Tom Cruise chooses empty thrills over gravitas.
Tom Cruise is an actor-auteur as were Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and John Cassavetes, but unlike them, Cruise has enjoyed immense popularity as a matinee-idol movie star and tends toward pop-star filmmaking. Cruise doesn’t direct, yet he’s still the “author” on films he produces, famously and consistently calling the shots in the action-flick category. The broad success of Top Gun: Maverick demands that Cruise’s choices be taken seriously, even though the latest, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, cannot be taken seriously.
That three-clause title puts Dead Reckoning in the realm of excess. We’re already familiar with its caper-teamwork premise (originally derived from the 1960s TV show), and the elaborate, large-scale action stunts have reached such surfeit that, in addition to becoming the selling point, they are the raison d’être of the series.
That the regime media dutifully celebrate Cruise’s auteur calculations should be cause for concern. Thrills were an overture to the heroic, death-defying humor of the James Bond films, but something is wrong when a 27-year-old franchise grinds out familiar routines in the same blatant, humorless manner. Admittedly, Cruise’s house director Christopher McQuarrie has gotten better at being a circus ringmaster, but he has mastered a worthless craft. In Dead Reckoning, McQuarrie’s emphasis on in-your-face spectacle calls upon the most primitive kinetic responses to fast motor vehicles, dizzying heights, and point-blank physical and mechanical violence. It garners rote reviewer response: “This is why we go to the movies,” one shill gushed. I hadn’t read that cliché since it was used for Peter Jackson’s now forgotten King Kong remake.
Reducing cinema to gimmicky sensationalism is regressive, especially when McQuarrie’s repetition is this witlessly conventional. In visual terms, McQuarrie and Cruise outclass the tiresome Fast and Furious franchise, but these careening chases and top-of-the-world vistas are more like theme-park rides. As super spy Ethan Hunt, Cruise’s running atop a speeding train is a too-literal stunt. It doesn’t make him Buster Keaton — McQuarrie lacks the visual rhythm that Chad Stahelski displays in the dazzling John Wick movies. Without that essential cinematic wit, the M:I films seem devoted to anesthetizing our senses. Overplaying depth and height dimensions gets old. The instant the stunts are over, there’s nothing to think about. “Wow!” is an empty expression.
The best of the M:I series was 2011’s Ghost Protocol directed by cartoonist Brad Bird, who understood spatial humor. (Plus, back then, Ethan’s teammates were still characters, spying and fighting with credible competitive emotion.) Ghost Protocol’s hands-on, close-up stunts were fascinating illustrations of something at stake. Ethan/Cruise’s mature face adds character — a failed idea in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Yet Dead Reckoning keeps reshuffling interchangeable uninteresting females (Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Hayley Atwell), and the pretend political risks (this time involving AI — talk about ghost protocol!) are no more substantial than the geopolitics of Top Gun: Maverick.
The personal — auteurist — elements of the ever accumulating, nonstop action stunts reveal Cruise’s yahoo taste: Born in 1962, having grown up on both James Bond and Bruce Lee exploits, he entered Hollywood during the Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger phase, when movie stars seemed detached from their craven blockbusters. As Cruise vacillated between high-concept deals and art projects — Days of Thunder, The Firm, Born on the Fourth of July, Far and Away, Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, The Last Samurai — his sincere play-acting still didn’t seem personal, as Andrew Sarris theorized auteur films must.
Cruise’s collaborations with Spielberg on Minority Report and War of the Worlds were career peaks for both, convincing me that Cruise was a superb actor. He was tragicomic perfection in Lions for Lambs and Tropic Thunder, capable of conveying spiritual and political meaning. Like a lot of people, I expected the same in the facile Top Gun: Maverick. Now we know how impersonal that film really was, so are the M:I movies, despite the star-auteur’s professional dedication to them.
Welles, Olivier, and Cassavetes were intellectuals, yet Cruise possesses the popular knack they lacked (maybe he learned it from actor-auteur Paul Newman, his co-star in The Color of Money). But this shrewdness prevents us from respecting Dead Reckoning Part One. The return of Henry Czerny as Kittredge, the villain from Brian De Palma’s first M:I installment, raises a topical issue. He warns Ethan: “This is our chance to control the truth, the concepts of right and wrong for everyone for centuries to come.” This world-conquering threat relates to everything audiences deal with outside, and then trashes that concern. The auteur of Top Gun: Maverick missed the opportunity to give this weightless movie gravitas.
