Why Mission: Impossible is the best franchise in Hollywood
Has Ethan Hunt finally met his match? The most indefatigable agent of American intelligence, played as always by Tom Cruise, has a formidable new foe in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh installment in the movie series based on the TV series. It’s not a who but a what: a computer virus with a mind of its own, crunching numbers so efficiently that it can anticipate the good guy’s every move. The deck seems stacked against Ethan. But then, doesn’t it always? Beating unbeatable odds is his whole thing. It’s an average Tuesday for him, and the ultimate appeal of this series, whose very title is a challenge Ethan always rises (and climbs, and runs, and sweats, and nearly plummets to his death) to meet.
The truly improbable victory in Dead Reckoning belongs not to Hunt, whose skin-of-his-teeth survival is all but guaranteed by the “part one” in the title, but to the Mission: Impossible franchise itself. More than 25 years after Cruise refashioned a small-screen spy story into a big-screen action vehicle for himself, how are these movies still so good? Dead Reckoning may not be the best Mission: Impossible, but that’s only because the bar has been set as high as the various skyscrapers and aircraft cabins from which Hunt inevitably hangs. It’s the best Hollywood franchise we have. And like its sixtysomething star, it’s showing surprisingly few signs of wear and tear.
There are no bad Mission: Impossible movies. No, not even John Woo’s Y2K entry, M:I-2, which hard boils the tricky suspense mechanics of Brian De Palma’s 1996 original into an action thriller of sublimely mounting absurdities, a bullet opera in the key of Notorious. There are those who love Woo’s balletically soapy take on Mission: Impossible best. They’re no more wrong than those who prefer the third movie, with its chilling Philip Seymour Hoffman villain. Or the fourth, with its daisy chain of Pixarian obstacles and world’s-tallest-building ascent. Or any of the three directed by Christopher McQuarrie, which have managed to serialize Hunt’s feats of high-wire espionage without depriving them of their self-contained fun.
Every M:I is an ingenious contraption and an antidote to blockbuster bloat, streamlining the worldsaving business of your average summer movie into a series of expertly staged set pieces, many of them built around Cruise’s who-needsa-stunt-double game of chicken with his own mortality. They’re dumb in a smart way, or maybe vice versa: accept their lapses in logic, and they have a way of buzzing your brain with the audacity of their compounding complications. That they scarcely demand investment in the characters, even Cruise’s, is a feature, not a bug. Each courts a more primal investment, the constant present-tense urgency of their races against the clock.
Is there any other running franchise that so fully and consistently earns the adjective “Hitchcockian”? No surprise that M:I fits the bill, given that its inaugural entry was directed by De Palma, the master of suspense’s most eager disciple. Breaking from the reigning trends in Hollywood action cinema these past three decades, Mission: Impossible is less about killing than a nerve-racking flirtation with death. Hunt may drop a few bodies for his country and his species, but he’s much more likely to put his own at perpetual risk; most of the centerpiece sequences of Mission: Impossible are triumphs of suspense, not violence. They sometimes even revolve around minimizing casualties, as when Hunt has to think of a way to bust his arch-nemesis out of captivity in part six, Fallout, without killing any innocent guards.
M:I’s unlikely creative consistency is especially surprising given how much turnover the series has seen across its lifespan. Cruise is the only cast member who appears in every entry; the makeup of his squad of sidekicks has changed constantly over the years, actors coming and going with each sequel. The creative team changes, too – or it used to, at least, before McQuarrie settled in with 2015’s Rogue Nation. Until then, M:I existed in a state of constant stylistic reinvention, a different film-maker merging his preoccupations with Cruise’s each time. That makes this the rare Hollywood series that’s at once a revolving door of behind-thecamera talent and a dependable source of auteuristic personality – a director’s franchise as much as a star’s.
Of course, the constant is Cruise. His star power, renewed through the lengths he’s willing to go to preserve it, anchors the series. Hunt may not be much of a character by standard definition – he’s more cipher than complicated man – but he’s an ideal avatar for Cruise’s commitment to generating thrills through the lunacy of practical stunt work. Conflating his own determination (and blithely disregarded safety) with that of his character, the actor treats each movie like a mad race against the very concept of acting your age. It’s not so much that the stunts get more precarious every time. It’s that Cruise gets older, and the stakes go up accordingly. He can’t stop.
Mission: Impossible has never been entirely immune to trends. If the crunch of Limp Bizkit on a soundtrack didn’t prove that already, the Endgamebiting inconclusiveness of Dead Reckoning should. But the movies have held onto their values, their spy-thriller formula, pioneered by De Palma’s original and molded into different shapes with each successive sequel. Their appeal is largely standalone, give or take a loose plot thread: when you watch a Mission: Impossible movie, you’re dangling right there in the breathtaking moment with Cruise, not waiting for a cameo or callback, not hoping for a preview of a coming installment. And when someone, say, hangs from a rising airplane, there’s an extra jolt of shivery anxiety in the knowledge that what you’re seeing wasn’t achieved solely through the click of a mouse.
Cruise, in the lead-up to Dead Reckoning’s release, promised that he plans to keep making Mission: Impossible movies well into his 80s. That could be a recipe for tragedy: even the most thetan-purged movie star might eventually reach his limit or the base-jumping point of no return. But if the last seven movies in the series are any indication, it probably won’t be a recipe for diminishing returns. A movie franchise that still delivers five decades on? The odds are in Cruise’s favor, however unbeatable they might seem.