Notes on Mission: Impossible 3

by Clara Ribot

Mission: Impossible 3 was released in 2006, at the tail end of the Bush presidency, in a year that gave us Inland Empire and The Da Vinci Code. M:I3 is where the franchise starts taking itself more seriously, at least a little, and where it begins to form the tone that defines the rest of the franchise. In the previous two installments, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt was an agent on a job. Here, he’s a man torn between domesticity and action— less of an archetype and more grounded in character. New things seem possible, Mission: Impossible-wise: the style is less flashy, the performances more nuanced, the stakes relentlessly heightened time and time again. Our nostalgia for the 2000s begs us to fuse retrospective political sentiment onto any cultural-artifact-turned-moodboard-populator (see: Meet Me in the Bathroom), and it’s tempting to do the same here.

In his analysis of the political evolution of the franchise, Pat Cassels notes how M:I3’s successor, 2011’s Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol represents a shift away from the “polemic filmmaking” of the previous films. It’s the fourth in the series and notably the first made during the Obama administration. He says:

Gone, for the most part, are the monologues about the Cold War or thinly veiled Iraq War references that added immediacy to the movies up until then. (Hell, even M:I2 and its deadly virus allowed for a subplot about Big Pharma; it was just difficult to see underneath all those leather jackets.) Ghost Protocol’s most famous scene features Hunt climbing the Burj Dubai (as it was called in 2010) in a stunt that was stunning for the fact that human beings executed it, not because we found it remotely relatable. Likewise, the film’s politics moving forward disassociate themselves from the real world.

Further, Cassels claims that this represented a wider trend in film, especially blockbusters. He cites critic Adam Nayman’s analysis of the film, during the Obama years, as “manifesting a progressive agenda without ever strictly defining themselves as political works”. It was also an era of “superhero movies reflecting a newfound trust in figures responsibly wielding unimaginable power”. While Ghost Protocol is notable for the superhuman stunt of Tom Cruise’s Burj Khalifa climb, MI3’s the most striking moment finds him tied to a chair, getting brutally tortured by a deadpan Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The scene’s power comes from his convincing weakness, with no immediate reversal of fortune afterward—pure dread.

But is there really anything here? Is a 150-million-dollar, patriotic, Hollywood product worth analyzing for a crumb of subversive content? Can you seriously argue that the finer points of the Mission: Impossible 3 plot may be anti-US intervention? Am I confusing message and style? Am I a Lib now? Are any of us watching it for “the plot” anyway?” That one’s easy: we’re watching it for Tom Cruise. 

2006 wasn’t just a turning point for his franchise—it was Cruise’s first Mission: Impossible after his divorce from Nicole Kidman, his marriage to Katie Holmes, his infamous interview about Brooke Shields, and the Oprah Couch Incident. The press tour for the film is marked by a shift in his place in culture. While the film’s theme of conjugal sacrifice should’ve made his marriage to Katie Holmes and the birth of their first child the the biggest story of the M:I3 press tour, this was all overshadowed by the public’s growing doubts about Cruise’s public persona. In her analysis of gossip bloggers and 21st century celebrity, Anne Petersen remarked, “Tom Cruise has fallen from the limelight because he attempted to make the shift from 20th to 21st century star, trading his rare appearances and relative secrecy for overexposure and outspokenness.” 

While his public persona alienates many would-be fans, the hopeful among us could point in protest to roles like 1999’s Magnolia, where Cruise’s performance as an unhinged motivational speaker is both captivating and eerily parallel to his real-life role in the Church of Scientology. Even the Mission: Impossible movies push the narrative of a smart man captive to his loyalties, representing an organization that he doesn’t fully believe in. They manifest a self-aware agenda without defining themselves as anti-anything. It’s a line of thought that allows us to experience him, and to love him, as a celebrity, not just an actor.

Because even if Cruise is “self-aware” and there’s a meta-textual element to every role he takes, does that influence anything other than our willingness to support him as a celebrity? If anything the “self-awareness” is a way to take control of the narrative, an extension of the obsessively insistent attitude present in every post-Oprah interview. A humiliation response, a way to shield yourself from another suppressive person. And when we feel like the person in charge gets it, we don’t need to think about what he’s getting anymore. Our work is done. 

And the truth is, we want to love Tom Cruise. We want to love movie stars. We want to see that the man on the poster “gets it,” that he’s winking at us, even if his outward actions are those of a powerful cult-member-turned-enforcer who makes millions running fast in DoD-approved CIA advertisements.

And what are we going to do—not watch Mission: Impossible 3? Can we really be upset at the lack of meaning in a movie about swinging between skyscrapers like a human yo-yo? When we look into the void of meaninglessness, don’t we see the same glint that’s in Tom Cruise's empty, beautiful eyes, the very thing that might make him such a good actor in the first place? We shouldn’t let the folding-in of meaning on itself, the grasping at straws of commodified dissent and image-as-reality, stop us from enjoying what is, truly, a really good action movie. 

It would be easy to end there. But I want to ask if these two feelings are mutually exclusive: Is it possible that there’s a bit of pleasure in feeling our hopes die out, not unlike the thrill of seeing agent Ethan Hunt tied to the chair at the beginning of the movie? On our protagonist, Anne Peterson writes:

Throughout the film, Cruise is earnest, impassioned, and cocky – his set, square jaw, his self-assured flirtiness with girlfriend Lea Redmond, the affected swagger of the 5'6" man. This film, juxtaposed with Risky Business (Brickman 1983), released just months apart, were what first made Cruise a star: he appears equally authentic as a home-alone son, taking over the mansion, and the scrappy cornerback, desperate for a way to escape the steel legacy of his family. His image, meticulously constructed by top publicist Pat Kingsley, served as the common denominator of the films that solidified Cruise’s star—Top Gun (Scott 1986), The Color of Money (Scorsese 1986), Born on the Fourth of July (Stone 1989).  In short, his image was so unified, so believable, that the signs of its construction were invisible.

If we’re going to be honest about why we like M:I3, it’s not about self-awareness, or some throwaway line about US foreign policy. It’s about Tom Cruise’s splintering image, the gap between this movie and the ones before it and after it, that make it great. In her essay, Petersen outlines an interesting dynamic between Cruise and gossip bloggers obsessed with questioning his persona, specifically his sexuality. During that moment in Cruise’s career, doubt only grew with every photo-op with Katie Holmes and ‘Stars: They’re Just Like Us!’ content that he appeared in. “In essence,” Petersen writes, “Cruise misjudged his consumers—in the end, his conspicuous heterosexual displays only bolstered Hilton's claims.”

Cruise’s performance in this film is the perfect masculine action star, in the perfect action movie, which coheres perfectly with a smooth, shallow, endlessly exciting world. Its perfection is the best argument against itself, a sign that it can only ever be constructed.

CLARA RIBOT is a videographer from New York City. You can check out her film programming on Instagram @apparatus.screen