Tom Cruise Is A Man On A Mission: Impossible. Is A Reckoning Due?

Just how much Cruise Control is too much Cruise Control, asks Rahul Desai in this deep-dive into Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning — Part One.

A still from Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

MOST action films thrive on the man vs machine conflict. But never has this conflict felt more personal — and therefore, more desperate — than in a modern-day Tom Cruise blockbuster. The 61-year-old Hollywood superstar is ageless, of course. We know he does his own stunts. We know he’s bursting with enthusiasm like a waxy gargoyle on a sugar high. We know he loves what he does. We know he genuinely believes that he’s saving the world — and its movies — when his characters are saving the world in movies. We know he thinks he is the last man standing between the good old days and the bad new days. Most of all, we know he is hyper-aware of the universe around him. He weaponises this awareness through the big screen.

Last year’s Top Gun: Maverick is an example of how Cruise seized the moment and unleashed an antidote of vintage make in the VFX-superhero-fatigue age. He knew exactly what it stood for. His impassioned analog image shaped his role of a veteran pilot returning to show the brash kids how it’s done. The reason it broke box-office records is because a post-pandemic audience needed nostalgia — antiquated plotting, coherent action, old-is-gold tropes — to offset the new normal. And what’s more nostalgic than a timeless Tom Cruise defying the slick and hi-tech comic-book franchise system? Military (and movie) propaganda never felt so soothing.

His latest, the seventh installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, is another bleeding-heart brick in that man-vs-machine wall. Dead Reckoning Part One features IMF superspy Ethan Hunt (does Ethan Hunt play Tom Cruise, or vice versa? Who knows anymore?) facing his biggest rival yet — ready for this? — Artificial Intelligence (AI). The plot reads: Hunt and his team race against world powers to find and thwart a nameless, faceless and lifeless enemy called the Entity, a rogue AI posing the greatest threat to humanity. Which is to say: Cruise’s mission — should he accept it — is to not just save the movies but movie-making itself. The timing is eerily precise. Because another way of reading the plot is: Cruise and team race to release a summer blockbuster and thwart ChatGPT, a studio-commissioned AI posing the gravest threat to working artists and flesh-and-blood storytelling. Cruise is so aggressively earnest that it’s tempting to view this film as proof of his solidarity with the ongoing Hollywood writer and actor strikes.

Hunt trying to dismantle an AI system for the greater good is basically Cruise promising that cinema will never be hijacked by sentient technology. He’s got this. He’s striking with his colleagues…by making a lot of money. (That sound you hear is Christopher Nolan writing a Tom Cruise biopic). He bets that no CGI bot can reproduce the sheer thrill of a madcap motorbike leap off a cliff. The making-of video of this stunt that went viral some months ago is a middle finger to the suits who want AI to replace human creativity at half the cost. And Cruise knows — he always knows — that we don’t enjoy these movies so much as we enjoy the fact that we enjoy them. We seek out his signature audacity the way people fish out dusty photo albums when everything around them is perishing too fast.

This context — and corresponding real-world stakes — makes the 163-minute action thriller look cooler than it is. The Entity forces all the intelligence agencies to go analog (we see thousands of agents literally writing down all their data in case of a wipeout), a playful way of promoting the purism of action cinema in an era of post-converted 3D and tech-garbled epics. At one point, Hunt growls “digital” like it’s the ugliest word in the dictionary. He is living, breathing proof that it’s humans that are turning into machines, perhaps not the other way around. So the chase sequences in Venice have the grainy texture and lighting of film. The combat is all sound and crunching fury, not too flashy or over-choreographed. There’s no tangible antagonist — unless we count a man called Gabriel, who is more or less the face and fury of the Entity, and Paris, his hired French assassin — and so it’s mostly Hunt willing the film into retro mode.

The set pieces are replete with moments where he struggles to tame fancy gadgetry, instead relying on his physical instincts (sprinting, parachuting and in-camera effects) to pull off gravity-defying miracles. Even the locations are old-world: The Arabian desert, Italy, the Orient Express (Pathaan fans might get tickled by the near-identical train chaos). There’s also some period glamour to be found in the film’s striking women — Hunt’s MI6 love interest Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), ‘White Widow’ Alanna Mitsopolis (a bleached-blonde Vanessa Kirby), and orphan-burglar Grace (Hayley Atwell). Given his aversion to robotics, I’d imagine Hunt would be good friends with Rocky Balboa and John McClane in the action multiverse.

But in terms of the silly-smart daredevilry of the franchise, Dead Reckoning Part One is mid-table at best. It’s an accepted norm that the actual storyline in these movies is mere window dressing — a flimsy springboard for the action to do loopy somersaults. (Drinking game: Have a shot every time an MI movie opens with Ethan Hunt being disavowed from the IMF). But this instalment overdoes the window dressing, almost like it’s attempting to ditch its trademark silliness for all-out smartness. Or worse, almost like it’s under the illusion that we actually care about the narrative machinations. As a result, there’s too much exposition and talking and punchline-conversing and dealing. There’s also a lot of story whataboutery: Two halves of an Entity-unlocking key form the crux of Hunt’s global hunt, and he spends much of the film following the path of this key to figure out what its purpose is. Someone is stealing it, someone is selling and buying it; a Russian submarine holds the (metaphorical) key to the keys. Why take such a convoluted route when the one-liner offers just as much leeway to diffuse a bomb at an airport, wreck the Spanish Steps or blow up an Austrian bridge? Why try to make sense?

The problem with this film is, ironically, also what makes it entertaining: The Tom Cruise syndrome. The over-writing stems from the superstar’s own self-seriousness as The Chosen One. In a way, he’s both the Spy and The Entity out to reshape our perception of the truth. The movie is so intent on following his lead and being a medicinal blast from the past that it sometimes ends up looking like it’s assembled by an AI machine. The script insists on being ‘convincing’, because Cruise is reacting to the visual graphics-orgy style of modern blockbusters. In the process, you can almost touch the desperation to be both denser and simpler at once. And ever so often, the reacting becomes reactionary. It’s not total creation; it’s a history-clutching flight of fancy that’s designed to resist — and destroy — the future. The storytelling loses sight of its own voice, instead focusing on withstanding evolution and progress, not toxic newness and computer soullessness. Rescuing movies and movie-watching from the whims of artificial intelligence reeks of a saviour complex that auteurs like Nolan are regularly accused of. It’s okay to take responsibility, but not when the pensiveness of this mission bleeds into the craft, like it does here.

It’s a delicate line that Dead Reckoning Part One keeps crossing, like that stubbornly conservative uncle who derides millennials and Gen Z kids for not upholding traditional values. It was endearing in Top Gun but it’s sort of tedious in this film. After all, how much saving is too much saving? How much old-fashioned flimsiness is too much old-fashioned flimsiness? It’s perfectly fine to create a hero symbolic of what the world loses while moving forward and expanding — a hero representative of when film-making was more people than machines. But it can be done without forcing moviegoers to view dullness through the lens of nostalgia. It can be done without Tom Cruise constantly stalking us and demanding to know if we remember the time stunts were real and snaking plots earned the action and movies weren’t made entirely in post-production suites. It can be done without the man looking like he might self-combust in righteous rage if we don’t enjoy his missions. All we can maybe do now is ask: Remember when we liked movies for what they were, not for what they weren’t?

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