Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage are strangely important to the story of the Mission: Impossible franchise, as I understand that story. The first Mission: Impossible arrived in 1996, amid a long decade of big-budget, big box-office, shamelessly over-the-top action movies starring those two actors, such as the Die Hard movies and Armageddon (Willis), and The Rock and Con Air (Cage). These movies created and refined a certain action-movie style and tone, which emerged more or less organically from the acting methods of those two megastars of that silly decade.
As early as the first Die Hard movie (1988), Willis had perfected a way of delivering his lines with a little smirk of self-awareness that suggested he was just slightly cooler than the movie, an admission which somehow made the movies cooler. For his part, Cage had embraced a style of florid overacting, which was palatable and often fun precisely because of its obviousness and self-awareness, and when he found himself in the outlandish contraption of a Nineties action movie like The Rock or Face/Off, he really let loose, taking corny melodrama to the level of camp, taking cartoon villainy to the level of professional wrestling. The boldness of these meta-comic performances by these two actors, and the great success of those movies, created a sort of action movie culture — a larger tendency in the making of those formulaic spectacles that turned their native cynicism absurdity into an ironic style of its own.
The first Mission: Impossible appeared in the middle of all this, more or less. It was a nice blend of the dank European spy thriller and bright American action movie, but its director Brian DePalma endowed it with that slightly lurid DePalma tone, and its famous set-piece of a helicopter chained to a train inside the Chunnel was pretty over-the-top, basically meta-comic like those Cage and Willis movies. Still, by the standards of the decade, Mission: Impossible 1 was pretty understated. Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), on the other hand, was a full expression of the decade’s action-movie madness. John Woo, who’d directed Face/Off, — a movie to which the phrase “over the top” is uniquely inadequate — created heavily stylised action scenes that were both visually striking and a little ridiculous, and he staged the romantic interplay between Tom Cruise and Thandiwe Newton in the tones of extra-ripe melodrama familiar from his vaguely religious Hong Kong films. And, well, sometimes you couldn’t help laughing a little.
It’s easy to imagine Tom Cruise — who by this second Mission: Impossible had become a producer as well as the star of the franchise — looking back on the movie and telling his team, “Okay. Let’s not have any more of that extra-ripe melodrama stuff. Let’s not have any more half-intentional metacomedy. I am not Bruce Willis. I am not Nicholas Cage. I’m Tom Cruise. I don’t want people laughing at my movies and wondering if I’m in on the joke.” That is, the move from sodden and spiritual John Woo directing Mission: Impossible 2 to utilitarian J.J. Abrams directing Mission: Impossible 3 (2006) seems a pretty obvious and intentional course-correction. From then on, the campy excess, and the signs of directorial licence and vision, disappeared. There was more excess than ever, of course, but it wasn’t campy. And there was plenty of licence, but the person enjoying the licence, the person whose vision informed these movies, was not some artsy-fartsy director, who might make the star come off campy or accidentally funny, but the star himself, the star of stars, Tom Cruise.
From that point — though they grew ever more complex in both their set-pieces and their plots — the movies were no longer a little weird in their framing and tone, their look, their vision. The ambient postmodernism of the Nineties was gone. Amazingly, though, they stayed pretty good. They were thrilling and fun. They set a standard for consistency and reliability in a movie franchise that will be hard to beat. What I can say, movie-review-wise, about Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is that it’s almost exactly as good, almost exactly as fun and exciting, as the last five or six Mission: Impossibles. It’s being reported that The Final Reckoning is the final Mission: Impossible. If that’s so, then the series is ending neither on a high note nor as a disappointment, but as the sound realisation of well-founded expectations.
As successful and well-made as these movies have been, they’ve also been… I’m tempted to say they’ve been a little soulless, but that’s not quite right. It’s not that these movies don’t have a soul. They do have a soul, but it’s the soul of a Scientologist. Most of what I know about Scientology I know from things Tom Cruise was filmed saying about it, and what Scientology seems to have done for (or to) Tom Cruise is to make him believe that he can do pretty much anything. More specifically, the power or value-added of Scientology seems to be that this ability to do pretty much anything flows from the Scientologist’s, or at least Tom Cruise’s, belief in this ability. It’s the belief that counts, the believer’s will, the believing willer’s power to commit, the committed believer’s power to do… something, whatever. When Tom Cruise speaks about how Scientology empowers him, he sounds absolutely ready and able to take action, heroic action if necessary, but he’s somewhat befuddled, if not mentally paralysed, on the matter of why he might act, what purpose his superhuman powers of action might serve. But it’s also clear that, should a worthwhile purpose fall into his lap, he totally believes he’d be able to do almost anything to realise it.
This latter stretch of Mission: Impossible movies is a testament to this belief, and to the unusual powers that possibly flow from it. And luckily for Cruise, the films themselves provide him with a self-renewing purpose to which he can direct his special powers. That purpose is to exceed, in scale of spectacle and physical daring of stunts and complicatedness of plot, in each new Mission: Impossible, whatever was done in the last Mission: Impossible. It’s necessary to interject here that Cruise not only stars in and produces these movies. He does his own stunts in these them, and it is central to the meaning of these movies that everyone knows this. These stunts rise to their highest greatness and their greatest importance in The Final Reckoning.
I’m not being totally fair to the later Mission: Impossibles when I say they have the soul of a Scientologist. They are dominated by this soul, but the light of other souls flickers pleasingly within them. They are wonderfully cast, with great villains extending back to Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible 3 and forward to the latest villain, played by Esai Morales. And when Vanessa Kirby arrived as the semi-villainous White Widow in Mission: Impossible: Fallout (2018), it felt like the movie and I were both being defibrillated. I’ve approached every subsequent MI with one initial thought: I hope the White Widow is in it.
One funny thing about the White Widow is how, despite her sexual charge and ambiguous motives, she exemplifies a sort of children’s-movie logic in much of the franchise’s characterisation. Many characters in the Mission: Impossible movies — to use the moral language of my daughters when they were little — start out mean but end up nice. Aside from the one main villain in each movie, Ethan Hunt’s antagonists always end up on his side, won over to a principle of universal niceness — which is anchored by the presence of a global threat — that his impossibly elaborate Mission is meant to serve. This is morally simple, if not simple-minded, but it works okay within the sentimental world of the franchise, which is otherwise dominated by movie machinery overcoming itself entirely for the sake of this overcoming, which is to say by the able and empty will of Tom Cruise.
This recourse to universal niceness as a global value made urgent by a global threat goes back at least to Nineties movies such as Armageddon (asteroid) and Independence Day (aliens). In the last two Mission: Impossibles, the global threat is a malevolent AI agent known as the Entity, which (who?) is rapidly taking over the world. The Entity is an even more unnerving action-movie conceit in The Final Reckoning than it was two years ago in Dead Reckoning, because it doesn’t feel so much like an action-movie conceit anymore. Maybe that’s why I wanted it to be a bigger presence in the new film. We see what it’s doing — casting a veil of confusion over people’s perceptions of the world, taking over the arsenals of every nuclear power — but we don’t get to hear the electronic thrum of its voice nearly enough. We don’t get to have the super-intelligent AI blow our minds by explaining itself.
Of course, this is because it’s a Mission: Impossible movie, a Tom Cruise production, in which the wildest, spookiest, most interesting thing to emerge in the history of the world has to take a back seat to, well, stunts. As the Mission: Impossible franchise has gone on, the daredevil stunts, and the public knowledge that Cruise is doing them, have grown in importance. The last two movies — despite the likeable and beautiful cast of side-characters, and despite the logistical complexity of their individual capers and their larger plot — emit a somewhat reductive sense that they’re built for the sake of their stunts, that the film is a vehicle for Tom Cruise to show the world the insane things he has the iron will and thus the barely human ability to do.
“The last two movies emit a somewhat reductive sense that they’re built for the sake of their stunts.”
But there’s a niggling aesthetic problem with Cruise’s superhuman self-belief. When you’re watching the Mission: Impossible stunt sequences, you inevitably start thinking about the stunt, not as a thrilling physical trial of a character in a movie story you’ve suspended your disbelief to enter as if it’s real life, but as a stunt. Instead of just worrying that the villain might get the better of our hero Ethan Hunt as the two of them wrestle with physics and luck and each other, you can’t help drifting into spell-breaking reflections, especially as the sequence extends into its ninth or tenth minute. “Wow,” you start thinking, “it’s really Tom Cruise doing that stunt. I wonder if he was scared. How does he hang on so long? How old is he now? Sixty-something? Jeez, that’s impressive for his age. For any age, really. I wonder what his wife thinks about all this. Who’s his wife now? Wait. He’s not married anymore, is he? I think I read something about that pretty Spanish actress.”
The Mission: Impossibles, then, go overboard in a way that would have forced various ironic concessions from other action-movie franchises, or in other action-movie eras. Were James Bond to motorcycle from a cliff and then parachute to the ground, he’d have to accent his landing with a cheeky adjustment of his bowtie or something, to cue the audience to chuckle at this self-aware gesture and not at the silliness and improbability of the thing itself. But the Mission: Impossibles see no need for cheeky gesturing because there’s no artifice to acknowledge. As it was the real Tom Cruise treating that rocky cliff as a motorcycle ramp, it is Tom Cruise himself pendulating gracefully under that parachute, easing down to the riverbank for that elegant landing. You might rather applaud than laugh, like someone in the stands at the Olympics.
The impressive self-creation and self-mythologising of Tom Cruise have woven his roles as actor, producer, stuntman, and celebrity into a single entity, so to speak, one consuming presence so looming and powerful it turns the usual actor-movie relationship inside out. When you drift into those distracted reflections as he does his unlikely stunts, it starts to feel less like Tom Cruise is an actor in the latest Mission: Impossible than that the latest Mission: Impossible is a prop in the epic saga of Tom Cruise, an elaborate demonstration that he can do anything, that he’s big enough to contain anything. Tom Cruise isn’t in Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning. Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is in Tom Cruise. But this means that the films and their star were always in a strange competition with each other. The movies needed to exceed their predecessors in action-movie magnitude, and Cruise needed to loom larger than the movies, to envelop their expanding artifice in his Tom Cruise reality. As the movies got bigger, Cruise and his stunts had to grow in scale and daring too.
There’s a signal in the latest entry, though, that this existential arms-race between movie star and movie franchise had to end — Cruise’s hair. The first thing you notice when Ethan Hunt appears on screen is that he seems to have missed a couple of haircuts. His hair is weirdly long. It’s over his ears. Another character even makes a joke about it. “I like the longer hair,” Hayley Atwell’s Grace says when she and we first see him. That is, the movie resorts to a cheeky gesture of self-awareness, a bit of action-movie irony, to adjust for Cruise’s conspicuous do. But why is it an issue? Why does he have distracting hair when it has no importance to the story, and when it doesn’t look very good? The first thing I thought of, which my wife echoed, is that he has longer hair to make himself look younger than he is.
The long hair is an ageing man’s ruse, a bit of artifice that can’t be denied. So it has to be acknowledged, via an ironic mention at the beginning of the ageing man’s new movie. This is a queasy moment. It reminds us that there’s at least one aspect of reality that the muscular will of Tom Cruise hasn’t mastered after all. It hasn’t mastered time.
And so the Mission: Impossible franchise is ending not because it’s said all it needs to say. It’s been saying the same thing for 20 years, which never really needed to be said in the first place. There’s no reason it couldn’t keep repeating itself. The franchise is ending because its star can’t sustain his mastery over it. Tom Cruise can’t keep being bigger than his massive movies — despite the Scientology pep-talks he gives himself — because time and age are making him smaller. He surely can’t keep doing those elaborate stunts. The most he can do, perhaps, is to grow his hair so it’s over his ears, and then join everyone else in laughing at it.
