Mission: Impossible (Brian De Palma, 1996): Brian De Palma hasn't directed all that many guy movies in his career (and no, Body Double doesn't count, no matter how many porn stars and power drill murders it has), but after The Untouchables and Scarface the past two weeks, we might as well make it three on a macho (ding ding ding!!! Yes!! LeisureSuit.net has just scored it's worst pun ever! I reckon I'll be wearing that crown for a while) and cover Mission Impossible this week.

Now this is an action film, and it has people being killed by knives and guns, and it has beautiful women and explosions, and high tech gadgets, so I don't want any argument that it isn't "guy" enough. I'll grant that it's not the sort of movie for a guy who watches movies in his boxers with a bag of Tostitos by the remote control and a can of Schlitz perched on his hairy pot belly, but a movie for guys who program computers for a living or guys in mirrored sunglasses is still a guy movie. It's not brutish and in your face--it's cool, slick, and, yes, a little fancy.

Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt, master of disguise and member of an elite team of IMF agents dedicated to nabbing criminals and protecting the American way. Why the International Monetary Fund gives a crap about criminals or the American way is never made clear, but I do know Pat Buchanan hates the IMF, so they must be good guys in real life, too.

Hunt's team is the pride of the IMF, primarily because they're so damn sexy, with such pulchritudinous spooks as the lovely, limey Kristin Scott Thomas, she of the bee-stung lips, Ms. Emmanuelle Béart, and that hung hunk Emilio Estevez-- . . . Oh, shit, pretend I didn't say that last one. I don't know what came over me. Someone must have slipped something into my Beefaroni. Anyway, under the fearless leadership of guy movie staple Jon Voight, these highly trained operatives are monitoring the theft of a disk which contains something confusing, but I think it's the key to opening something called the NOC list, which contains information about secret government agents across the globe.

The operation meets with disaster, and when Hunt is the only one to emerge alive, he immediately comes under the suspicion of Kittridge, the teams' dispatcher. Kittridge is played by that greaseball-in-a-thousand-dollar-suit Henry Czerny, who has built a substantial career playing child molesters and government bureaucrats (I'll leave the debate on which is worse for a later column), and here sounds just fabulous saying "your mission should you choose to accept it." Anyway, Hunt risks being detained on suspicion of treason, but with the help of some explosive chewing gum (see . . . guy movie!) escapes in a flood of goldfish and broken glass.

So now the hunt is on to figure out who betrayed him. A hunt which will require him, for reasons few viewers will understand, to hire some fellow disavowed agents to break into CIA Headquarters in Langley, VA to steal the aforementioned NOC list. It's an impossible mission, but with the help of his recruits--the undeniably masculine Ving Rhames and the as-masculine-as-a-guy-who-speaks-French-can-be Jean Reno--he may or may not succeed, but at least it'll be a way cool scene that'll look great in the trailer.

I love caper films, and heist films, and films with high-tech gadgets and heroes who win the day by using their brains and cool rather than their ability to wield a tank gun in one hand. Mission: Impossible is just that kind of movie. Its only downsides are the fact that you have to see the film 3 or 4 times before you can follow the plot, and that Hunt and Emmanuelle Beart clearly have sex, but the scene is like totally edited out. I paid eight dollars for that???

But still, Mission: Impossible rates. A very cool movie.