Series Minded: The Mission: Impossible Sextet

 [Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop]

Mission: Impossible - 1996, d. Brian De Palma
Mission: Impossible 2 - 2000, d. John Woo
Mission: Impossible 3 - 2006, d. JJ Abrams
Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol - 2011, d. Brad Bird
Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation - 2015, d. Christopher McQuarrie
Mission: Impossible: Fallout - 2018, d. Christopher McQuarrie

Is there a more in-the-moment-amazing-but-afterwards-forgettable franchise than Mission: Impossible?  I enjoy --quite a bit, actually-- most of these films, yet, I've seen each one 2 or 3 times max over the series' now 25 years in existence.  They are not something I innately go back to nor have a strong drive to revisit repeatedly.  This past April was the first time I had ever sat down and watched them as a series, one movie per evening for six nights straight.  In doing so, however, my perception on the series has changed, quite a bit.

Until now, how I felt about Mission: Impossible was directly related to how I felt about Tom Cruise, as an actor, sure, but more as a persona and a public figure.  When the first move came out I was scratching 20 years old and Cruise was still in his melodramatic heartthrob phase.  I couldn't take him seriously.  While enjoyable, I though Mission:Impossible was ego-driven to a fault, taking a TV series about a team, and making it about one man: Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt.

The second film, four years later, was most notable not for its stunts or John Woo's direction, or

anything related to Cruise, but rather the film that (thankfully) kept Dougray Scott from becoming Wolverine in the X-Men franchise.  Cruise in the year 2000 was coming out of his dalliances with auteurs, with Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia netting him another Oscar nom and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut virtually consuming his life (and then-wife Nicole Kidman's) for the better part of two years, with both releasing in 1999.  A that point, nobody (well, speaking for myself) was thinking Tom Cruise: Action Hero, and John Woo presents Tom Cruise with Guns wasn't really anything I was eager to see. Early buzz was that it was a troubled production, which is never a good thing. The commercials showing him with his late-'90s floppy mop (which looks conspicuously like my 2021 COVID hair) and bizarre flying motorcycle gunfight seemed like a warning which I did not heed. M:I2 was incredibly successful financially, but lambasted critically.  

It would be 6 years before another Mission: Impossible would emerge, and by that point Cruise had become rather prominently know as a Scientologist, and that batshit Oprah Winfrey appearance where he jumped up and down on her couch proclaiming how much he was in love with Katie Holmes (a woman 16 years his junior, then still seen as perhaps too young a starlet)...yeah...that happened just before M:I III  came out.  Between MI movies he starred in Vanilla Sky, Minority Report and War of the Worlds, all films I didn't like very much, as well as Collateral which I begrudgingly though was good and Cruise was good in. I was never really in on Cruise, but at this point in his career and the M:I series I was decidedly out on him.  I didn't see M:I III until a decade later.

Mission:Impossible Ghost Protocol released with an excitement around it that Cruise hadn't had in 15 years.  Brad Bird, hopping from Pixar animation into live action for the first time brought...well, not quite a sense of cartoonish reality, but a hyper-reality to the series.  Bird's The Incredibles was as much a spy movie as it was a superhero movie and a family, and he brings all three of those sensibilities with him.  There was also the inkling that maybe Ghost Protocol would be the passing of the torch, where Cruise would be handing the series over (or at least stepping back a bit) to a new team led by always-a-bridesmaid Jeremy Renner, but, because it had such a huge reception, Cruise just doubled down on his stardom. 

The other thing about Ghost Protocol was Chris McQuarrie helping out on the story, recentering the series back on Cruise rather than write him out.  Cruise worked with McQuarrie on Valkyrie and Jack Reacher and it seems that McQuarrie is either being rewarded for his loyalty or Cruise just gets that McQuarrie gets him.

Between M:I GP and M:I  Rogue Nation another 4 years later a second very critical thing happened: Edge of Tomorrow (which we'll be covering in T&K Go Loopty Loo very shortly).  Written by McQuarrie,  Edge of Tomorrow served a very critical role (pun intended) in Cruise's career: it was an active display of humility. Early in the film Cruise portrays a coward, and his cowardice gets him killed, but due to alien science, he starts living the day over again, resetting every time he dies.  Watching Cruise die over and over again was quite cathartic as a view, especially for someone who never really cared for him too much. By the end of the film he's become a very competent soldier (but only because he knows what's going to happen...he knows how to play the video game that is his life) but he also finds humility, courage, and purpose.  Like the Phoenix, he was reborn, over and over again, into a legit action star.  Forget Mission: Impossible 1-4, Edge of Tomorrow is what solidified him into an action lead.  

What basically works with the Mission: Impossible series that differentiates it from the Bond series is that, starting with the third movie, it builds an personal arc for Ehant Hunt that carries through four films.  For Rogue Nation Cruise enlisted Chris McQuarrie as both writer and director.  He returned for Fallout, which was a first time for a director, and also for the first time, they brought the entire team back (except Renner who was unable to return due to Hawkeye stuff) from the previous film, with heavy continuity, not only with Rogue Nation but the entire series being very tight and satisfying.

What differentiates Mission: Impossible from nearly any other action series is, of course, Cruise himself, and his insistence on performing some pretty spectacular, death-defying stunts.  His physicality becomes increasingly insane as the series progresses, and it's all the more impressive considering he's in his mid-50's when shooting Fallout.   I wonder if the the films are insured out the wazoo, or if insurance won't even touch them because the risk of Cruise actually dying is too high.  The rock climbing in Moab, scaling the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, hanging onto the exterior of an airbus aeroplane, the underwater sequence, halo jumping and even just his long running takes, or jumping across rooftops or freeing himself from a pole.  Even though we know as a viewer that Cruise the actor, not Ethan Hunt the character is the one putting their life on the line in these crazy sequences, somehow it not only doesn't take us out of the film, it draws us in even more and holds onto us even tighter.  We invest in watching Tom Cruise not die so that Ethan Hunt can live and save the day.  In an era of tireless fight sequences and superheroes who seem indestructible, Cruise's physicality isn't limited to stunts.  He plays wounded and fatigued better than anyone.  His physical performance adds weight to the actions he does, showing that exerting so much energy does take its toll.  Likewise, his face conveys a vulnerability, often an incredulous expression as if he can't believe he needs to keep going after what just happened.  He'll often take down a bad guy only to have to keep fighting and you can see on his face that he really doesn't want to, but he will.  It's very charming.  Far more charming than anything he does as a romantic lead.  That sense of incredulity is about as relatedly human as Cruise ever gets.

So what about these movies.  I've gone on for multiple paragraphs now... how about six more? One per film:

good poster

Mission:Impossible
Okay, so my 11-year-old daughter actually sat down to watch this with us.  I mean, she literally sat there and watched it with us.  No phone or Nintendo Switch distractions.  She never does that anymore. She had a lot of questions, but it's a super-spy movie, there are always going to be questions.  This one is literally a classic in the genre though.  I still cringe every time I see Emilio Estevez's death.  The much parodied descent into the secure chamber is still an exceptionally tense and thrilling sequence.  You forget how squirrelly Jean Reno is but he's so wonderful.  That sequence in the Chunnel? So good.  It's really edge-of-the-seat stuff, so eye catching and very engaging.  De Palma's style is all over this and it's fantastic.  Of all the mid-90's action films, this has the most individuality.  Even my old assessment that this is just a showboat piece where Cruise demands to be the centerpiece isn't wholly true, as there are a lot of great character actors in this who bring a lot to making the film work.  I don't think they knew at that time what they wanted this franchise to be but even in hindsight it does feel like a very apropos beginning.

Mission:Impossible 2

awful poster

It's just a hot garbage movie so laden with 90's-isms that are the cringe-iest of cringe. John Woo's action sensibilities just don't fit with the series or the genre.  He's an action director, not a spy thriller director.  While the M:I spy movies have some big-time action set pieces, it also needs to have a qualified touch dramatically, and the drama is never sold here.  It's always too much.  At the end of the first M:I Ethan Hunt basically said he was going to retire, and this picks up with him free climbing one of the most difficult rock faces in the world.  I don't get the sense this is retirement.  Anthony Hopkins is stunt-casted as the new head of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF), and it's so out of place.  It's got all-the-wrong-choices sequel-itis.  Its choice of villain in Dougray Scott couldn't be less impressive.  He's such an uninteresting presence on screen.  Thandiwe Newton, however, is as amazing as she always is, well, given what she's got to work with.  She's enlisted to the mission, we think because of her cat burglar skills, only to learn it's because she's Dougray Scott's ex, and she can get close.  It also doesn't help that Woo's lens though is far too leering.  It's not even an admiring leer, it's lascivious, and as great as Newton is, the way her character is handled visually and in the story is all pretty discomforting.  Plus, the chemistry between Cruise and Newton is never really there, you never believe the connection they're supposed to have.  Even the action is largely ridiculous, and not in a good way.  It's overblown and hyper-stylized in a way that none of the other films in the series are.  The car ballet or motorcycle-fu of it all just feels silly and sadly like the only thing it has going for it.  Really, the only good thing about this film is it's so easy to skip when rewatching the series.  It has no impact.  It's an anomaly, a failed experiment best placed aside.

Mission:Impossible III

not a good poster

I just watched this film a couple weeks ago and I've all but forgotten it again.  It's an enjoyable movie, but largely unmemorable.  JJ Abrams' debut feature film does everything it needs to do, but in spite of it all, it has no staying power.  The style is another wild deviation from what came before it, into a gritty, grounded realism, lots of handheld camerawork, with a graininess and grittiness to it both visually and story-wise.  If you skip past M:I2 and jump into III directly after M:I we find Ethan Hunt engaged and domesticated, which seems like it would only work if he was basically retired.  But Hunt is pulled away on an impossible mission (given a team consisting of Ving Rhames, once again the only holdover, plus Maggie Q and John Rhys Myers, with Billy Crudup and Laurence Fishburne being the chain of command they report to) to hunt down ... Philip Seymour Hoffman? Yeah, PSH is the bad guy in this and he bring a scary level of intensity that makes Cruise raise his game considerably.  Not that Cruise was sleepwalking through these by any extent, but Hoffman just brings a weight and severity to his role as an arms dealer completely unimpressed by Hunt and team's interference in his operations.  Hoffman's character's way of dealing with Hunt is by making it personal, kidnapping his fiance and torturing the both of them.  Michelle Monaghan plays the eventual Mrs. Hunt, and she is sort of the spectre that haunts Ethan for the next three films, even though they both survive. This film sets up the next three very adeptly, not just with Ethan dealing with the "fallout" of his inability to make his marriage work, but with the wonderful introduction of Simon Pegg as Benji, who becomes an integral part of IMF after this.

Mission:Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Now this is how you sell an
impossible mission

Just dynamite, the best of the series so far.  It starts with breaking Ethan out of jail, leads to infiltrating the Kremlin before parts of it blow up, then takes us to Dubai for a solid 40 minutes of incredible action and spy stuff, including a foot-turned-car chase through a sand storm that may be my favourite chase sequence.  The film really relies upon, and invests in its team, giving Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Paula Patton plenty to do while Cruise is recovering from trying to kill himself in the most entertaining ways possible.  The villain, a crazy man looking to advance society by starting a nuclear apocalyse, isn't the most compelling but the final battle in a vertical car park is just nuts (and wrecking all those luxury cars must have been expensive as hell).  Everything and everyone in this is firing on all cylinders, and it's just delightful.  Bird's direction isn't tangibly flashy, but he gets scale and it feels epic throughout. The film even features a coda that cameos both Rhames (unable to return due to scheduling) and Monaghan, which is just the sweetest thing about it, that it remembered its past when it so easily could have just let it pass.  If there is anything disappointing about this movie it's that it opens with a very cool action sequence with Josh Hollaway (Sawyer from Lost) and they promptly kill him off.  He's so picture perfect and Bird uses him so well, you could see him being the star, and then the rug is pulled out.  It's also sad that Patton doesn't return.  She proved herself an awesome screen presence here, and very adept at looking cool doing spy and actiony stuff, and it's like she just disappeared after this without explanation.

Mission:Impossible: Rogue Nation

you can sell an impossible
mission this way too

The team is back, sadly minus Paula Patton, but with more Luther.  Renner is kind of stuck in boring bureaucratic mode, which seems like a clear rebuke of the idea that he would be taking over the series from Cruise.  Instead Rebecca Ferguson dazzles as Ilsa Faust (such a great name), the mysterious woman working for the bad guy, but clearly not working for the bad guy.  Ferguson is so good it's quite easy to overlook just how underdeveloped her character is in this.  There's a strange moment where Ilsa offers Ethan to run away with her and escape the spy life for as long as they can possibly elude their respective agencies, but until that moment there's not a hint of romantic spark.  Faust's desire is to do what she can so she can come in from the cold, go back to London instead of having to do awful things to keep proving herself to the bad guy.  That bad guy is the unassuming Sean Harris, an ex-MI5 agent who has developed a whole Syndicate of rogue agents used will seed chaos on a global scale.  It seems that a lot of effort has gone into countering the work they do, while even more effort has gone into dealing with the fallout of their actions.  The film finds Hunt yet again going rogue, with the Impossible Mission Force shut down by a new director played by Alec Baldwin.  Overall this one is super fun, but the story is as muddy as they come.

Mission:Impossible: Fallout

and if you just want to do
character posters of the pretty
people, that works too

Though Renner had to bail, the IMF is back. Baldwin is, somehow, the first returning director of IMF (though not for long). Baldwin gets a rival in Angela Bassett(!?!) as the director of the CIA.  She forces one of her men, played by SUPERMAN Henry Cavill (!?!), onto the IMF mission to root out the new head of a fractured Syndicate.  Cavill's presence here is undeniably my favourite part.  He's so much taller than Cruise, so much more rugged, so much burlier than him, and sporting the infamous moustache (that had to be CGI-ed out of Justice League) that he's the most striking presence in all of this series, one that has had some of the most exceptionally beautiful and charismatic people adorn it. Of course, at some point the two of them have to come to blows, and of course Cruise just wants to prove he can beat Superman if he had to.  But Ilsa Faust is back, in a role that's maybe 2% more confusing than her role in Rogue Nation, wich seems like an unfortunate step backword, and yet, all the credit to Ferguson, she's perhaps even cooler and more winning in this one.  If there's a future for the franchise without Cruise, it's gotta be Ilsa Faust.  Another first, Sean Harris is back, he's still the leader of all those rogue agents, and his plans are both global and personal...he has big plans for the world, but they also include getting some very personal blows in on Ethan Hunt.  As a direct sequel to Rogue Nation it's great, even better than the first.  As a part of the M:I series it's also awsome, bringing it all together with a tight little bow.  

Rank'em

1. M:I Ghost Protocol
2. Mission:Impossible
3. M:I Fallout
4. M:I Rogue Nation
5. M:I III
   M:I2 only ranks because it smells.