When Mission: Impossible Had No Mission

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2 days ago

Every major movie franchise has boxes to check. In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs must run amok; in Planet of the Apes, apes have to meditate on intelligence; in The Fast and the Furious, Vin Diesel absolutely has to evangelize the benefits of family, Corona beers, and tricked-out cars. But Mission: Impossible took four films to fully establish its franchise must-have: the ever more blurred lines between its death-defying, stunt-loving star, Tom Cruise, and the superspy he plays. For more than a decade, the series was defined instead by its lack of definition—at least, beyond having Cruise in the lead role as Ethan Hunt, and Ving Rhames recur as Hunt's ally. Each installment felt made by a director with a specific take on the material, and Cruise was their versatile instrument.
But the four Mission: Impossible films that followed—culminating in the eighth and purportedly final installment, now in theaters—have taken a different approach. Instead of relying on a select few characters and story beats to link the films together, the movies have abided by a stricter canon. Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, which earned a record-setting $63 million at the box office over its opening weekend, represents the most aggressive pivot away from the saga's more freewheeling origins: It self-seriously inserts supercuts of footage from its predecessors, reveals the purpose of a long-forgotten plot device, and turns a bit player from 1996's Mission: Impossible into a crucial character. In the process, it streamlines those earlier, delightfully unpredictable stories to the point of overlooking their true appeal.
That tactic may be familiar to today's audiences, who are used to cinematic universes and intersecting story threads, but the Mission: Impossible franchise initially distinguished itself by eschewing continuity. New cast members came and went. Hunt lacked signature skills and catchphrases. The movies were messy, and didn't seem interested in building toward an overarching plan. Yet in their inconsistency, they prove the value of ignoring the brand-building pressures that have become the norm for big-budget features today.
[Read: The unbearable weight of Mission: Impossible]
Like the 1960s television show on which they're loosely based, the early Mission: Impossibles were stand-alone stories. The first two movies in particular stuck out for their bold authorial styles. First came Brian De Palma's film, which he drenched in noir-ish flair while also deploying vivid color and Dutch angles. It arrived at a time when blockbusters such as Independence Day and Twister leveled cities and prioritized world-ending spectacle. Without a formula in place, De Palma got to challenge genre conventions—for instance, by mining tension out of mere silence during the central set piece, which saw Hunt's team staging a tricky heist.
The second film, 2000's Mission: Impossible II, went maximalist under the direction of John Woo, who punctuated almost every sequence with slow-motion visuals and dizzying snap zooms. The filmmaker also asserted that Hunt himself was malleable: Whereas in the first film, he fights off his enemies without ever firing a gun, in Woo's version, he's a cocksure Casanova mowing down his targets in hails of bullets. Woo also indulged in the action pageantry that De Palma had avoided—Mission: Impossible II seemed to contain twice the amount of explosions necessary for a popcorn film—but the climactic stunt is perhaps the smallest Cruise has ever had to pull off: When the villain stabs at Hunt with a knife, the point stops just before reaching his eye.
The two films that followed conveyed a similar sense of unpredictability. For 2006's Mission: Impossible III and 2011's Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, Cruise, who also served as a producer, picked unconventional choices to direct: J. J. Abrams, then best known for creating twisty TV dramas such as Alias and Lost, took on the third entry, while Brad Bird, who'd cut his teeth in animation, handled Ghost Protocol. Like their more accomplished predecessors, both filmmakers were entrusted by Cruise and company to treat Mission: Impossible as a playground where they could demonstrate their own creative strengths.
[Read: The sincerity and absurdity of Hollywood's best action franchise]
Where De Palma and Woo focused on visual panache, Abrams and Bird stretched the limits of tone—and in doing so, revealed the adaptability of the franchise. Mission: Impossible III is unnervingly sobering amid its shootouts and double crosses; the film features a memorably chilling Philip Seymour Hoffman as the villain, a character's disturbing death, and a subplot about Hunt getting married. Ghost Protocol, meanwhile, is essentially a screwball comedy: Simon Pegg's character, Benji, provides a humorous button to many of the film's biggest scenes, and Bird treats Hunt like a marble caught in a Rube Goldberg machine packed with goofy gadgets, whether he's pinballing through a prison or being launched out of a car in the middle of a sandstorm. (Hunt even declares 'Mission accomplished,' only for the film to play the line for laughs.)
In the years since Ghost Protocol, much of big-budget filmmaking has come to feel made by committee. Studios offer fans remakes, legacy sequels, and spin-offs that connect disparate story threads, bending over backwards to ensure that viewers understand they're being shown something related to preexisting media. (Just look at the title of the upcoming John Wick spin-off.) The new Mission: Impossible suffers by making similar moves. It struggles to make sense of Hunt's story as one long saga, yielding an awkwardly paced, lethargic-in-stretches film. The Final Reckoning insists that every assignment Hunt has ever taken, every ally he's ever made, and every enemy he's ever foiled have been connected, forming a neat line of stepping stones that paved the way for him to save the world one more time.
Taken together, the first four Mission: Impossibles were compellingly disorganized, a stark contrast with Hollywood's ever more rigid notion of how to construct a franchise. They didn't build consistent lore. Each new installment didn't try to top the previous one—a popular move that's had diminishing returns. Although some observers critique their varying quality, the lack of consensus emphasizes the singularity of each of these efforts. They remind me of the instances of an individual filmmaker's vision found amid major cinematic properties these days, such as Taika Waititi putting his witty stamp on a Thor sequel, Fede Alvarez turning Alien: Romulus into a soundscape of jump scares, and on television, Tony Gilroy ensuring that the Star Wars prequel Andor never included a single Skywalker. If the older Mission: Impossible movies now feel dated and incongruous—whether within the franchise itself or as part of the cinematic landscape writ large—that's to their benefit. They let creative sensibilities, not commercial ones, take the lead.
Article originally published at The Atlantic