MOVIES
The latest in the Tom Cruise franchise is already being acclaimed as action film of the year, writes
It’s Impossible to hate this franchise
Over the past 22 years perhaps no franchise has been as successful and consistent as the Tom Cruise juggernaut action vanity project that is Mission: Impossible. Fallout, the sixth film in the franchise, is already receiving glowingly breathless acclaim. Let’s remind ourselves just how and why the series — which is about just how possible are the seemingly impossible world-saving tasks set for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his team at the laughably named Impossible Missions Force — has managed to maintain this level of critical and popular success.
When Brian de Palma directed the first in the series in 1996, the film was conceived as a spy thriller that traded on intrigue and tension rather than increasingly spectacular action setpieces against iconic world landmarks.
In spite of a still-ridiculous finale involving a helicopter chasing a train through a tunnel, Mission: Impossible was a critically lukewarm but popularly appreciated piece of cloak and dagger.
It gave pop culture an endlessly spoofable sequence in the form of Cruise’s ceiling-suspended break-in at a CIA computer room and provided a reminder of the long shadow of De Palma’s cinematic idol, Alfred Hitchcock. Cruise, who had set up his own production company with Paula Wagner to make the film for Paramount, clearly had his eye on creating a franchise that would cement him as a top-tier action star.
So in 2000, when it came to unleashing M:I-2, he turned to Hong Kong action maestro and lover of slow-motion action ballets and doves John Woo to take the reins to create a film that departed significantly from the first. It drew up the blueprint for a more high-octane action, crazy stunt-driven approach.
While Woo’s film remains the most critically panned of the series, it turned a huge profit at the box office and so any thoughts of the IMF quietly retiring were put out of the minds of producers and fans alike.
Over the next three films Cruise made a wily decision to hire a new director for each film, and each brought their own particular sensibilities while allowing for the fact that the franchise remained very much his showcase.
JJ Abrams made his feature film debut on M:I-3 in 2006. While not quite the critical or commercial success he might have hoped for, it created a stellar villain turn for Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Animation director Brad Bird took charge of 2011’s Ghost Protocol, which offered up the sight of Cruise scaling the glass exterior of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.
Like James Bond and the Bourne series, M:I seemed to be taking full advantage of the possibilities provided by the world’s most recognisable landmarks as things to jump off or climb up or just blow up.
Unlike the Bond and Bourne franchises, however, the M:I series has always been a team-based effort — where we know that Hunt can’t save the world without a little help from his friends
By the time Usual Suspects writer Christopher McQuarrie got behind the camera for 2015’s Rogue Nation, the franchise had seemed to reach a reasonably satisfying balance between its spy-thriller intrigue origins and its 1980s adventureaction blockbuster heritage. McQuarrie is back for Fallout.
The franchise relies on predictable plots. These usually involve Hunt and the IMF’s unstable relationship to the US government. It also exists as a kind of spectacular record of the life changes of its star.
Unlike Bond or Bourne, it has become somewhat impossible to imagine the continuation of the series beyond Cruise’s ability to return for yet another dazzling display of stunt work and death-defying motorcycle high jinks.
Cruise was 34 when he starred in the first film, and is now 57. We’ve watched as he’s moved from square-cut earnest husband of Nicole Kidman to Oprah couch-jumping nutter (often cited as a reason for M:I-3’s less-than-expected box office return) to well, you know, that strange dark-lord-of- Scientology-and-too-shortto-be-Jack Reacher-without-CGI-help guy, Tom Cruise.
As long as Cruise is able to hang off planes, take off his shirt and climb every skyscraper, you can be sure that no impossible mission will ever be too impossible for Ethan Hunt and the IMF. And perhaps that’s all it really needs. LS