Mission Infirmable
Tom Cruise is old. Or at least that’s the theme of his new movie, Mission Impossible 3. In the opening scenes, we gather that Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, is semi-retired, engaged to a woman who doesn’t know his true identity, and has been relegated to being a teacher of the new generation of Impossible Mission Force agents. Naturally, he’s called back for one last operation, because that’s what semi-retired people are asked to do in films. And in the process, his fiancée is threatened.
All of this begs the question: why does Hunt (and by extrapolation, Cruise himself) feel the need to do something so pointless? Hunt is about to get married to a lovely young intelligent woman (Michelle Monaghan), and he can start to live life without guns aimed at him all the time.
Well, it turns out that Hunt wants to go back to save his former student played by Felicity’s Keri Russell. That’s a terrible move on so many levels. Here are a few of them for you to sample. Why is he so emotionally attached to this former student? Were they romantically involved? And if so, why choose someone with a Katie Holmes ex-TV teenager vibe? And if he wasn’t romantically involved with his student, then what is the point other than to make the movie seem young and make Cruise seems like an old guy? As Ving Rhames repeats the cliché in the film, “Those who can’t do, teach.”
So almost immediately we’re left with an image of a Cruise that is over the hill, past his prime, ready to settle down into a mundane existence. Cruise is not the sexy, young go-getting hunk but a neutered James Bond. Our eye candy Mission Impossible-girl (formerly inhabited by Emmanuelle Beart and Thandie Newton) is now Maggie Q, a stunning Eur-Asian model who doesn’t even have any romantic interest in Hunt but slightly has a connection with Jonathan Rhys Meyers. It is baffling why they would have her in a film if they didn’t intend on, ahem, using her.
But Cruise the producer decides to send us signals that he still is sexy and fresh. When a gaggle of women meet him at his engagement party, they walk away saying “I’d marry him.” That moment just reeks of desperation. James Bond could elicit the same response and we wouldn’t need any words at all. In another, we witness an absurd eureka moment as Cruise writes impromptu physics equations on a window. Bond’s intelligence was in his eyes and his purposefulness, not in mimicking a college professor.
According to the chronology, Sean Connery made his six canonical Bond films in a nine-year span. By the time Diamonds Are Forever came out, he looked a bit past his prime at age 41. Cruise has made three Mission Impossible films in a 10-year span, and even though he’s physically aged much better than Connery in the comparable time, the missions feel less impossible and more inevitable.
Perhaps it’s summed up by one of the best Cruise films and best Cruise performances in recent memory, Collateral (above). Cruise resigns himself to the sad existence of a grey-haired assassin that must wrestle with the younger forces of Jamie Foxx and Mark Ruffalo. That was a film I could enjoy.
