Our mission, that we chose to accept: Watching Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt become a cult leader

Once again Luke Y. Thompson (AV Club) has given us an exclusive film review you’ll find only here at the Bunker. Our association with Luke goes back more than 20 years, to a now defunct publication, New Times Los Angeles, where he was one of the very few reviewers in the country who actually liked John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth. In other words, Luke calls them the way he sees them. He last provided us with what we still consider the best and most truthful review of Top Gun: Maverick that you’ll find anywhere. (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One opens in US theaters on July 12.)

Both Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One feature key action sequences set on moving trains. Indy’s is drenched in layers of CG and shot in front of obvious bluescreen; Ethan Hunt’s has Tom Cruise and Esai Morales actually running and crouching atop a real train (though the grand finale, with carriages falling off a bridge one by one, is almost certainly studio-shot and computer abetted). M:I’s train sequence is the better one, but not as exponentially better as perhaps one might think. “Realness” may seem super-important to stunt people, but it’s hardly the primary narrative concern – cartoons are as unreal as it gets, yet you’ve probably shed tears over the fates of Pixar characters.

Involvement in the story is what really makes or breaks the action, and Indiana Jones is a reliable old friend who screws up sometimes, and shows his age. Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, meanwhile, becomes a progressively more saintlike and less human character each film, though his frequent bouts with anxiety in this film sure beat the actor’s certainty of perfection in Top Gun: Maverick. He seems pretty good at acting, too, because isn’t Dianetics supposed to cure you of all of the reactive mind panic attacks or whatever in real life?

I called the Maverick character Narcissistic Navy Jesus, and while Hunt ditches the narcissism, he’s still a savior, but now the “For I so love the world I will give my only begotten personal life” type. More than ever, his Impossible Mission Force feels like a cult out to recruit people at their lowest moments, when their lives have become too dangerous and hunted to survive. Join the team, accept Tom Cruise as your savior...or you could go home and have someone blow your brains out. When Ethan makes the pitch to sexy pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), he tells her, “Your life will always matter more to me than my own.”

“You don’t even know me,” she responds. “What difference does that make?” he replies, as inspirational music swells. Several action sequences later, he’s sending her across a railroad bridge to (a sort of) total freedom that still involves her following orders for the rest of her life.

For someone who used to be such a sex symbol and is clearly in denial about his own aging, Cruise remains awfully chaste in this movie too – he wants to save all the pretty ladies but never shtup them.  Moreover, his tragic backstory with women gets retconned into even more tragedy this time out, as new villain Gabriel (Esai Morales), in addition to being practically a super-villain in the present, gets digitally de-aged into some of Hunt’s traumatic flashbacks. It seems he has a penchant for killing women Hunt likes – perhaps his code-name should be “Fridge,” and not just because the normally life-preserving Hunt would love to nuke him.

Gabriel, for reasons that will presumably be better explained in Part Two, given that everything else is over explained in this one, is the servant of a dangerous AI that’s basically a social media troll-bot which evolved sentience. Visually, it resembles a digital display of Everything Everywhere All at Once’s everything bagel, and every nation in the world wants it as their own personal WMD; Ethan Hunt is apparently the only one in this reality to have watched the Terminator movies. The MacGuffin of the movie is a set of two keys that access something connected to the AI, but nobody’s really quite sure what. So rather than simply taking the keys, various interests keep following the key holders around hoping to be led somewhere of significance and not get killed by the other folks with the same idea.

The Mission: Impossible movies began while Cruise was still in his “work with all the great directors” phase, as auteurs like Brian de Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, and Brad Bird took their installments in wildly different directions. Starting with the fifth film, though, they’ve all been directed by Christopher McQuarrie, a Cruise-Whisperer extraordinaire, who, aside from his feature directorial debut The Way of the Gun, has only ever directed Tom Cruise movies. With him now guiding the franchise, and the different directorial visions idea scrapped, the M:I movies have veered in more of the Fast and Furious/Saw direction of adding new characters and story convolutions each time out that nobody with a life remembers the intricacies of. At one point in the new film, Simon Pegg has to remind us what his character’s surname is, just so we’ll all understand a pun based on it. (Perhaps notably, the sequence involves him taking a combination lie-detector/riddle solving personality test conducted by the AI under potential penalty of death.)

It’s all very serious even as it gets silly. Ethan Hunt is extraordinarily humorless as action heroes go, with only one moment of being deliberately funny when he pretends to be an Italian lawyer by putting on glasses and speaking a few words of Italian. To the extent that he gets any other laughs, it’s at the moments when he realizes he has to do an insane stunt, and basically has a big WTF moment. Again, considering Cruise loves to do that stuff and it’s the main reason these movies even get made, this is some decent acting, because he’s briefly persuasive as a person who definitely does not want to do the thing. For what it’s worth, the much-hyped motorcycle jump off a mountain is over pretty quickly and you’ve likely seen most of it in trailers. The better action beats involve Grace being in jeopardy, because she’s more likable and funny, and there’s an actual chance she won’t survive. I’ve no idea if Atwell did her stunts for real, and I don’t care.

Perhaps the movie’s best joke is an unintentional one of timing – the film opens with a Russian submarine armed with what we’re told is “the state of the art of war.” The actual Russian army these days would seem to require significantly less than an AI weapon to befuddle.

Obligatory series moments: those latex faces, Cruise on a motorcycle, and lots of Tom Cruise running, even when it doesn’t advance the plot. At one point, after a long run, the story simply cuts away and doesn’t show where he went; at another, a key fight between two major players that’s tense and genuinely well-choreographed keeps getting cut away from to show Cruise running toward it, even as the score essentially spoils the fact that he won’t be getting there on time. Pretty efficient to make your daily aerobic exercise part of the movie, I suppose.

I'll say this for McQuarrie: he’s learned the lesson of J.J. Abrams’ third film in the franchise, a mostly decent mix of action with domestic drama that sputtered to a terrible ending and left moviegoers walking out with a bad feeling. This writer-director makes sure to put his big action setpiece at the very end, and consistently up the stakes right to the point of ridiculousness, stopping just short of utter absurdity (for actual utter absurdity, check out John Woo’s mostly maligned second film in the series, complete with limp bizkit theme song). McQuarrie did it with the Henry Cavill cliffside fight last movie, and he does it again with the falling train carriages here. If only he weren’t so full of it when he claims there was somehow too much story to tell for one movie. This one takes forever to get to the good stuff, and leaves us with the knowledge that there’s a whole second film to get through to complete the plot. Again, it’ll probably be a bunch of setpieces glued together by a lot of hasty exposition that still all boils down to: “There's a bad thing that Tom Cruise has to stop.”

One day, the actor might realize that “aging gracefully” isn’t one of those things. Cruise’s best phase was when he realized people perceived him as a shallow pretty boy, and made a string of movies that subverted and twisted that image, from Rain Man to Born on the Fourth of July. The day he makes a movie that depicts him as an aging adrenaline junkie control freak – but in a destructive way – he might become interesting again. For now, that’s probably too much of a risk to the paycheck.

Roger Moore, who was derided as too old to play James Bond at age 57 in A View to a Kill, is surely too gentlemanly to shake his fist in the afterlife.

— Luke Y. Thompson

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