Mission Impossible Movies
Tom Cruise, while at the peak of his popularity in the
mid-1990s, started producing movies for himself to star in with the Mission
Impossible franchise. Many other actors
take on a franchise role early in their career that they may return to when
they need a lift at the box office (ie Stallone in the Rocky and Rambo series)
or they may try a character that may have ongoing appeal later on their careers
(ie 2014’s The November Man was clearly such an attempt by Pierce Brosnan, a more
successful example is Johnny Depp in the Pirates series or Liam Neeson in the
Taken, though originally the first installments of those two series were much
more successful than expected). Cruise
effectively purchased an insurance policy for himself since inevitably his star
began to wane a little (in the U.S. anyway) after many years of gigantic hits
but every time he makes a Mission Impossible movie he gets a boost.
The films are all pop spy thrillers that involve deception,
disguises, inventive action sequences and a team focused on averting global and
personal disasters. Cruise has helped
stave off franchise fatigue in a few key ways.
Each film has a different director, with a distinct style. Additionally each film has a different leading
lady, sometimes the lady is involved with Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, at
other times she is just a member of the team.
The team members are unique in each film, though Ving Rhames has been a
constant in each film (though he only had a cameo appearance in Ghost
Protocol). Hunt has a different superior
in each, usually an extremely talented and respected actor (Jon Voight, Anthony
Hopkins, Laurence Fishburne, and Tom Wilkinson) Also, the films come out every
four to five years, so they are occasional visitors as opposed to frequent
guests. Like the Bond films all of the
films open with a pre-title sequence, and then has a few minutes devoted to
colorful credits played out with a variation of the famous Mission Impossible
theme. In each film Cruise himself does a lot of the
outrageous stunts, with one big standout. With the upcoming release of Mission
Impossible; Rogue Nation, I want to take a quick look back at the first four
entries of the series. Note I will be
discussing some spoilers from each of the films.
Brian DePalma directed the first film and his style is
evident. There are lots of scenes
setting the stage for an upcoming big sequence, shots from underneath the
actor’s chins –notably the scene in which Hunt and Kittridge face off in the
restaurant, tracking shots –the one at one at the beginning of the third act in
which the Chunnel train appears from outside to then goes inside is an example,
and more suspense than physical confrontation-Ethan has only two very quick
fights and one of them he loses easily.
There is an overly intricate plot in which it all comes down to a set
piece in each act of Ethan’s team retrieving a NOC list (list of undercover
Western agents) twice (the first two acts) and then stopping its spread (the
third). Some fans of the original show
complained that the character played by Jon Voight, who turned out to be a
traitor in this film was the hero in the original show but I never saw the show
so it did not bother me. I had recently
seen The Professional and was touched by Jean Reno’s performance there so it
shocked me more to see him as a bad guy here.
Ving Rhames had been in Pulp Fiction as Marsellus Wallace about a year
and a half before that and he brings a refreshing element to Luther, the
computer expert who over the course of the series develops a fun relationship
with Ethan. This film also caused me to
take notice of Emmanuelle Beart to the degree that I subsequently sought out
some of her French films (L’Enfer, Un Couer en Hiver, Manon of the Spring,
etc.) and started following her career. Henry
Czerny, (to me the true villain of Clear and Present Danger two years earlier)
is a lot of fun as the smarmy Kittridge and Vanessa Redgrave’s presence is a
nice surprise. Cruise himself is
perfectly cast as Hunt (in a role created for him) as a competent but young
agent who suddenly finds himself in an unexpected situation that he manages to
work his way through. Cruise’s big stunt in this film is
dropping from a rope into the vault. The
film uses Prague and London well and the theft of the NOC list from the CIA
vault is the highlight of the film, capped off perfectly by Kittridge’s line
regarding the fate of the poor schmoe whose only mistake was getting drugged by
Claire. ***
John Woo, the Hong Kong action maestro who directed two of
my favorite action films (The Killer, Face/Off) directed MI2. The film combines all the Woo trademarks (a
hero and villain who have a complicated relationship and in some ways are
mirror images of each other-at one point they even talk to each other through
mirrors, the idea being they are looking at each other and seeing themselves-
balletic gunplay, people firing two guns with outstretched arms while doing all
kinds of acrobatics, Mexican standoffs, white doves, over the top stunts and
extended fight scenes) with elements of the classic Hitchcock film Notorious,
in which an agent sends a woman he loves to seduce a villain in order to spy on
him. The idea is intriguing but the result
is a bit of a mixed bag. Mi2 has several
effective scenes (the rock climbing sequence in the opening segues perfectly
from the crash in the Rockies, the shootout at the chemical lab, Nyah’s
burglary scene, the motorcycle chase) but they seem like disconnected parts
rather than a piece of a cohesive whole.
Hans Zimmer provides an eerie score, particularly this
piece with a chorus during the lab sequence, but the retooling of the main theme to a more
heavy metal sound seems out of place. Cruise
plays Ethan a little differently, as though Woo’s vision for the series also reimagined
Ethan as a character. He sort flows through the film in a
dreamlike state (his longer hair seems a metaphor for this) rather than recreating
his quick and wired presence in the first film, which Cruise recovers and
builds on in the subsequent films. Cruise
seems to have a lot of fun playing Sean posing as Ethan on the plane. Notably this is Cruise’s first full on action
film in which he does a lot of fighting and shooting along with his other
moves. Most of his other films up to
this point are dramas that may have an action scene or two. Cruise recreates the rope dropping stunt when
he enters the lab but the key stunt here is in the climbing sequence in which
Ethan jumps from one
face of a cliff to another, which of course Cruise did himself. Thandie Newton is lovely as Nyah, though she
has little dialogue in the second half of the film and Dougray Scott is a
strong antagonist with a vicious Scottish accent. I wonder is Scott has any resentment toward
this film. He had been cast as Wolverine
in X-Men but had to drop out due to the film going over schedule and Hugh
Jackman took over the part and became a superstar with it. ***
Cruise recruited JJ
Abrams to direct MI3, Abrams first feature (he had done a lot of television as
a director and producer, most notably Lost and Alias). Abrams created a clever spy story that mixes
Ethan’s attempt at creating a domestic life for himself with a nurse named
Julia, played with a lot of warmth by Michelle Monaghan, with the need for his
skills during a crisis at IMF. The
pretitle sequence is perhaps the best of the series as it drops us into the
middle of a terrifying scenario from the third act of the film and after the
titles goes back into scenes celebrating Ethan and Julia’s engagement, which is
a refreshing look at another side of Ethan.
He is trying to hide his true career (he has largely become a trainer
with only occasional fieldwork) but can’t help himself such as in a scene in
which he instinctively reads the lips of Julia and her friends speaking. Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays well named
villain, Owen Davian, who is after the Rabbit’s Foot, a device whose sole
purpose is to be the MacGuffin (the item which both the heroes and villains
want). MI-3 is loaded with memorable
sequences that unlike in the previous film, are edited better and feel
interconnected. There is a break in at
the Vatican in which Ethan and his team kidnap Davian, an interrogation of
Davian on a plane which goes against Ethan, the rescue of Davian on the
Chesapeake Bay-Bridge Tunnel, Ethan’s attempt to get to Julia ahead of Davian,
Ethan’s own captivity and escape from IMF with help from an unlikely source,
Ethan’s run through a
Chinese village to save Julia, much of it filmed in a single take, Ethan’s
creatively staged final face off with Davian, and Julia’s heroic moment at the
end of that scene. The signature stunt
in the film is Ethan jumping
from one Shanghai skyscraper to another in order to recover the Rabbit’s
Foot. The characters all have creative
names (Brassel, Musgrave, Benji). Laurence
Fishburne is a fun authoritative presence in the film with some witty lines (“please
don’t interrupt me when I am asking rhetorical questions”), Hoffman is a smart
and menacing presence, never saying more than he needs to. Rhames offers his usual solid support, Simon
Pegg is a nice addition as kind of a Q character. The only step wrong is John Rhys Myers and
Maggie Q do not have much to do as the other members of Ethan’s field team, but
this is corrected in the next film. ****
The box office response was exceptionally strong for the
first two films ($457 million and $546 million respectively but a little lower
for part three, making around $397 million).
I suspected the series was over.
Tom Cruise had fallen a little out of favor due to some, to me, silly
incidents. I could care less about his
Scientology beliefs or who he is involved with.
My only relationship to him is as an audience member and as one his
films consistently deliver. I think also
his core audience, people who grew up in the 80s like myself, had grown up and
were not going to the movies as frequently.
Paramount, the distributor of the Mission films (and many Cruise’s other
films) ended their relationship with Cruise in late 2006 so I was bit surprised
when in 2010 it was announced that Paramount had struck a deal with Cruise to
make a fourth Mission Impossible film.
When Cruise’s 2010 action film, Knight and Day, in which he played a
character similar to Ethan, underperformed in the U.S. the stakes were
especially high for the film that was ultimately named Mission Impossible - Ghost
Protocol. Jeremy Renner, who was an up
and coming star after The Hurt Locker (2009) and The Town (2010), was brought
in the shoulder some of the box office responsibility along with Cruise.
Brad Bird, the director of The Incredibles (a Pixar
superhero film with an interesting take on the genre that I enjoyed) and
Ratatouille (also a Pixar film, but one that I have never seen-the idea of rats
and food make me a little nauseous) made his live action directing debut with
this film. JJ Abrahams, who had developed a close relationship with Cruise in
the third film, stayed on as a producer.
Bird’s unique eye leads to the best visuals in the series and the focus
is very heavily on the team, though Ethan remains the undisputed leader. Simon Pegg returns as Benji, and has a much
bigger role this time. Jeremy Renner
plays Brandt, an analyst who reluctantly ends up on the adventure, and Paula
Patton plays Agent Carter, a kickass agent.
Each member of the team is crucially important and they each have their
own arc. Some of the many memorable scenes include a jailbreak, an escape from
a hospital, a disastrous infiltration of the Kremlin, a fight in a carpark with
cars going up and down moving platforms, a chase through a sandstorm, and the
signature stunt is Ethan climbing
on the outside of the tallest building in the world, the Burj Kalifa, in
Dubai. The IMF team, faced with unreliable technology
this time out, is trying to ultimately stop a fanatic played by Michael
Nyquist, from starting a nuclear war.
Cruise plays Ethan as a little haunted and worn down emotionally (though
definitely NOT physically). Ethan, who
by now is a pretty senior person at IMF, has had a rough time since the last
film, the details of which are slowly filled in. He has been in the Russian prison for an
unspecified amount of time (in the pretitle sequence he is first shown throwing
a stone against the wall of his cell in a homage to Steve McQueen doing the
same with a baseball in The Great Escape-the title of which serves as
foreshadowing to the thrilling scene that follows) and his marital status is
unclear but hinted at in several ways.
Brandt looks a bit uncomfortable when he first sees Ethan,
and then the Secretary mentions that he knows Ethan has sacrificed a lot, Benji
says something to Carter about Julia having left Ethan (which struck me as an
out of character since Ethan and Julia are shown as very much together at the
end of MI-3). Brandt eventually reveals
that he had previously been assigned to protect Ethan and Julia from afar in
Croatia and that Julia was kidnapped and killed, leading to Brandt leaving the
field out of guilt, and becoming an analyst, which links his story with
Ethan’s. How long ago this was again is
unclear but I took it to be about a year or two. When Brandt mentioned this I felt it was odd
that Ethan of all people would need a bodyguard, and wondered what Ethan and
Julia were doing in Croatia but it may have had something to do with the
Serbians and Ethan and Julia may have been there pretending to be on vacation.
Exposition is always tricky in a film like this and Bird and
his screenwriters show ingenuity in the multilayered final scene set near a
ferry landing in Seattle in which the true backstory is told. First the team gets a nice scene to reflect
on their mission. It had been slightly
hinted throughout the film that Carter, whose agent boyfriend was killed in the
pretitle sequence, and Ethan might get involved but as Carter leaves the table her
gesture to Ethan is clearly only of friendship.
Julia apparently was kidnapped but Ethan rescued her and then faked her
death to protect her, recognizing that Julia would always be a target as long
Ethan is in the field. Ethan’s supposed
retaliation, killing six Serbians, was probably achieved during the rescue,
which was used to plant him into the Russian prison. Ethan gradually reveals this ruse to Brandt
to both assuage his guilt and to show that Brandt has earned Ethan’s
trust. As it becomes clear that Julia is
alive she appears from a distance coming off a ferry surrounded by coworkers
(all dressed up in scrubs, appropriate since Julia was a nurse) going for a
bite to eat and a big fellow next to her may well be some kind of
bodyguard. The score by Michael
Giacchino plays Julia’s theme from the previous film. Ethan can see Julia but
Brandt cannot from his angle. Ethan says
to Brandt “It’s not your job to protect her.
It’s mine”, which comes off as touching.
Ethan is doing exactly that here in never pointing out that Julia is
nearby so Brandt could never reveal under torture where Julia is. As Brandt leaves I expected that Ethan he
would go up to Julia and there would be a warm reunion. But Ethan cannot get too close. Fortunately Julia does catch him out of the
corner of her eye and they share a brief warm look and she ends up going inside
before the people she is with notice. It
is a bittersweet ending. Sadly Julia has
no idea what Ethan has just gone through and we have little idea what her day
to day life is. Ethan’s obvious pain is
not from Julia’s death but more likely from having to be separated from
her. This scene is the only one in which
Ethan seems relaxed and it is probably because he gets to see Julia that day. Many spy franchises kill off the true love of
the leading male so he can keep doing what he does but Mission Impossible has
come up with a different solution. The film leaves us wanting more as Ethan
walks off to his next mission, going against a group called the Syndicate,
which appears to be the main antagonist in the next Mission Impossible
movie-Rogue Nation. *****
The trailer for this film shows Ethan’s team in what seems
to be a full war against the Syndicate with the help of another bad ass female
agent, by Rebecca Ferguson, similar to Paula Patton’s character in Ghost
Protocol. Jeremy Renner appears briefly,
though he may have a larger role in the final film. Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames are featured more
prominently. Alec Baldwin may be the
villain. The film is directed by
Christopher McQuarrie, who directed Cruise in Jack Reacher (2012), and was the
screenwriter for The Usual Suspects (1995), and the co-screenwriter for Valkyrie
(2008), the latter of which was produced by and starred Cruise. It appears that Rogue Nation is being posed
as the final installment as a line spoken by Brandt in the trailer mentions a
“last mission” and it appears to have scenes that refer back to previous
installments (Ethan is shown in a London phone booth like in the first film and
also riding a motorcycle on a mountain road which combines two scenes from MI:2). The big stunt this time is Ethan hanging onto
a plane that is taking off. I do not
know how it will all come together but I am eager to find out.
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