How The 'Mission: Impossible' Sequels Saved Tom Cruise's Career

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25th of July is the opening day, in several overseas territories, of Paramount/Viacom Inc.’s Mission: Impossible - Fallout

The action of Mission: Impossible - Fallout

The film has earned mostly rave reviews and is almost sure to be the summer’s last mega-movie when it opens in North America tomorrow night. Looking at all six M:Imovies over the last month, you can trace how the series slowly became what it is today: The most consistently grand and arguably best non-fantasy action franchise today. We are at a point where Mission: Impossible is better than the 007 franchise, the Bourne movies and the Fast and Furious flicks. And a key to that evolution, aside from merely producing six straight good-to-great films over 28 years that now stand out via their attention to character and plot, is how it changed Ethan Hunt from Tom Cruise: Generic Action Man to Ethan Hunt: Underdog Kamikaze Hero.

Mission: Impossible was already a breath of fresh air in 1996, existing as a short (105 minutes plus credits), muted, cold and clinical spy thriller with just three major action sequences. In the summer of The RockIndependence Day and TwisterM:I qualified as restrained. However, its lead character was essentially “Uh… it’s Tom Cruise.” At the time, the star of Top GunRisky Business and A Few Good Men doing a franchise adaptation of a popular 1960s TV show, as well as a somewhat conventional guns-’n’-explosions action movie, was enough to make Brian DePalma’s thriller into a preordained summer champion. But even as Ethan had a genuine arc, with his idealism and belief in his work and his company shattered after he’s betrayed by his mentor and pursued by the IMF, the character, in a nutshell, was “Tom Cruise cosplays James Bond Jr.”

Since too many folks complained that Mission: Impossible was too cold and too confusing (“Horrors, I have to pay attention to the movie!”), John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II had a more straightforward plot, moments where characters stop and explain what’s going on. It also gave us an Ethan Hunt who was now a romantic hero in a literal and figurative sense. The story, a loose take on Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, had an anguished Ethan (who spends his free time climbing sky-high mountains with minimal safety equipment) falling for a recruited jewel thief (Thandie Newton) and then having to send her into the arms of her murderous ex-boyfriend (Dougray Scott). It was intended as an emotional romantic drama that turns into a guns-’n’-stunts action spectacular in the third act. It’s a very different Ethan Hunt; one a lot more comfortable with guns and crazy stunts.

Even if you argue that Ethan’s new attitude is a way of coping with getting betrayed in the first movie, it’s still Brian DePalma’s Ethan Hunt morphing into John Woo’s Ethan Hunt. As such, in J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III, Ethan morphs into a human-scale superspy who, like Alias’s Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner), tries to have a normal life amid the spy games. His new wife (Michelle Monaghan) is kidnapped by Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s arms dealer baddie, and he has to risk giving over a possible doomsday weapon to the baddies to save her. He’s a far more conventional action hero and something of an invincible superhero. During an aerial attack on a civilian bridge, only Ethan leaps across a chasm, assembles a weapon and shoots down a plane while his teammates merely watch.

That Mission: Impossible III wasn’t as successful as the first two, despite mostly strong reviews, was partly because its portrayal of Hunt as an everyman who is Superman on the job and willing to move heaven and earth to save his love interest was seen as glorified propaganda. It felt like a reaction to the previous summer’s PR meltdown. After an Oprah Winfrey interview where he got overly giddy over Katie Holmes and after a surprisingly confrontational interview with Matt Lauer over the value of psychiatric medication, his once unblemished off-screen reputation was in tatters. As such, a movie where Cruise is the perfect guy and the ideal action hero going through hell to rescue a woman who looked a little like Katie Holmes was… Well, it didn’t play well.

While Cruise didn’t have any outright flops between Mission: Impossible III in May of 2006 and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol in December 2011, his reputation as a preeminent movie star took a hit just as the old-school movie star (as a concept) was becoming endangered by IP and brands taking over the industry. By April 25, 2006, just a week before M:I 3 would open, Kristen Bell’s Veronica Mars was mocking the very idea of Tom Cruise as a romantic ideal. So, by coincidence or design, Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol took Ethan Hunt from being an unstoppable superman to being every bit as prone to error and every bit as exasperated as you or I might be in the spy game scenarios. Yes, he climbs the world’s tallest building with only (malfunctioning) sticky gloves, but he’s gosh-darned terrified the whole time.

For all intents and purposes, Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol is a comedy. Yes, there is action and occasionally mean violence (the Kremlin gets blown up in the first act), but the set pieces are all tailored to showing an Ethan Hunt and his team being befuddled continuously when the gadgets fail. Sure, it’s thrilling watching Hunt climb the Burj Khalifa in glorious IMAX. Ghost Protocol still contains the best use of “Let’s shoot with IMAX cameras!” of any modern blockbuster. Yet the scene works because of the exasperated and comedic dialogue exchanged between Hunt and his team. The centerpiece action scene of the movie ends with Cruise bashing his head on the side of the building as he attempts a last-ditch crash landing. By inviting us to laugh at (and with) Ethan, Ghost Protocol made Tom Cruise relatable again. It was (along with Tropic Thunder) Tom Cruise’s version of Richard Nixon appearing on Laugh-In.

And, yeah, Ghost Protocol operated as a soft reboot of the franchise. It was the first sequel with a tangible connection to the prior installments (explicit references to the events of Mission: Impossible III), and it reshaped the series into essentially the Tom Cruise (And Friends) Stunt Show. But rather than portray Ethan Hunt as an invincible superhero who was to be taken seriously to the point of worship, this Ethan Hunt was a very human super-agent who was terrified to climb buildings and suffered real injuries along the way. Yes, he would do what needed to be done, but we were invited to share in his fear, wince at his wounds and occasionally laugh at his misfortunes. Ghost Protocol took the series to new global heights ($694 million worldwide, still Cruise’s biggest global hit) and essentially brought Cruise back from “couch jumping” infamy.

Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation continued the continuity from Ghost Protocol and was essentially M: I All-Stars Edition (think Fast Five). It reunited Cruise with Ving Rhames (from the first three films), Simon Pegg (introduced in the third flick) and Jeremy Renner (introduced in the fourth movie, not as a replacement for Cruise but as a good-natured desk jockey foil). Like Fast Five, it pitted our heroes against a new scene-stealing character, Ilsa Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson. While Rogue Nation was a darker and denser chapter than Ghost Protocol, it maintained a certain “exasperated laughter” mentality that invited us to giggle as Tom Cruise’s action stunts went wrong or went too far. He didn’t mean to end up hanging off the side of a plane (“Benji, open the door!”), and he gets rescued by Ferguson during his big underwater stunt.

Rogue Nation emphasized the failures not of the high-tech toys but of a team of superspies who made mistakes, trusted the wrong people or couldn’t quite convince their superiors of the validity of their quest. Rogue Nation cemented Ethan Hunt as Tom Cruise’s defining and most autobiographical role. Mission: Impossible saw a huge movie star trying to play an action hero, while Mission: Impossible II saw Cruise embracing the movie star-as-action star role and resembling every young boy’s playground action hero fantasies (right down to the leather jacket, perfect hair and shades). Mission: Impossible III saw Cruise trying and failing to be normal, while Ghost Protocol had Cruise accepting his fate. He would never be seen as a regular guy and would sacrifice conventional happiness to entertain us. Rogue Nation saw Cruise/Ethan wondering what it was all for, a theme that continues in Fallout.

Christopher McQuarrie’s Fallout (the first time a director has come back to the franchise) offers a conclusion to the trilogy that began with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. It even (as foreshadowed in the film’s first scene) provides closure for Mission: Impossible 3. It is notable how Cruise’s Ethan Hunt went from generic invincible action hero to specific invincible action hero to fallible and reckless kamikaze superspy. By allowing Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt to fail or badly hurt himself while succeeding (and inviting us to laugh while he suffered), the last three Mission: Impossible movies have remade Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt into a more relatable action hero. That difference, along with an emphasis on practical effects and real locations, a popular ensemble cast and sheer quality, is why Mission: Impossible remains a top-tier blockbuster franchise in terms of both quality and commerce.

Ethan Hunt is still the living manifestation of destiny. The difference, for the movies and for Tom Cruise’s reputation 13 years after he jumped on Oprah Winfrey’s couch while professing his love for Katie Holmes during the marketing campaign for War of the Worlds, is that we are now invited to laugh at that line.

Scott Mendelson, Contributor
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