10 Complex Movie Schemes That Actually Make No Sense

9. Mission: Impossible Is Mission: Improbable

Jon Voight's plan is simple, he €“ actually, no it's not. At all. His double-crossing IMF agent Jim Phelp's scheme in Brian De Palma's glitzy blockbuster update of the cult sixties show is almost certainly responsible for the ongoing trend of action thrillers to have endless twisty turny last-reel shockers where it's revealed somebody else had been pulling the strings all along, and there's a bunch of flashbacks explaining it, and it still doesn't really make sense. Mission: Impossible opens with a team of agents trying to stop the theft of a bunch of covert operative's identities from the American embassy in Prague. It doesn't really work out. As in, the rest of the team dies horribly, except for Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt, who has to go on the run and try to figure out who set them up. Because he was the only survivor, so his bosses assume he was the mole inside the group. Except - surprise! It turns out Jim Phelps didn't die at all, despite his bloody murder being caught on camera. Faked it all, didn't he. And a member of the team of IMF rogues Hunt has been chilling with was also working with him. So somehow he faked his death, returned from the dead, set it up so Hunt would take the fall but also hook up with Jean Reno's similarly double-crossing Krieger, and why do they end up in the Channel Tunnel again?