Look at this absolute dingleberry, dangling away up there
dir: Christopher McQuarrie
2025
Enough already.
We’ve seen enough of Tom Cruise running. We get it. You’re the boy that won’t grow up, besides being in your 60s. We further get it: you’re really fit for your age, and possibly Scientology is keeping you eternally youthful (I mean, comparatively, for someone your age). And you can run fast and jump off things and onto other things, and that you’re “famous” for doing your own stunts.
We get it. No-one’s saying you can’t do all of that stuff. We’re just saying, okay, we believe you, but that’s enough already.
These films have never been about a team of heroes who save the world from megalomaniacal villains. They have all been about one guy, called Ethan Hunt, who saves the world routinely, and then there are some hangers on. Of course they do “important” stuff, but if they weren’t around, Ethan Hunt would doubtless figure out how to save the day some other way, he just wouldn’t have someone around to explain things to (for the audience’s sake). Sure, they could have gone the Deadpool route and have had him continuously talking to the audience, but even his star power couldn’t make that that interesting for eight fucking movies.
This film completes whatever all that bullshit was that they did in the previous movie, which, if I recall, was called Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1. Terrible name for a movie, almost as bad as calling a film The Last Samurai and having Tom Cruise as the main character. In the previous film there was a really nasty guy called Gabriel (Esai Morales) who strutted around mostly killing women that Ethan Hunt had spoken to or held hands with. He did this for his own personal gratification, not generally because the plot required it. He also happened to be in league with an AI that had reached self-awareness and therefore immediately planned to kill everyone.
What would an AI want with a dead planet? No idea, but I am not as smart as theoretical AIs in films where people jump motorbikes onto trains or fight people for parachutes in biplanes or have to find things in sunken submarines in order to save us all.
To paraphrase a line from The Simpsons, they take an awfully long time to get to the fireworks factory, if the fireworks factory is an end to all these threats upon humanity’s existence. What it also reminds me of is an article I read recently that depicted what happens at the annual Christmas parties for Hancock Prospecting, being Gina Rhinehart’s company.
In case you don’t know who she is, well, this screed isn’t going to illuminate you, but whoever she is, at these Christmas parties, her employees, miners and those who tell miners what to do, have to spend the day praising their dear leader/owner and telling her how grateful they are that she lets them mine minerals for her, how truly lucky they are. That’s in between singing songs that praise her wisdom, business acumen, and, presumably, great beauty as well.
This flick is, like all these flicks, very much involved in the work of praising Ethan Hunt when he is on screen, praising him even more when he’s not and wondering what he’s wearing and whether he’s happy, and essentially having people debate whether he’s the greatest of all time and humanity’s only hope or not, only to eventually get around to what everyone should have assumed based on every other time that he’s delivered, that we’d all be fucked without him.
Forget delusional, forget messianic. Long have people compared these Missions Impossibles to the Bond films, but no-one ever mistook any of the Bonds for a messiah: we all knew he was in it for the booze, for the sex and maybe for the Queen, but that’s about it. Emblem of colonialism, agent of an Empire in decline, but no supernatural saviour, surely (even if he saved us from cataclysms / nuclear whatevers / ends of the world multiple times over).
By this outing Ethan Hunt has saved humanity from doom and in this case the technological Devil so many times it’s almost like he’s expecting us all to vote for him as the next Pope / Jesus / Xenu. He has sacrificed so much for us, at the very least we could show him some gratitude. Just a few statues, is all I’m saying.
It’s not about family. There are plenty of Is in Cruise’s Team. Teamwork does not make the dream work. It’s just Ethan, all of the time, as the others stand back gaping, in awe of him and his holy ways.
He, alone, has to dive down to a scuttled Soviet submarine, in order to retrieve a macguffin that, paired with another macguffin, and retrieved because of the combination of two other macguffins into a cross shaped key (you know, a cross like what Jesus H. Christ wore when he was just hanging around?), that may or may not save the world.
And somehow, that has to have a different thingie plugged into it that one of Ethan’s hangers-on has developed, that will do a thing that will kill the AI Entity, or trick it into doing something dumb, or wipe the smile off of Gabriel’s woman-killing face at the very least.
Three hours of this bullshit. Well, 170 minutes to be exact. Did I mind the extreme length? Well, not so much, since what it gained in length it more than lost in girth. In no way is the flick streamlined, but its stolid A to B to C to D to E plotting allows for some what I would call delightful cameos. Hannah Waddingham, so great as Rebecca on Ted Lasso plays someone oh so senior in the US Navy who knows nothing about Ethan Hunt, or Ethan Hawke, probably, but by the end of her two minutes with the man, will see the light, and lead him on to his next cameo, on a submarine, being Travis Trammell, who’s so great as Mr Melchick on Severance as its captain. With that glorious moustache, seductively saying “Mister” several times either as a threat or a promise; it added more sneaky sexuality to these films than anyone else has managed even after 20 years.
Just a few minutes with him, and with no reason to believe him, people always go his way, give him what he wants or help him get to his next destination. Implausible, really, but we’re not here for Mission Plausible and Realistic. He has to get to the next place because we want to see him just barely survive something that the rest of us would probably stuff up at the first hurdle, and keep going.
So, like, the thing on the submarine. Only he can get there, but he needs experimental gear. No-one else could go with him, like, nah, they can’t even get the submarine to go close to it, because that would be too easy, but there’s also only one prototype suit. When he gets there, despite the fact that the submarine sank decades ago, everything works fine to allow him to access what he needs, but that isn’t dangerous enough: the submarine has to start rolling around, because that’s more fun. So he’s only got a few minutes to get to the… thing that he needs to put the key in, but the submarine is rolling, and there’s torpedoes everywhere, and, if you’re an idiot like me, you forget, you honestly forget and think “fuck, is he going to make it?”, as he just gets the thing he needs and just gets out before it rolls off the continental shelf but he had to take his suit off, so he’s going to strain and struggle to get to the surface, and then he’s going to drown…
And come back to life, just like Buffy at the end of Season 1, resuscitated by one of her allies after The Master drowned her. Now, I’m not saying that they ripped off Buffy the Vampire Slayer for their flick, but I do wonder if it results in the same paradox that resulted in there being two Slayers simultaneously. Does that mean there’s another Slayer / Ethan Hunt / Faith that’s been activated?
I sure hope not. We don’t need more Tom Cruises in this or any other world.
That Ethan survives, pfft, the hero always survives, that’s nothing new, why would we be surprised? He survives in order to do the next thing, which involves, hmm, more callbacks, more references to how great he is, and also a reminder of how great that first flick was.
Rolf Saxon is not a household name. I mean it’s a pretty cool name. He sounds like a guitarist from a 70s British metal kind of band like Iron Maiden or Judas Priest. But it’s so cool to see him here, and it’s one of the few callbacks that works really, really well here.
Most people haven’t watched that first Mission: Impossible flick directed by Brian De Palma that many times, but people of a certain age, or above a certain age, remember the sequence where the “team” is breaking into Langley. It was endlessly referenced and parodied for decades. And that’s as it should be, because it was a phenomenal set piece / sequence. Eight films later, and while they’ve tried to match that initial scene, almost no other sequences in any of these flicks is as fondly remembered as that sequence, or as well known.
He was only a part of it, but Rolf Saxon played the guy who was meant to be working in that top secret room that Cruise’s character rappelled his way into. It was, in an almost comical manner, the complete undoing of the character, to the betterment of the team’s objectives (which was to steal the NOC list), but that’s by the by.
None of us spent any time thinking about what the worst (fictional) breach in the CIA’s history did to that agent’s credibility on the job. But the people making this flick thought about it. They not only thought about it, they brought the guy back!
He was exiled to an island in that bit of the world between Alaska and Russia where, because The Entity has taken over all of the world’s nuclear arsenals, tensions are high. What a coincidence that so much of the film has to happen there, at or around St Matthew Island, where William Donloe was sent in shame, shame, shame (after Hunt ruined him with That Knife).
And yet that’s where he met the love of his life, Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk), so it hasn’t been all bad. These two lovebirds dominate the rest of the film. I only really cared about whether they were going to be okay, not anyone else. When it looked like the dickhead Gabriel or the other dickhead The Entity had engineered circumstances such that they were going to have to sacrifice themselves in order to save Ethan’s mangy arse, I thought “No fucking way; if they die we riot”.
But I know screenplays too well. Sure, Ethan has to always survive, and women have to look at him longingly, but killing that couple would have soured a lot of people in the audience (at least the ones still awake).
After all the six hours of expositions, explanations, women being killed unnecessarily, Haley Atwell’s character having to look up or down adoringly at Cruise (ew, even fictional characters can do better) which must have damaged her soul, long term characters dying, newer characters maybe living or dying (few fucks really given, to be honest), it culminates in one of those two stage set pieces: one mostly underground at a bunker, and one up in the sky, as grown men tussle for a climax.
It’s pretty… odd. There are allegedly in story reasons for why they’re fighting on planes from a century ago, being that they’re purely mechanical and The Entity can’t use its evil internet powers to make them crash, but also, it’s just so fucking dumb. Cruise, I have no doubt, said to the director and screenwriters that the climax had to be on biplanes in order to represent… something, and because he wanted to have something that either paid homage to Buster Keaton, or associated Cruise with Keaton as a pioneering innovator of cinema, and, especially considering how Gabriel goes to his eternal reward, but the ending is a fucking cartoon. I expected, when Gabriel died, to see Porky Pig burst through a bass drum, wave his trotter around at the audience and say “a-de-be-a-de-be-a-de-be-tha-That’s All, Folks!” with that famous Looney Tunes fanfare at the end.
Oh sure, there are people on the ground or underground doing Important Things, but honestly, were they ever going to do anything else as remotely dangerous or stupid as what Cruise was doing above their, for heroic reasons?
And he did it all, to save the World, the whole World, not just the whitish bits, for us, the great ungrateful unwashed. Shucks *wipes a tear* we hardly deserve him.
I hope it’s over. You can never tell with Cruise. They were telling him twenty years ago that he was too old and sexless to be running around half naked, and look at him now. If ever there was someone who wouldn’t accept the advice of others, no matter how gently its offered, or how sensitively the subject is approached.
Like the Marvel movies, once they saved the universe from Thanos, there was nowhere left to go in terms of escalating threats, no threat large enough to justify that they keep making these increasingly goofy films, and they should have stopped several films ago, but big money doesn’t allow that kind of prudence. Here’s a nice place to end things Mr Clear, let these people go off and do other things. Maybe they can take up crafts, hobbies and the like? Maybe you could consider it too?
6 times this time he’s going to have to save the world yet again, just like the other eight times out of 10
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“For every life you try to save, you gamble millions more. And now the fate of every living soul on Earth is your responsibility.” - Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning
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