Director: Brad Bird
Cast: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton
Have I Seen it Before: As my reviews for the other movies in this series have already mentioned, I’m a sucker for Tom Cruise dangling improbably from things. As he ages, he hasn’t slowed down. It may be the single greatest argument for Scientology (or, at least, the elite levels of Scientology) that is out there. One can not argue with results. But, to answer the question, I’ll probably be there opening weekend until Cruise is well into his 70s, or if he becomes completely Clear, whichever happens first.
At it’s most basic, good storytelling is a study in obstacle. Get somebody stuck up in a tree, and show how they get down, and that’s about as tight of a story as one can tell. With that in mind, there may be no better graduate level course in this theory than the Dubai sequence of this film. A typical Mission story would have the IMF under the leadership of Ethan Hunt (Cruise) fooling the assassins and the arms dealers.
Passing through the prism of Brad Bird’s brain, complications pile onto complications to the point where Hunt is climbing the tallest building ever conceived of by man one handed, while a sand storm looms in the distance, and everything else in the scheme is going completely wrong as well.
Here, we have a filmmaker so thoroughly in command of his craft allowed to work magic in a major motion picture franchise. Brad Bird is a better, more pure filmmaker than J.J. Abrams, and possible even De Palma. Whereas Bird’s worst film,
While the rest of the film might be standard action fare, every shot in that hotel is so thrilling, that the memory of a TV show that was once about occasional freelance spies running operations that were essentially heists disappears. Mission: Impossible has now delivered on the ambition that the series has reached for since the original film. We have an American James Bond, and that American 007’s films are on average far better on average than the output of the thing they were trying to mimic. Maybe that quality will ebb, but if it takes twenty or thirty films, that’s going to be plenty of fun in the meantime.