Customer Reviews

The Best of Mission Impossible, Volume 4 [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
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I renember of watching "The Mercenaries" for the first time. I consider it one of the bets MI episodes ever! It was very inteligent.

I have the picture of the villian (with a Fidel Castro looking) shooting Rollin when he fiunds ot that Rollin is an IMF agent.

The golden stealing scene was really well planed and really well done (I hear that the golden bars whre Ice Creams tablets). I read in a megazine that this scene became very famous.

It was always good to see IMF on action. In my opinion, "The Mercenaries is the second best episode of MI's season 3. It only looses for "The Mind of Staphan Miklos".

There are two episodes on this tape. The Mercenaries and The Exchange. The Exchange is a major and exciting departure for M.I. It is the only episode where an MI agent is captured (Cinnamon) at the beginning. The entire show is based on an exciting and creative "rescue".

This is a show that the creator (Bruce Gellar) did not want to make. Later this became one of his favorite shows. Phelps is clearly pained by Cinnamons capture and the rescue is a "cold war" stroke of genius. A must see!!

"The Mercenaries" is an episode that goes so far beyond the limitations of the "suspension of disbelief" level that it just becomes ridiculous. This holds true even if you grant the usual necessary levels needed for episodes of the show.
The commander of a group of mercenaries fighting in Africa is an American and he has a stash of gold bars in a supposedly impenetrable vault. Phelps and Cinnamon pose as missionaries to mask their "true" role of running arms to the mercenaries. While Phelps and Cinnamon are negotiating with the commander, Barney and Willy use an old tunnel that runs under the compound to drill up through the floor of the vault and steal the gold. This is where the laws of nature are so violated that you are constantly objecting.
The problems are:

*) Barney and Willy are running a gasoline-powered generator in the tunnel; while they don respirator masks those masks would not protect them from the lack of oxygen and the presence of carbon monoxide.
*) The melted gold runs down through a tube and is poured in bar molds. Even though gold has a melting point of nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, Barney is not wearing gloves when he handles the tube.
*) The gold cools so quickly that the bars are solid in a short time.
*) Despite having handled a ton of melted gold and having it solidify in the tunnel, Barney and Willy show little affects of the heat.
*) The entire vault of gold fits into a small container and they have no trouble moving it around.

All of these serious violations of the laws of nature made me glad when the episode was over.
"The Exchange" is a much better episode, although Cinnamon cracks much too easily when she is captured. The IM force manages to infiltrate a compound in what is meant to be East Germany so that Cinnamon can photocopy documents regarding the enemy agents that are operating in the west. However, when she opens a window, a pigeon flies in and trips the light sensor alarm. Fortunately, Cinnamon is able to drop the camera to Phelps before she is captured.
Refusing to believe that Cinnamon is simply a soldier of fortune, the sadistic commander of the base enlists the help of a psychologist to break her. Desperate to save her, the rest of the IM force develops a scheme to break the top spy that the west has captured out of prison and exchange him for Cinnamon. However, in order to avoid being jailed, the IM force needs to extract all the valuable information from the spy before the exchange.
The tactics they use are excellent; there is very little need for the viewer to question whether it would work. The only weakness is how easily Cinnamon falls apart, granted she is subject to sleep deprivation and drugs, she is reduced to a shrieking wreck very quickly. A member of the highly trained IM force would not be so easy to crack.