Why Mission: Impossible thrives while Bond and Indiana Jones wither
Graham Hillard
“There is no ‘community of nations,’” Irving Kristol wrote 39 years ago this month. Give him a story credit on the new Mission: Impossible flick. A stunt-tacular of epic proportions, a beautifully paced action mashup, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is also a somber exercise in realpolitik, with all the melancholy that entails. If the old man were still around to watch it, he’d be nodding grimly.
MI7 opens in Arctic waters, where a Russian submarine is testing an experimental stealth technology. Though disaster soon scuttles the warship, its wreckage includes two halves of an interlocking key, a cleft MacGuffin that the film’s dramatis personae will go to any lengths to reunite. What the key unlocks, precisely, is a mystery, known vaguely to the audience and not at all to several important characters. The bottom line? An artificially intelligent “entity” has come into being, evolved consciousness, gone insane, and now threatens to take over the world. The key may well control it, and whatever country that does that will upend the international order with a turn of the wrist.
A NEW BOOK TELLS THE STORY OF UFC, A BUSINESS AND A SPORT
Out with the old system of alliances? Perhaps so. But in, as always, with Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), a human propulsion engine for whom a cheesed-off chatbot is simply no match. Part of the fun of MI7 is its celebration of all things analog, a nostalgic hook made necessary by the Entity’s digital supremacy. The rest comes down to the ageless Cruise, still running at breakneck speed after all these years and still every bit the movie star. Sitting once more in the producer’s chair, with longtime collaborator and director Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise has built a rocket that he alone can fly. “I’ve wanted to do it since I was a little kid,” the actor said recently of one of the film’s stunts. Yes, but the same might as well be said of the entire Mission: Impossible series, which feels more and more like an extension of Cruise’s reckless, contagious joy.
Like many first-parters, Cruise’s latest lacks proper resolution and ends with startling abruptness. Yet the movie is otherwise as sprightly as a spring hare, with hardly an ounce of flab on its 163-minute frame. Though trying to explain MI7’s plot is a fool’s errand, the film does hit certain comprehensible beats. Joined, as in past entries, by sidekicks Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), Ethan is tasked with tracking down both pieces of the mysterious key. One, recovered rather easily, is held by Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), Ethan’s MI6 ally from the last two pictures. The other half of the key Hunt is after slips from person to person in a labyrinthine game of Capture the Flag that takes Ethan from Abu Dhabi to Rome to the Orient Express. It’s retained or sought by an arms dealer (Vanessa Kirby), a terrorist (Esai Morales), an assassin (Pom Klementieff), and a pickpocket (Hayley Atwell). Full disclosure: I gave up almost immediately trying to follow who was on whose side or possessed what widget, when. Yet it would be unfair to conclude that MI7 is merely set pieces held together by nonsense. Rather, the film understands that an action thriller needn’t grip its narrative particulars too tightly. Broad strokes will do when painting on a frenetic canvas.
And MI7 moves. The reader will have heard, perhaps, about the film’s most heralded stunt, in which Ethan drives a motorcycle off a cliff, then turns the resulting fall into a base jump. Astonishingly, other scenes are even more impressive, among them a car-by-car train derailment that is as nail-bitingly tense as the famous skyscraper climb in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol. To be sure, a few of the new film’s setpieces feel conceptually derivative. What urban car chase doesn’t owe a debt to The French Connection (1971) or, for that matter, The Bourne Identity (2002)? That MI7 feels fresh despite occasional borrowing is a tribute to McQuarrie’s knack for execution. It is no small thing to position one’s camera perfectly in scene after scene, but the director does it. Watch as Ethan collapses atop a train carriage to squeeze into an approaching tunnel. The shot is low and angled, emphasizing the infinitesimal gap. Perfection.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Can Mission: Impossible’s cockiness endure in our tender age? God, I hope so. What sets MI7 apart is that our hero is still a hero despite the bleakness of the film’s geopolitical circumstances. The stunts are superb, but it’s the attitude that makes the difference. The alternative, offered in a spirit of cultural diffidence, is Indiana Jones and the Medicare Enrollment Period (right?) or the disaster that is the contemporary Bond series. I am aware that these films have their own razzle-dazzle. Nevertheless, each betrays its audience to one extent or another, substituting postmodern ambiguities for muscular fun. Bond literally dies in his last outing; Indiana Jones wants to. It is difficult — no, Impossible — to imagine Ethan Hunt taking the same road.
Graham Hillard is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.