MIDDLE-AGED MARVEL
At 53, Tom Cruise is still hurtling about on motorbikes and dodging bullets. BRIAN VINER, who’s the same age, doffs his cap
THE one mortal enemy not even Tom Cruise will be able to defy for ever is Father Time, though he’s giving it his best shot.
In this fifth incarnation as Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt, he confounds a bunch of Chechen separatists by clinging on to the outside of their plane during take-off, before boarding it to steal their canisters of nerve gas. And that’s even before the opening credits.
Cruise, incidentally, is 53. According to a recent newspaper survey, that’s now considered the point at which middle age begins. The same survey included the following as inexorable signs that mid-life has kicked in: buying travel sweets for long car journeys, enjoying the Antiques Road Show and joining the National Trust.
I was interested in that because I, too, am 53. And I’m afraid I tick all those boxes. But I can’t see Cruise in the middle lane of the M4 dipping into a tin of ginger fruit drops.
So as a man of precisely the same age, let me raise three cheers for Cruise, an inspiration to us all and looking as good as ever, even with his shirt off, almost 20 years after the first bigscreen spin-off of the long-running TV series. He can still abseil down a building in the course of saving the planet, in this case from a shadowy organisation called the Syndicate, as energetically as he ever could.
The last time we saw him, in 2011’s highly enjoyable Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, Hunt foiled the fiendish plans of a deranged nuclear scientist.
This time, his foe is a rogue former British Intelligence agent, Solomon Lane (a splendidly sinister Sean Harris), who in turn has recruited another British agent, Ilsa Faust (wonderfully played by a Swedish actress with a decidedly non-Swedish name, Rebecca Ferguson). She is either on the side of good, or evil, or possibly both. Not even the screenwriters seem entirely sure.
Meanwhile, the director of the CIA (a hammy Alec Baldwin) wants the IMF wound up, on the not unreasonable basis that everywhere Hunt goes, there is mayhem.
So Hunt becomes a fugitive from his own countrymen, although that only partly explains his impressive accumulation of air miles, as he scoots between London, Vienna, Paris, Washington DC, Casablanca and Minsk.
These days, no action spy film worthy of its name fails to criss- cross the globe more frenziedly than a turbo-charged Michael Palin, as if we won’t believe in it unless it clocks up at
least half a dozen locations. Of course, we don’t believe in it anyway. The plot, which threatens the life of the British Prime Minister (Tom Hollander), is as preposterous as we have come to expect from the Mission Impossible franchise.
Mission Implausible, in other words, but the writerdirector this time is Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote The Usual suspects and directed Jack Reacher, and knows how to craft a decent twist or two.
There was probably more spectacular action in the last film, but this one is just as fun, and could feasibly make a star of 31-year-old Ferguson, who steals scenes while everyone else is trying to steal nerve gas and memory sticks.
Last week, the trailer for the new Bond film spectre was released with the same promotional ballyhoo that used to attend the launch of entire movies, so here’s a timely reminder that 007 is not necessarily the world’s most debonair r and resourceful secret agent. He mightt not even have the best tune — Laloo schifrin’s Mission Impossible theme iss as timelessly stirring as ever.
And simon Pegg, back as Hunt’ss computer-geek sidekick — the Q too Cruise’s Bond, in a way — has a steadyy supply of witty one-liners.
However, the film’s best one-linerr verges on the philosophical. ‘There aree no allies in statecraft, Ilsa, only commonn interests,’ purrs her scheming bosss (simon McBurney). How true.
But it is spectacle that we really want t from a Mission Impossible film, not a raft of clever lines, and this one deliverss almost as impressively as the last, with a tremendous scene at the opera house inn Vienna, and a genuinely excitingg Moroccan motorbike chase.
We also get to see Cruise, or at any ratee Hunt, holding his breath for minutes on n end as he rides an underwater vortexx like a spider disappearing down a giantt plughole. A note to our fellow 53-year- olds: suck a travel sweet instead.