Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

For its first five instalments, Mission: Impossible was a series defined by constant reinvention. Each film designed to behave as a blockbuster calling card for the high profile directors that actor-producer Tom Cruise had managed to flatter then recruit. These constantly transforming artistic objectives have meant that re-evaluation has rarely crept into proceedings. That is until Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. This film - director Christopher McQuarrie's third with a fourth hot on its heels - is riddled with allusions to Brian De Palma's originator, even terminating with another action sequence set upon a speeding train. These references go beyond seeing Cruise's Ethan Hunt back sporting a black v-neck jumper under a leather jacket, or bringing back Henry Czerny's IMF irritant Kittridge. The aesthetics of late twentieth century spycraft - windowless rooms stacked with CRT monitors running diagnostics - have logistical and mechanical purchase in a story that revolves around an all-powerful algorithm; one that has escaped clean room conditions to infect every input or interaction aimed at Hunt's crew. The digital sphere can no longer be trusted. Only analogue solutions can be relied upon. 

Dead Reckoning revolves around a phantom antagonist taking orders from a constellation of calculations; endlessly breeding blue thoughts that are suspended and swirling in a pitch black void that (literally) hangs over the film's sweating heroes. This sense of danger is so obviously all-encompassing that very little energy is expended tying the film's disparate set-pieces together. There's a sense that this issue cannot be settled - and indeed it is not in this episode - therefore the film is given over to describing solutions to ever-changing problems. This mode of storytelling is actually complimented by the strange frequencies inherent to Cruise: his take on Hunt is monastic and obsessive, a fanatic dedicated not to a country or cause but to the experts he has selected to be in the room with him. This drive takes on a metatextual quality in Dead Reckoning, a film that pivots on the relentless foregrounding of enormous and impeccable stunt work. This execution focused mindset means that Dead Reckoning reads like a thesis statement on filmmaking itself. Hunt and his earpiece support are a creative team, one constantly placed in situations where they have to play the cards dealt to them on the day then figure out an advantageous outcome. 

For a star as private and protected as Cruise, this framing seems positively autobiographical. Like Hunt, Cruise is the human bullet chambered by these enormous productions; prepped, against everybody's better judgement, to be the one blasted out into the abyss. He's an old-fashioned star in that sense, everything is balanced on his shoulders and his ability to hit his marks. Therefore he is charged to behave in a certain way. Dead Reckoning offers up a sanitised and mythologised appraisal of a human being suffering through these pressures: Hunt frequently talks his less experienced allies through hell with the tranquil detachment of the truly invincible. If there's a sour note in this restless film then, it's the ease with which Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust is replaced. It's not just that early glimpses of the actress feel digitally stitched in, it's that Hayley Atwell's pickpocket Grace instantly stakes such a strong physical claim on both Hunt and the moment-to-moment assembly of the film. While Faust is slowly becoming an afterthought, Grace is intertwined with Hunt, co-driving his car (another FIAT 500, Dead Reckoning presumably as much a fan of The Castle of Cagliostro as the comparatively antiseptic Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) and pulling the kind of screen filling startled-but-still-photogenic faces ill-suited to either Ferguson or Cruise's characters. 

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

While the rest of the 80s relics struggle with box office obsolescence, Tom Cruise goes from strength to strength. His formula? Rather than hoard the limelight in pursuit of past, pumped-up glories, producer-star Cruise is happy to share the big screen with supernaturally accomplished women, cutting them in on the deal at a conceptual rather than superficial level. Edge of Tomorrow (or Live Die Repeat if you came to the film on home video) charted the rise of Cruise's William Cage from PR ooze to someone Emily Blunt's super soldier Rita Vrataski was happy to co-operate with. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation replays the trick with Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust, a shadow struck from the Red Grant mould who demonstrates the same capricious, see-sawing interests.

Hunt's fascination with the obviously duplicitous Faust reveals the kind of growth you'd expect in a comfortable, ageing super-spy. At this stage in his life Hunt knows his way around a deception. He's is no longer the delusional worrywart who willed Claire Phelps' betrayal away, he's established and confident enough now to contextualise Faust's treacherous streak as, essentially, flirting. After all, she hasn't killed him yet. Beyond an obvious, fizzy, professional respect, Hunt clearly sympathises with the precariousness of Faust's assignment. Like his 96 self, she's gifted but inexperienced, moving amongst sharks at the behest of a paternal overlord that explicitly treats her as expendable.

Cruise's insistence on keeping Hunt monastic, even asexual, post-Mission: Impossible III lends the relationship an interesting tension too. It's nothing so simple as a desire to possess, Hunt seems to see himself in Faust. She's a prospect. Perhaps he'd rather shape the rival agent into an ally than outright dismiss her as a threat? Kill off the bad fathers competing for Faust's soul then reconfigure her into a replacement for the ageing IMF agent. Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie's weaves this conceit into the bones of Rogue Nation, tracking Faust throughout as a co-star. She's always a distinct, dangerous presence with murky, even malleable, purpose. Sometimes she needs to be Hunt's ally. Sometimes she doesn't. Unlike the jealous, threatened Jim Phelps of Mission: Impossible Hunt isn't scared of obsolescence, he's excited by the possibility of a continuity beyond himself. Tested by age, Hunt defeats his mentor yet again by refusing to sink into the same, limited patterns of self-pity.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Brad Bird's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol understands that easy breezy accomplishment can never register like a dangerous fluke. Seeing Tom Cruise slip effortlessly between steel ventilation teeth raises a smile but it's nothing compared to a clammy leer at the actor struggling up the side of the world's tallest building, lumbered with a pair of malfunctioning Spider-Man gloves.

Bird has the ability to conjure up a sense of anxiety whilst still working within a broad, blockbuster framework. The action doesn't feel handed off and impersonal, it's the opposite of punctuation. Characters are baptised by motion. Stuck in implausible situations, they have to think their way around the problem and stress their bodies to accomplish. Bird and screenwriters Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec know that it's a lot easier to put yourself in the place of a man cooking inside a computer than it is to connect with an invulnerable gunfighter.

Ghost Protocol is also the first Mission: Impossible since Brian De Palma's opening salvo that really revels in the actual process of placing a spy into a situation. Since Ethan Hunt and his crew are super duper disavowed they're saddled with finite, malfunctioning equipment that forces them, not to mention the film, to construct intrigue around bullishness and skill rather than an expensive prop. Since there is no end to his talents, Bird also helps Cruise rejuvenate his star persona in a way that accounts for all the perceived craziness. This Hunt is brilliant but unhinged, an intense, lofty presence with suicidal programming.

Mission: Impossible III

Three films in and there still isn't a fixed idea of who or what Ethan Hunt should be. The differences aren't just subtle reworkings of a central spy conceit, each Hunt hails from a completely different action subgenre. Brian De Palma's film offered an anxious playmaker called up to the plate, while John Woo's stab strayed into the kind of psychic superheroics you'd expect to find in some slurry manga from the 1970s. Mission: Impossible III diverges again, offering a retired Zen master dragged out of his suburban life to settle a score.

After two mixed attempts to invoke an auteur orientated OO7, Producer Cruise settles for the brisk efficiency of television, hiring JJ Abrams to deliver a supernaturally expensive Alias finale. Actor Cruise struggles to right his derailing career by channelling the film's drama into something more understandable - a beleaguered husband must rescue his nice, pretty wife. While Tom's too busy pretending to be a normal guy, Philip Seymour Hoffman hijacks the film with a barbaric performance as a black market trader.

Owen Davian is a red-headed ogre, the physical and emotional antithesis of the boring fallen spies Hunt has so far faced. Davian has the body of a barrel-shaped primitive. What we mistake for weight and complacency is actually indicative of a human-sized brick. Davian's revenge isn't an attempt to get one over on the arrogant Hunt either. The businessman simply wants to damage the spy so personally, so thoroughly, that Hunt will never dare fuck with Davian's bottom line ever again.

Mission: Impossible II

Based on the evidence presented by Mission: Impossible II, it's very important to Tom Cruise The Producer that Tom Cruise The Actor look beautiful at all times. The first Mission: Impossible swirled around a boyish, agitated Cruise who couldn't help but cause a bubbly physical delight in the (older) women he interacted with. For the sequel Cruise, perhaps hoping to conjure up a similar tumescence in his audience, has director John Woo endlessly swishing his camera around the star's dreamy haircut. Alex Gibney's documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief relates a story about church leader David Miscavige's attempts to maintain Tom Cruise's sense of total entitlement, at a time when he was still married to Nicole Kidman. Upon learning that the couple dreamed of running through a meadow of wildflowers, Miscavige had his Sea Org cronies work day and night, repeatedly ploughing and sodding a section of desert until it met the Hollywood pair's fantastical expectations. That's what M:I-2 feels like, a spectacularly expensive ego trip in which everybody bends over backwards to please Cruise.

John Woo's Hong Kong films - certainly the action films he directed in the late 80s and early 1990s - tended to have a seat-of-your-pants energy, with the director placing his lead, ideally Chow Yun-fat, in squared sets filled with waves of detonating squibs. In The Killer and Hard-Boiled Chow doesn't gracefully dance around every single encounter. He often crouches and darts, scared for his life. Sometimes he even betrays some level of physical frailness, like fumbling a weapon while leaping away from shrapnel. During A Better Tomorrow Chow's character Mark picks up a debilitating leg injury that sees him demoted from mob hitman to a lowly errand boy. He is humbled horrifically before he is allowed to succeed mightily. Similarly, Woo's characters frequently have interior lives that are framed as complete disaster areas: a life of crime depicted as a monastic slog with only brief bubbles of apocalyptic mayhem. There's a constant sense of vulnerability in Chow's performances too, something utterly lacking in this tedious film. Cruise is perfect and invincible throughout. The Ethan Hunt seen in M:I-2 is no longer a desperate man nursing a never-ending headache. He's an impassive overseer who proceeds from a point of absolute confidence, burning holes through his companions (both in front and behind the camera) with a laser gaze that instantly supplicates them to his will.

Mission: Impossible

For his pass at Mission: Impossible, director Brian De Palma posits Tom Cruise as a grinning automaton that needs to be put through the wringer. In group briefings, Cruise's Ethan Hunt is the joker, riffing on his boss' advancing age to the delight of his spy pals. We're presented with the idea that the opening case will be routine, to the point where no-one even seems to be taking it particularly seriously. It's clear they all expect to breeze through the assignment. Hunt's cocky self-assurance is tied into a squad pecking order. He's flanked by talent and has the ear of his warhorse superior, Jim Phelps (Jon Voight). Watched with the benefit of knowing Phelps' true intentions, it's fun to note his apparent hatred of Hunt. 

The playful back-and-forth about Phelps' dotage is obviously a recurring irritation for the IMF commander. To Hunt it's a gag. For Phelps it's a pack challenge from a juvenile looking to stake a claim on his beautiful wife Claire (Emmanuelle Béart). Reason enough to wipe out the team and sink the entire operation. Although Mission: Impossible dials back on the more Oedipal details (a romantic dalliance between Cruise and Béart was dropped to keep the second act moving), the basic antagonism remains between two men who are essentially the same person glimpsed at different points in his life. Hunt is the young agent on the rise, the film charting his progression from component to leader. Phelps is the seasoned veteran who survived the Cold War and doesn't want to pass the torch. He'd rather bury his protégé instead.