Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, the presumed conclusion to Tom Cruise's stunt-packed series, trades the lighter touch evident in earlier episodes for a portentous self-seriousness that crushes the connective tissue arranged around the film's spectacular set-pieces. As with the previous Reckoning, Cruise's Ethan Hunt is attempting to drag and drop an all-powerful digital application into an almighty recycle bin before it can worm its way into the world's steaming nuclear arsenal. Indeed, the level of threat in director Christopher McQuarrie's sequel is so great, so all-encompassing, that it becomes ephemeral and abstract - a dark pall that hangs over a succession of anonymous, military-adjacent interiors. McQuarrie's film, already packed with winking excerpts from previous instalments, feels especially weak in its early passages where characters, very slowly, talk us through the sort of religious revelation now associated with Cruise's secret agent. This clip show (the sort of storytelling seen in 1990s television when overworked staff needed a mid-season breather) isn't just disappointing because it regurgitates extant material, it also fails to re-contextualise these inherited moments from the all-knowing perspective of Hunt himself. 

The character's overworked headspace - in which key moments are turned over and dissected - has been part of the series' visual language since the first episode, with that rookie agent embellishing the fragments of recall that remain in his head to make sense of the conspiracy unfolding around him. McQuarrie's second pass, Mission Impossible - Fallout, even played around with this character's vivid interior landscape: Hunt now able to imagine entire action sequences before they even play out. A zen-like advantage seemingly inherited for the sword masters of chanbara cinema. Unfortunately, Final Reckoning proposes nothing quite so potent when combing through previous victories. What this film does offer though is an exceptional, perhaps even series best, action sequence set in and around a sunken submarine. Cruise begins this claustrophobic, dialogue free delight by hand-cranking away the film's widescreen borders to make way for a towering, IMAX frame. Like Virgil Brigman before him, Hunt plunges down an icy trench then climbs into a rotted, rolling mausoleum. During the swim up, the throat-sung soundtrack suggests an undead leviathan being disturbed from its eternal slumber. Once inside this cramped, flooded beast the film's music is a cacophony of screeching and buckling metal as a stomach packed with unfastened ballistic missiles bump up against wincing, freezing bodies and rusted bulkheads. Every second of this expertly crafted sequence works to transform Hunt's already ludicrous objective from a scheme that really does seem impossible into one that feels genuinely insane. 

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 - characterised here as 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 movie star in that sense, everything is balanced on Cruise's 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 talking 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. 

Top Gun: Maverick

Top Gun is the story of a talented young American pilot slowly overcoming a variety of (largely domestic) threats to his ego and sense of self. The pilot's real name, Pete Mitchell, is viewed throughout Tony Scott's film as a poisoned chalice; his hot shot mentality contextualised as a grievous threat to the group cohesion so prized by any military unit. He's double-damned and not to be trusted. Tom Cruise's younger Maverick is able to tidy away these nagging concerns only after learning the sealed document-level truth of his father's passing: he died a hero. This knowledge completes Maverick, allowing him to rise to the challenges set before him, becoming a team player in the process. His anointment isn't how many enemy planes he has shot down though, rather it is when his biggest rival states that he now trusts Mitchell. Joseph Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick then, a sequel that has taken 36 years to follow its predecessor, is about this master returning to his calling. 

This Maverick has long been the finished article. Age and an unwillingness to follow a typical Navy career path has meant that he has drifted away from his true purpose - dogfighting - becoming the human component in much more esoteric, experimental, aircraft. His excellence has been folded into a scientific strata - he's human hard data, put in place to balance other unaccountable variables. His reliability is beyond question. Kosinski's sequel speaks with this sweeping language; that of a sports film. Massed air attacks are described and drilled in terms of pure objective and their prospective dangers, rather than how these strikes will then go on to influence a spinning world. Like the Scott film before it, Top Gun: Maverick is curiously apolitical in how it approaches its geopolitical unrest. Although clearly ex-Soviet Bloc in terms of gunships deployed, no clear names or locations are offered up for this enemy. 

Nameless but described with a clear cultural symbolism (one completely centred around military hardware), the country refining uranium deep in missile mountain might as well be a Soviet Union that never fell into economic hardship. Maverick's foe is a transcontinental mega power that reaches beyond the Sea of Okhotsk, deep into American Pacific territories, able to scramble next-generation aircraft that outclasses the planes fielded by the richest nation on our planet. This gap in technological prowess is a key building block in Top Gun: Maverick, one that allows the film to trespass into even more exciting and fantastical realms than its prequel. When the chips are down, Cruise's character is so supernaturally talented that he is able to render any advantage wrung out of aeronautical innovation effectively null. He doesn't just pilot his aircraft, he has a symbiotic relationship with the machinery. This concept is hammered into the audience via IMAX footage of a purple, straining, Cruise riding billion dollar planes so hard that they seem to be about to fall apart. 

Top Gun

At least initially, Top Gun presents as a defiantly shallow experience. The story of Tom Cruise's Maverick, a Naval hot-shot who encounters a top-secret Soviet aircraft, is told with the glossy visual language of an MTV music video. The plot hinges on a relationship between this young man and an older woman, Kelly McGillis' Charlie Blackwood, a civilian instructor at the TOPGUN Naval academy who has Pentagon-level clearance. Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr.'s screenplay describes Maverick in far younger terms than would be appropriate for a serious-minded military thriller. There's still something of the frat-boy pugilist about him and his desire to transform every encounter or relationship into a kind of game: endless opportunity for Maverick to flash his boyish smile then come out on top. This coping mechanism comes under attack when Maverick is recruited for a secretive wargame that requires heated de-briefs from dangling love interests in front of an audience of chilly peers. 

Sport is stressed again, this time in structural terms. Maverick is the small-town star graduating to a college-level arena in which everyone is just as skilled as he is. How will he cope? By sleeping with his professor, of course. Eventually, a creeping doubt in his own abilities as well as an acute identity issue begin to pick away at this Maverick. Characters within the film begin to address him not by the super cool call-sign he self-identifies with but by his less exciting civilian name. This penetration of Maverick's deliberately constructed carapace is doubly troublesome for the young man because his family name carries its own weight. Grins becomes grimaces; exposing imperfect teeth. Maverick's father, Duke Mitchell, was a Vietnam era pilot who perished in such a way that all records of his passing are sealed and stamped confidential. Maverick's true name, Pete Mitchell, initially registers as a kind of invective, deployed to undermine. Eventually though - after Maverick learns the heroic truth of his own father's death - the name takes on a liberating and transformational power of its own. Maverick's late acceptance of this less obviously flashy persona resolves his insecurities, allowing him to become a more complete dogfighter. 

Director Tony Scott and cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball employ the commercial beauty of car adverts to bolster an artistic intent that wavers (knowingly) between these softcore pornographies and a seat-of-your-pants coverage that recalls reportage. Male bodies are lovingly appraised, noting the pinkness of their sunburnt skin or the ripple of a flexed muscle. The actors are therefore transformed into products, as adoringly photographed as the F-14 Tomcats that batter in and out of frame during the airborne battles. A clear constant across all Scott's work though is the desire to glimpse (then project) secret moments of genuine expertise; be that Denzel Washington's wounded bear act in Man on Fire or a tight close-up of a pistol ejection port being put through its paces by a dead-eyed Mafiosi in True Romance. Top Gun's opening credits are built around supersonic jets landing then taking off from a frigate at sunset. We don't follow the peeling aircraft though, we stay with the people hustling and prepping for the next influx. The sequence even accounts for the idea that, for these Signal Officers, there's a sense of monotony to this task. They've done it many times before. Scott and Kimball then, assisted by Chris Lebenzon and Billy Weber's edit, draw out the tiny, dreamily focused moments in which these men add flourish to their actions. We see them break - ever so briefly - from a well-drilled discipline to display anachronistic, human moments amongst all the cold military machinery. 

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 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 and 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 the same level of excitement as a dangerous fluke. Seeing Tom Cruise slip effortlessly between steel ventilation teeth absolutely 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. As a director, Bird has the ability to conjure up a vivid sense of bullet-sweating anxiety whilst still working within a broad, blockbuster framework. The action is his films does not feel handed off or impersonal and is, therefore, the opposite of punctuation. These characters are baptised by motion. Stuck in increasingly implausible situations, they have to think their way around the problem and stress their bodies to accomplish their tasks.

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 yourself with an invulnerable, psychically domineering gunfighter. Ghost Protocol is the first Mission: Impossible then, since Brian De Palma's opening salvo, that really revels in the actual process and planning required to place these spies in dangerous situations. Since Ethan Hunt and his crew are super duper disavowed for this instalment they're saddled with finite, malfunctioning equipment that forces them (not to mention the film itself) to construct intrigue around the bullishness inherent to genuine skill rather than an expensive or fantastical prop. Since there is no end to his talents, Bird also helps Cruise rejuvenate his star persona in a way that accounts for all of his perceived, sofa-stomping craziness. This Hunt is brilliant but unhinged, an intense and 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.

Charm Vacuum!

The upcoming Knight and Day appears to be an experiment in audience resilience. You've suffered through films with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz in the singular, but what if they teamed up (again)? Both are former safe-hand stars looking anywhere for a hit; maybe studio execs felt it best to pool their fixed, gleaming grimaces? Could you handle that corporately mandated mash-up? They certainly have teeth in common. Being cast against Diaz does appear to be a stab at growth for Cruise. Never one to risk being upstaged, women in Cruise films tend to be pedestalled artifacts, attractive but breathlessly submissive. With Cruise big screen appeal mired in cranky religious outbursts and a life imitating art relationship with Katie Holmes, perhaps it was felt that the best way to get the girls back onside, and their bums back on seats, was setting Cruise against someone they might actually want to be? Cue Diaz sass-attack!

No doubt awful, this trail for Knight and Day does hit on something entertaining that can be done with old man Cruise. Having shot Diaz's schlubby ex, Cruise legs it over to comfort the bleeder with a dazzling glimpse of chompers, and assurances that he was aiming non-lethal. This go-see gag is actually a neat encapsulation of the star's recent struggles with audience perception. Off leash and preaching Scientology screed, Cruise has a tendency to drop clangers all over the place. If he's not damning psychiatry as Nazi magic, he's pillorying depressed mothers for seeking prescription medication. An example of the latter, publicly criticising Brooke Shields for using paroxetine, was swiftly followed up with a grovelling personal apology. Disaster Year would watch a movie of that! Cruise struggling with his need to spread his personal message, whilst juggling a deep seated desire to maintain good will with the little people. Imagine it! Cruise unleashed on the world, rambling about and colliding with the public, offending them with his opinions, then flashing them a smile and cuing up a relentless, earnest series of sorrys. All you need to keep people interested is an up on the stakes each time. Start strong with Cruise inadvertently ticking off a bellhop for humping his own bag; at the mid-point Cruise could upset Japan by taking a trip to China that unfortunately coincides with the former's Tom Cruise Day (either October 6th or 1oth depending on who you listen to); for the finish just have him 'accidentally' wipe out an alien civilisation or two. Sorry!