I’m not the first person to notice this, but it’s got more in common with Hitchcock’s wrong man thrillers than it does any other Mission: Impossible movie. Even the colour palette feels lifted straight from the Technicolor glories of North by Northwest.
There’s a focus on the technology here that feels objectively wrong for this series. Watching this with our niece one day (she’s currently one and a half, so it’ll be a few years) is going to be an exercise in pausing every five minutes to explain what all this ancient technology was. Here’s a film that spends roughly five minutes on footage of Hunt using Usenet, a technology that was already dated in 1996 and practically forgotten in 2025.
Despite being wildly dissimilar to other films in this franchise, this has its charms: two nail-biting sequences in the film (Langley and the train) are worth any price of admission. A lot of fun if one is willing to approach it with the right mindset.