His Mission That He Chooses To Accept

Tom Cruise preaches the gospel of popcorn entertainment for the people in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1

Warning: This post contains some very minor spoilers for the newest Mission: Impossible movie.

What makes Tom Cruise’s heart beat? What makes him do this — blow up bridges and send locomotives hurtling over them, climb the tallest building in the world with just his hands and feet and perfect teeth, fly helicopters and get into car chases, jump a literal motorcycle off a literal mountain and then deploy a literal parachute after gliding through the sky like a ballistic missile, the wind pushing his face back so hard that it practically ripples. He is 61 years old and worth more than most small countries. He is a film series and studio and genre unto himself. He does not appear to care or realize that he has bones and ligaments and parts that can’t be repaired or replaced. He seems to be in a constant competition with the ghost of Evel Knievel, pushing what’s possible when it comes to machines and fuel and gravity and the human body itself. What, other than a belief that doing all this will avert the rise of dark Xenu, drives him to make movies that read more like death wishes than films?

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One — a masterpiece of both punctuation and badass action moving phrasing¹ — is the seventh of eight entries in an improbable franchise, and the fourth straight in which Cruise appears to be trying to kill himself on camera. This is the now constant refrain surrounding each of these movies when they’re released, and while it can and does feel like a sweat-soaked media play designed to highlight the old razzle dazzle, the fact remains that yes, a 61-year-old Tom Cruise rode a motorcycle up a mountain and then off a cliff that was many thousands of feet above the ground and then jumped off that motorcycle and hurtled downward past some large and sharp rocks and then deployed a parachute that, while it saved his life, also yanked him up pretty hard. He is under no obligation to do this, and I wager most doctors would advise him strongly against doing it, or at least his friends and loved ones would.² He does it anyway, and then 20 or 30 minutes later in the movie he does another parachute stunt that didn’t look any easier or safer.

Watching this 163-minute behemoth — the first part of a series conclusion that will presumably but in the case of Tom Cruise I will never say “100%” be the end of Ethan Hunt, his maniacally driven super-spy character — is to be left dumb at what this man will do to make a picture. I’m sure if it were up to Cruise he’d make one of these movies every 18–24 months for the rest of his life, but even he must have some kind of limit, though I worry sometimes that it’s going to take him too long to find it. One can only up the bar so much when you’re already doing things like “holding my breath underwater for over three minutes and as many as six”³ and “clinging to the outside of an actual big ass airplane as it takes off”⁴ and “performing close-up sleight-of-hand magic.”⁵ At any rate, this is the beginning of the end, and now Tom Cruise must grapple with the end of a franchise that has defined him almost as much as he’s defined it.

The path that these films have taken over the last 27 (!) years mirrors Hollywood’s other gargantuan and oddly sentimental action series, The Fast and the Furious, in their evolution from something charmingly low-key to a bench press contest at a gym, each of Cruise and Vin Diesel seeing just how much studio money can be spent on a single film and how many movie stars can be thrown into 120-plus minutes of runtime. In both cases, mid-series slumps that looked like franchise endpoints instead became unlikely pivots: the F&F series into heist films defined by family and native advertising for Corona, and the M:I series into James Bond But Starring Tom Cruise. The former has left more or less every law of physics behind, but the latter decided to orient itself firmly around Cruise and his terrifying commitment to practical stunts and escalating spectacle. That began with 2011’s Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, in which Cruise made clear how far he was willing to go by scaling a portion of the Burj Khalifa in a free solo climb,⁶ and every film since has seen him try his hardest to do something even stupider and more dangerous and more exciting.

As Cruise continues to push the boundaries of what Paramount Pictures’ insurance will cover, the M:I films have taken on a reflective and deeply personal quality. The first three were bog-standard spy thrillers, so loosely based on the 1960s TV show that spawned them that all they really kept were the names of both the series itself and the clandestine/ridiculous agency that drives the action, the Impossible Mission Force, a name that only a 12-year-old boy could love and that the films frequently acknowledge is deeply unserious. They were also, tonally, a mess; John Woo directed the second Mission: Impossible and did his usual John Woo things (operatic gunfights, doves scattering in front of the hero, motorcycle karate) but to oddly blunted effect in service of a plot so confusing that it’s not worth explaining. That is likely the series nadir, though the third Mission: Impossible, blessed as it was with the presence of Philip Seymour Hoffman as a menacing, actually frightening heavy who remains the best villain of all the films, is bloated and uneven and downright stupid; at one point, Keri Russell’s head explodes. It also introduces the idea of Ethan Hunt getting married, a plot point that the series put in its back pocket and deploys with surprising weight every now and again.

It would be five years before another Mission: Impossible movie came together, and on the surface, Ghost Protocol isn’t all that different from its predecessors: a chase for a MacGuffin, Ethan going rogue and assembling a team, double-crosses, lots of latex masks. But Cruise’s Burj Khalifa stunt, among others, gave it a different feel, of something more visceral, or at least willing to draw blood. CGI and digital effects will be a prominent part of every action movie going forward, this series included, but from Ghost Protocol on, there came a deep commitment to physical reality. Yes, that’s the actual Burj Khalifa. Yes, that’s actually Tom Cruise climbing it. Yes, he’s actually riding a motorcycle very fast through traffic on the streets of Paris. Yes, we’re going to smash cars and break things and make Ethan Hunt run all the time.⁷ As Hollywood blockbusters have pushed more and more into the realm of high-tech green screens and CGI creation, Mission: Impossible has kept its feet relatively on the ground. And in the process, it’s become Cruise’s personal vanity project — a way for him to make the purest thriller in which he, Tom Cruise, would show the world that these movies could still be made, and more importantly, that he, now at an age when most actors trade in their prop guns and are content to hand off the hard work to stunt doubles, could still helm them.

Leaving the plots of the films aside, the four Mission: Impossible movies that Cruise has made in the last 12 years can be seen as metaphors for his own continuing career. Every film counts Ethan Hunt out; he’s too old, too old-school, a relic of a dumber era. His enemies underestimate him, and his allies (or at least his government) find his methods to be equal parts insane and unnecessary. His mission, as it says on the can, is impossible, and yet he accepts every time. He refuses to fail that mission or sacrifice his teammates in the process; his devotion to the crew he assembles is total.⁸ Ethan Hunt has the zeal of a true believer and the loyalty of a convert, because so does Cruise; the only difference is that for Cruise, it’s the borderline religious conviction that all this whizbang and danger means something more than the digital celluloid onto which it’s printed. He has to jump that motorcycle off that mountain, because if he doesn’t, then the viewer won’t get what they came for, and that’s why he’s here. It doesn’t mean anything unless it’s as real as it can get.

The Mission: Impossible series is, at this point, Tom Cruise’s personal statement on Why We Go To The Movies and his love letter to them, and that for them not to go extinct, or at least land on the endangered species list, there has to be humanity in the art. It’s not exactly a coincidence that, in a time where filmmaking has been complicated if not irreparably altered by studios increasingly turning to digital tools and tricks over the tangible and traditional methods of shooting movies, the main antagonist in Dead Reckoning is a sentient and rogue artificial intelligence called The Entity that knows everything, can predict the future, and has the power to disrupt or hijack any digital tool it wants to create its own reality. In essence, Tom Cruise made a movie where the bad guy is ChatGPT, with Ethan Hunt in a race to stop it from taking over the world. Subtle, he’s not.

There’s a bombastic quality to this that you can’t help but laugh at — the idea that only the old-fashioned stardom of Tom Cruise and his Buster Keaton-style stunt work can stop the coming bot apocalypse. But it does feel like the Mission: Impossible movies represent one of the last refuges from the rubbery, sloppy mess that constitutes most major Hollywood films, featuring a legion of overworked and underpaid VFX artists churning under the whip and using state-of-the-art technology to create entire cities and planets and galaxies that nonetheless end up looking like Windows 2000-era screensavers, full of distracting digital baubles.⁹ In Dead Reckoning, you’re actually in Rome, and Venice, and Abu Dhabi. When Tom Cruise jumps off that motorcycle in the Austrian Alps, he’s not actually in the Austrian Alps, but he’s in a real place with real rocks and real dirt and real trees with real leaves that you can see moving in the real breeze, and his very real parachute takes him to a very real train that he really does send off a very real bridge. There’s a genuine physicality to these films that makes them stand out, and a bone-deep commitment that you can see in the strain on Cruise’s face, big as a skyscraper on the screen in front of you, as he hangs perilously from railings and ledges and cliffs.

Before my screening of Dead Reckoning, there was a short aired in which Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie thanked us for coming to see the movie in theaters. The war over how we watch movies going forward is tearing the industry apart and is, in part, why we currently have two concurrent industry strikes on the part of the writers and actors guilds; the future of movies themselves — how they’re written and cast and made and distributed — is very much up in the air. If it were up to Tom Cruise, it would be like this forever: real stunts, real locations, real theaters with real people in real seats, real dedication to the product. He’s waging a one-man fight against the digital tide, and to win it, he will put his body on the line again and again and again; nothing less will do. This is his impossible mission, and in his mind, he has no choice but to accept. And while he cannot win long-term, that will not stop him; if anything, it seems to push him to newer heights. Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt, and Ethan Hunt is Tom Cruise, and you get the sense that if Cruise died while filming his craziest stunt ever for the final movie,¹⁰ that would be alright with him, because that’s what Ethan Hunt would do.

Is it all worth it? When Cruise does his big motorcycle jump as part of an elaborate runaway train setpiece in Dead Reckoning’s final act, the music falls away; all you hear is the rev of the engine, the squeal of the bike’s tires, and then the sound of the wind buffeting him as he rips through the air. And in my theater, three-quarters full and fully invested, all you could hear were audience members muttering incredulously under their breath, their soft goddamns and ohmygods filling the space. And that’s why Tom Cruise does this: because somewhere deep inside of him, he knows that this is his highest calling, and that these viewers are his reason to be. “The greater good” is the common invocation of the Mission: Impossible series; all Ethan Hunt does is to save not himself, but the people around him and the world in which they live. So it goes with Tom Cruise, who jumps off that motorcycle not for himself, but for the people in those seats who gasp when he does it. The world’s consummate showman will not rest until the audience gets what it deserves, even if it means he might not be around to see it himself.

1. The best of these is “Ghost Protocol,” a phrase I highly recommend using in your daily life as often as possible.

2. I would love to watch these movies with Katie Holmes.

3. As he did in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.

4. As he also did in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.

5. As he does in Dead Reckoning while flirting with Hayley Atwell — his most dangerous and successful stunt yet.

6. He did not actually go full Alex Honnold, because he would for sure have died in the process; Cruise was attached to the building with cables the entire time, with the cables later digitally erased in post-production. Also, I bet Tom Cruise *loved* Free Solo.

7. There are multiple minute-plus-long scenes in Dead Reckoning where it’s just Cruise running in his particular strange fashion, like someone sped up footage of Robert Patrick as the T-1000 in Terminator 2, presumably to show off that he doesn’t skip his cardio workouts.

8. Cruise deserves praise, too, for the eye he has for co-stars; the choice of Rebecca Ferguson as the series’ femme fatale and Ethan Hunt’s on/off love interest was a stellar one, and the addition of Atwell in Dead Reckoning is equally inspired. Likewise, he’s gotten excellent supporting work from Simon Pegg, Henry Cavill, Vanessa Kirby (perfectly cast as a deliriously horny arms dealer), the eternal Ving Rhames, and Sean Harris, who in Rogue Nation and Fallout gave Hoffman a serious run as the series’ best villain.

9. Disney is the biggest offender in this department, with its Marvel and Star Wars output increasingly looking like it was written and filmed at the last minute and barely finished (if finished at all); the end result is muddy, ugly and dispiriting.

10. Principal photography began in March 2022, but shooting is currently on hold due to the SAG-AFTRA strike; I’m guessing we won’t see Dead Reckoning Part 2 until at least the back half of 2024, and maybe not until summer 2025.