst, including the strangest development in the
action genre, trying to almost revive The Cold War, which is practically an
insult a decade after the events of 9/11 and is the epitome of how bizarre the
town has become more out of touch with its audience since anytime since the
later 1960s. The fourth Mission: Impossible film (2011 and note
they dropped the “4” to sell it better) uses a scenario as fodder for its comic
(sometimes unintentionally) popcorn plot, though the original show was a
product of the Cold War era, even the first Tom Cruise film in the series
wanted to trash the series to some extent (not like the new one does though) to
be its own version of the franchise.
That
brings us to two new releases on disc that line up and happen to show this
trend.
First we
have Michael Brandt’s The Double
(2011) with Richard Gere called back into working with the CIA he left behind
to get a one-time Soviet agent. Topher
Grace 9in a good performance) is the young FBI agent who has tracked the story
of him and his adversary since Gere’s departure, but Gere concludes a new
killing is a copycat and the real killer is gone, though he never killed him
personally. To the credit of writers
Brandt and Derek Haas (who at their best wrote the underrated remake of 3:10 To Yuma) are trying to do
something new and different with this scenario, but the whole Cold War spy
cycle was so played out by the time the Soviet Union fell that studios were
dumping their tired thrillers as write-offs as such storytelling had worn thin
as the reactionary 1980s wore all Soviet scenarios thin to the breaking
point. This was evidenced by how big a
bomb Rambo III was and how the 1989
Bond film Licence To Kill turned
away from that territory (for which they were masters) and made an
ultra-violent drug kingpin/revenge thriller instead.
However, this
is still a surprisingly energetic, ambitious action film with fight scenes that
convince even when the storyline has issues and Gere gives his best performance
since the underrated Shall We Dance
(2004) and best action work since the somewhat similar and itself mixed The Jackal (1997). Unlike most of the formula action garbage we
have seen lately however, this takes the audience and its intelligence
seriously and you might want to give it a look if it sounds like something you
might want to see. Hope Brandt and Haas
try something like this again soon.
Extras include a Featurette, Trailer and feature length audio commentary track
by Brandt and Haas.
To
further prove how thin Cold War stories were getting, Mission: Impossible: The ’88 TV Season was Paramount’s earlier
attempt to revive the classic TV series and they even got Peter Graves to
return as the one and only Jim Phelps.
Made in Australia, the show added newer technology (some of which is
amusing to see now) and a mix of Cold war and non-Cold War scripts, but the
results were very mixed, too talky like the later seasons of the original show
that ruined it (which I was re-reminded of watching the show again) and when
the writer’s strike happened at that time (even affecting work on Licence To Kill), the show started
recycling scripts from the later seasons of the old show, so it was sabotaged
on some level.
Phelps
gets little PC mini-books with 3-inch CDs that include video (his scanned thumb
print gets the disc out of the machine) and he gets his mission on a computer
screen. Some of this is amusing, but the
show lacks suspense and like later seasons of the original show, watching for
dated technology becomes one of the reasons to revisit it in the face of weaker
teleplays. All 19 hour-long shows are
here across five DVDs.
The new
show managed to land Phil Morris (now known as The Martian Manhunter from Smallville) as the electronics expert
on the team, a role his father Greg Morris had on the original series and their
characters were also father and son.
Thaao Penghlis (Russell’s Altered
States) played disguise expert Nicholas Black, Antony Hamilton (who almost
became the first blond James Bond) played strongman Max Harte, Terry Markwell
played lady agent Casey Randall and Jane Badler (the original “V”, Falcon Crest) played lady agent Shannon Reed (no joke intended).
At least
the show was trying to be Mission: Impossible, but it was a revival that
had too many things working against it.
I hope to revisit the rest of the show when the other half of the series
hits DVD. There are no extras, but for
more of the original series, try these links:
Mission: Impossible: The
Complete First Season
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/4632/Mission:+Impossible+%E2%80%93+Th
Mission: Impossible: The
Complete Second Season
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/5593/Mission:+Impossible+%E2%80%93+Th
The 1080p
2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image on Double
is slightly stylized, but had more good shots throughout than expected, helped
by the fact that Director of Photography Jeffrey L. Kimball, A.S.C. (Star Trek: Nemesis, Glory Road, True Romance, Top Gun
and Mission: Impossible II among his
many films with John Woo) shot this in the Super 35mm format and is a good
choice to lens this genre. The scope
frame is used more effectively than I have seen on many larger blockbuster releases. The DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix
is also decent even with its amount of dialogue, but the surrounds are used
well. No demo moments here, but John
Debney’s score is not bad and most effective since Idlewild (2006)
The 1.33
X 1 image on the episodes of Mission:
Impossible were originally shot on 35mm film, but like so many shows at
this time on TV, credits and visual effects
(and possibly final editing) were finished on analog videotape and that
makes these transfers softer than they should be. Like the HD upgrades Paramount/CBS is doing
on Star Trek: The Next Generation
for Blu-ray and other HD markets & outlets, this series needs the same
treatment, especially as compared to how great the original seasons looked on
DVD alone. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
holds up better, but the lossy codec has its sonic limits.
- Nicholas Sheffo
