Running Man: Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning Part One and the Exertions of Tom Cruise

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We fry in Leone summer: while Barbie and Oppenheimer cycle so rapidly through ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and ‘ugly’ so as to feel as plastic as their respective subjects—brands and back-room cowardice)—sundry other franchise zombifications feel like ash off of Eastwood’s cigarillo. And as film production itself stands still as a fake cowboy town erected in the desert, activated towards a fairer world, or even a less-cruel one, other fantasies linger, like the question of hyper-hyphenate Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning Part One.

Here is an expensive legacy sequel full of considered action set pieces and interminably incoherent international implications, less jingoistic and ugly than Top Gun: Maverick but also less open to the (fascistic, even) poetry that that film’s tracts of conquerable sky suggested. It carries the import of nascent finality, mortality even, without acknowledging that it will ever end; once numerical sequels can be segmented further still, they might run forever. Dead Reckoning appears to an industry in crisis and draws near-literal comparisons between its hero’s narrative struggles and the industry’s: we need to return to the movie(s) if we are to reckon with the big bad of AI, if we might finally slay it through something like trust, a tenet everybody knows emerges only from practical stunts and glorious Hollywood spectacle. In this textual double-parking, Dead Reckoning has nothing to say about the state of things—law and order, art and content, fantasy and reality—and is itself that state. It suspends itself and its lead actor in a phantom state of realness: Tom Cruise, the forever running man, has become more real than real and less legible than ever.

Surely, no evil man is as compellingly evil as Tom Cruise is, not even Ethan Hunt, the empty-eyed protagonist of some seven and counting Mission Impossible’s. With the series’ prime entry nearly thirty years in the rear-view, Hunt feels less like a beloved character than a useful cipher for Cruise’s image massaging—“he’s being erased in real time.” Cruise’s face hasn’t moved from pure prettiness to haiku evocation like Keanu’s, doesn’t it wear its weathering like a leather toolbelt of dependable (occasionally novel) instruments, like Leo’s. Indeed, those imperfect contemporaries are useful departure points: while Reeves and DiCaprio have become better, looser screen actors as they’ve aged, Cruise has rigidized himself into a stony auteur. This is not a new point: Cruise/ Wagner Productions was founded in 1992 in advance of producing Mission: Impossible (1996) as a way of giving the actor more creative control in the filmmaking process. The production group was dissolved in 2006, in the wake of Cruise’s infamous public treatment of Brooke Shields, to say nothing of his comments surrounding psychiatry and a further burrowing into participation in and advocacy around the Church of Scientology. Cruise has resumed his role as producer in recent years, on Top Gun: Maverick (2020) and all subsequent Mission: Impossible films, on two Jack Reacher films (2012 and 2016). A peculiar focus on oddly-coded justice emerges from this set of films, positioning Cruise as both rogue outsider and executioner of lawful right, even—especially—outside the law. Something is always obscured, despite the man’s face, obviously aging and also somehow not, remaining in plain sight.

It’s impossible and dishonest to approach the enfranchisement of Ethan Hunt and Mission: Impossible without also talking about Cruise as monster and mythology. Hunt makes the movies go, as Cruise does. A heightened PR focus post-2020 has repositioned Cruise as an advocate only for cinema itself, resituating his on-set tantrums as aw-shucks ain’t-it-greats gone haywire, suggesting Top Gun: Maverick’s very real box office success as nearly prophecy-fulfilling, an act of Hollywood spectacle lauded by one of (Hollywood) cinema’s protectors and memed into affection by his acolytes. A cynical critic might point to Cruise’s self-generated enshrinement as cinema’s future as further legacy laundering. Since 2008, the man has forbidden journalists from asking about Scientology. A better film—or at least a film less insistent on literalizing Cruise’s perceived threats to and from industry force in his personal and professional life—might have generated productive tension with the state of those forces, rather than absorption into the thin air of mass public relations.

Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning Part One begins in familiar territory for a US summer blockbuster, vilifying oppositional forces (here, as always, Russia) with a sweeping sub-Red October submarine prologue and re-injecting the viral franchise into the familiar body of a phantom political, globalist-ish landscape. Russian forces have a paradigm-shifting AI weapon—hereafter “the Entity”—that swiftly turns on them and sinks the sub and itself below layers of Arctic sea ice, as if it were the One Ring from Jackson’s Tolkien movies. The film cuts forward and away, reaching for its action figure hero as Ethan Hunt emerges from the shadows of a shadowy room to accept his new mission, which is of course to first locate the MacGuffin—twin portions of a cruciform key—and then determine what it unlocks. Because we’ve seen the locked box sink below the (now science-fictional) sea ice and know that this is part one of an at least two part story, we know that we won’t get that catharsis until another sequel.

My pithy aside about melting sea ice isn’t incidental runoff despair but rather a gesture towards Dead Reckoning’s peculiar relationship to the “real” world, both cinematically and socio-politically. It brings up the climate crisis before I do, as CIA director William Kittridge (Henry Czerny, last seen in the 1996 film, a welcome shot of squeaky-clean grease amid McQuarrie and Cruise’s collective fixation on summoning elements of De Palma’s film) later asserts to Hunt that the next global conflict “won’t be a cold war,” that it will involve armed marshaling over shrinking natural resources, access to workable energy sources, and ultimately, truth itself. In other words, everybody—Hunt’s immediately disavowed IMF team, Czerny’s nondescript G-men, Cary Elwes’ conspiracy-pilled zealot-patriot CIA director, a mysterious and blase friend-of-the-Entity named “Gabriel”—wants the keys so they can control the AI so they can control “truth.”

This boilerplate of incomprehensible plotting forms a steady foundation for the film’s frequent successes, a series of well-crafted, well-storyboarded action setpieces. A perfunctory sequence in the Arabian Desert collides Hunt into old not-flame Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), an airport run-around collides him into new not-flame Grace (Hayley Atwell) and then sends the new twosome beeping around Venice—playful, with an eye on Buster Keaton—and then aboard the zero-gravity Orient Express, a bloated but occasionally considered sequence, ultimately in tune with De Palma’s own half-guided attempt at movie-ending train dreams.

If I sound reticent in my praise of these sequences, it’s because I must gesture back to the context of the real world. Boilerplate action set pieces in mainstream American films have seen a deepening in recent years, in both their execution and instigation towards more compelling cinematic operations. In the hands of the kinetic-minded Stahelski, Reeves, and a fleet of balletic stunt actors, John Wick has moved from revenge franchise to extended treatise on the violence inside grace and the fallout of a landed punch. All-world setpieces have popped up in the orbit of John Wick’s neon gravity, from Reeves’ and Moss’ motorcycle nightmare through falling eschatological data in Act III of The Matrix Resurrections (2021) to Jim Cameron returning to his own fetish-or-flight site in the new-Titanic ending of Avatar: The Way of Water (2022.) Even Cruise’s Archbishop and old collaborator Steven Spielberg has re-situated what being the most instinctual action film-mover of his time means, first by flexing that fact in West Side Story (2021) and then lamenting it with The Fabelmans (2022.) The central sequence—ogled first in the dead artistic currency of internet content and literal commercial so as to basically be deflated when it finally appears in-film—is Cruise actually driving a motorcycle over a cliff edge. In Dead Reckoning, action is deployed to support two truths: 1.) Ethan Hunt always really accomplishes his mission and 2.) what you are seeing is really happening.

Of course, Ethan Hunt does more than just accomplish his mission, resituating both himself and the task to rise above the petty incorporation his ghost-work mandates. Especially as the franchise has tipped towards Hunt-as-Cruise, a master team-member/ task-master drawing dead-eyed platitudes like “what do you care about most in the world,” “my friends” (a shudder: is director McQuarrie’s avatar Simon Pegg’s meager teach-friend?) from the screenplay, the politics of Mission: Impossible have become increasingly, intentionally illegible. It’s as possible to leave Dead Reckoning convinced that the film is deeply suspicious of the American intelligence/ surveillance state and so, is in sync with Hunt’s rogue-minded, exceptional individualism as one true antidote to deep-state crockery as it is reasonable to conclude that Mission: Impossible is the logical answer to American Empire’s continued role in destabilizing populations domestic and abroad under unchecked military expansion and a government hijacked by money-minded elites and reactionary patriots alike and so, is in sync with Hunt’s righteous team of rebels that protest American hegemony by their very continued existence. That there are murky, unintelligible ideologies at war in products whose only existence is to appeal to the largest possible number of consumers is no novel development. That these ideologies are ultimately invoked as perhaps inherently a part of Ethan Hunt’s super-consciousness—one that stands in stark opposition to separate and false super-consciousnesses, to say nothing of foreign ones—inadvertently winds up absolving Hunt of any of the squirmy charm he once exercised as just another spy at the table in Mission: Impossible. Now, he makes the movies go. If, unlike Oppenheimer and Barbie’s summer assaults, Dead Reckoning doesn’t ferry in self-importance, it remains raptly self-interested; there must always be Tom Cruise, there must always be Tom Cruise this way.

And it is tempting to read Hunt/Cruise alongside those contemporaries, another man of systems assaulting our senses in the irreal present. Oppenheimer (to its relative credit) positions its title character as another one of Nolan’s lost-in-the-machine men and Barbie (to its relative detriment) suggests not Barbie but Ken as its most compelling figure, equally both subjugated and vile, ultimately the most charming and least-culpable character in the film. Ken is no more laudable than Lewis Strauss and where Nolan is willing to manifest a movie about pure power as emergent from the baseline of cowardice, Gerwig cowardly sets her men free while restricting her women to merely the image of importance and can’t conceive of the bad taste needed to supplant further incorporation.

The most interesting filmmakers know that even when a movie isn’t about movies, it’s about making movies, which is a process of desire—possession, projection, perversion. Less-interesting filmmakers recognize this fact but assert their own metaphoric worth—a movie can be about me—as cinematic latex. The least interesting filmmakers are not interested in the image beyond its real-life counterpart, and think movies are about things. The most evil filmmakers recognize that the turning point of cinema’s is/ isn’t-ness was when the twin forces of PR and advertising latched themselves onto the image and so, believe (in good faith or bad) that making movies or making anything might be worth latching onto that latching. Dead Reckoning, the process by which the current position of a moving image is calculated by analyzing its perceived speed and the passing of time, presupposes to address what the future of cinema can and should look like. In the process, it settles on the image of a single man making us watch him hurtle over a cliff over and over again, glitching who he really is in favor of something like friendship, which was never really there.

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