This franchise is a dog with a sequel coming out one a decade, how about a reboot? New cast, all potraying the original characters, and doing it more in the style of the series (something else I've not seen in a very long time)?
I would like to see a reboot more in the vein of the series. What I think would be an interesting approach would be to capitalize on the potential in the familiar opening catchphrases. Consider: A man goes to a secret drop and gets a recorded message telling him about a dangerous situation that can't be dealt with by conventional means. It's described as "Your mission,
should you choose to accept it" -- meaning it's a volunteer mission. According to a line spoken only in the pilot episode, the man is given carte blanche as to team composition and methods. If any of his team are caught or killed, the Secretary (probably of Defense) will disavow any knowledge of their actions.
After accepting this assignment, the man goes to his home and selects a team consisting, not of career agents, but of professionals from ordinary life who have the necessary skills for the particular mission -- an engineer, a master of disguise, a strongman, maybe a safecracker or a man with an eidetic memory or a high-wire walker as needed. These people are also volunteers. They meet in the man's apartment to plan their mission.
Does this sound like a major spy operation? No. It sounds like an off-the-books, deniable mission, something the government is staying as far away from as possible. It's basically a con game with implicit but unofficial government backing. These people are doing things that are technically illegal and unauthorized, and they're on their own if they get caught. It's possible that the Secretary and the guy on the tape are the only ones who actually know about the team and their missions.
At least, that's the impression I had at the start. The show didn't really follow this pattern, since there were plenty of episodes where the team was working with official support and had access to any government resources they needed. It wasn't so much that they were operating
sub rosa as that they were able to do things by unconventional means and solve problems that nobody else could solve. But if that was so, why even bother with the secret message drop? Why the implied volunteer nature of the missions and the threat of disavowal? There's a lot of potential in that opening voiceover that I don't think has ever really been explored.
The movies to date have treated the IMF as a massive government organization, even a sub-branch of the CIA itself. That's kind of a logical progression from the original series (where they increasingly had all the government support they needed) and the '88 revival series (which postulated a larger IMF organization with multiple teams). But I'm intrigued by the idea of the IMF as just one guy, perhaps a retired CIA agent who still unofficially does favors for the Secretary, running a sort of garage-band spy operation out of his apartment, recruiting civilian friends and colleagues to help him out on extremely off-book missions that are too sensitive or too illegal for the government to undertake officially. That's what I'd like to see in an M:I reboot.
