The latest installment in Tom Cruise’s spy franchise manages to be ridiculous amounts of fun despite itself. And here are four reasons why.
It's old.
Bo Bridges / Paramount Pictures
The Mission: Impossible movies have now been around for just under two decades, almost twice as long as the television show on which they're based (and that's counting the '80s revival). The first film came out in 1996, when Cruise was 33 and his co-star was the owl-eyed French actress Emmanuelle Béart, making a doomed bid for American stardom. It was directed by no less than Brian De Palma (of Scarface and Carrie) and co-written by Chinatown's Oscar-winning Robert Towne, who also scripted the John Woo–helmed sequel. Film series have certainly chugged on for longer — see Alien, Star Wars, Planet of the Apes — but it's rare for one this long in the tooth to also be so continuous. Ethan Hunt, the indestructible IMF agent extraordinaire played by Cruise, has never passed the torch off to someone else, even as his team has shifted around him.
Five features in, the franchise could easily feel past its prime. But through the same blockbuster thaumaturgy that's allowed the Fast & Furious films to scale up into operatic, chrome-crunching weepies, Mission: Impossible has somehow adapted and gotten better over time. Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation may not be the best in the series (a win I'd give to 2011's Ghost Protocol), but it easily tops that first movie, which, despite its pedigree and box office success, was a mixed bag. The franchise has gradually refined its combination of jaw-dropping action set pieces and sleekly cool world of espionage into something that's approaching pop perfection. And in a moment in which studio movies have fallen hard for serialization — even the latest string of Bond films are linked — Mission: Impossible's weightlessness, both in its stunts and in its spirit, is its greatest asset.
It stars Tom Cruise.
David James / Paramount Pictures
And Cruise's career has gone through some roller coaster swings over the course of the franchise. Cruise was still married to Nicole Kidman when he made the first Mission: Impossible — in the time since, he's married and divorced Katie Holmes, jumped on Oprah's couch, gotten dumped by Paramount, starred in a feverish Scientology promotional video that was leaked to the public, and reinvented his career as a Real Action Star, the guy who does his own stunts. His public image has taken a battering and may always be fraught, but onscreen, he's clung to movie stardom and youth with astonishing willpower.
And it works. Ethan Hunt is the kind of role that's a perfect fit for Cruise's overwhelming gameness, his willingness both to dangle off the world's tallest building and to spend weeks doing cheery TV promotional appearances around the globe. Ethan's aura of inhumanity in Rogue Nation syncs nicely with Cruise's to create a character aware of his own larger-than-life status. "I've heard stories," gasps an IMF worker upon meeting him. "They can't all be true!" Cruise pauses, then smiles, like he's running through the ones he's heard himself and verifying that, yes, they all totally happened.
Over the course of Rogue Nation, Cruise, now 53, vaults shirtless up a pole in handcuffs like some big-screen Pilates advertisement; he jumps off an opera house roof; he clings to a plane that takes off, a much-touted stunt that's actually just the movie's equivalent of a cold open; and, most impressively, he makes fun of his own imperviousness in the flash of alarm that flickers across his face as Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) volunteers him for an insane break-in (and in the bit of physical comedy that comes when his character's still recovering afterward).
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