That Hunt Won’t Hunt

Jack,

Much like you, I liked Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning a lot. People can call the Mission: Impossible movies formulaic, but it’s a good formula, and it almost always works in creating two hours of action, stunts, and spy thrills.

I think the one thing holding back the Mission: Impossible movies from the pop culture status of an Indiana Jones or Star Wars is a protagonist who can be interesting and fun to watch, even when he’s not hanging from the side of a building or riding a motorcycle off a cliff. God bless Tom Cruise for his willingness to perform so many of his own stunts; those sequences crackle with excitement, and it’s always more fun when the idea of doing them seems as intimidating and ill-considered to Hunt as it does to us in the audience.

But even compared to his supporting cast, Cruise’s character of Ethan Hunt is bland. We get to see gadget guy Benji (Simon Pegg) and super-hacker Luther (Ving Rhames) cracking jokes and getting all the good lines. The last few films have featured plenty of femme fatales and female teammates and even a henchwoman who communicates a great deal with little dialogue and limited screen time. By comparison, Hunt is all business, always focused, and the fact that these stories begin in medias res means that as soon as we see the character, there’s already some global crisis to be tackled.

The third Mission: Impossible movie tried to give Ethan Hunt a wife and a home life, but I guess the creative team decided that concept would be too limiting for future stories. As a result, Ethan is something of a blank slate — and I suppose you could argue there’s a hint of his character in how little non-mission life we see. Maybe Ethan Hunt is an obsessive workaholic with no real friends beyond his teammates, and who doesn’t know what to do with himself between missions, other than some particularly unsafe rock climbing. The guy who’s always running around the world, trying to save everybody else’s life, has no life of his own.

And that’s fine, but I suspect a character like that is just not as interesting to audiences as the double life of bookish archaeology professor and globetrotting adventurer Indiana Jones, or the suave womanizing connoisseur James Bond, or the glowering, tortured father Jack Bauer. Ethan Hunt doesn’t crack jokes like Deadpool or think his way out of crises like Jack Ryan, he’s not as desperate and frightened as Richard Kimble, and he’s not a relatable ordinary guy stuck in an extreme situation like John McClane. He’s just an exceptionally well-trained secret agent, sitting around waiting for his next self-destructing message from the director.

We’ll root for Ethan Hunt in an air-conditioned movie theater for two hours, but nobody wants to dress up like him for Halloween. I’d also note that the odd way of the series ending but not ending the marriage means that the character of Ethan Hunt has a lot of vaguely flirty moments with other agents that never get consummated and never seem to mean much.

I also notice that the Mission: Impossible films usually get good actors to play villains who are working for shadowy organizations with vague motivations beyond “take over the world” or “destroy the world.” (I think in Ghost Protocol they almost hand-wave away the villain’s motivation as a “nuclear strategist who believes the weak must die for the strong to survive.”) What’s more, in the first few films, the villain’s plan almost always involved some rogue agent from the Impossible Mission Force. For a while, it seemed that if the IMF really wanted to make the world a safer place, it should simply disband, as half their personnel were training to be future supervillains. Apparently the most dangerous threat to world stability was the IMF Department of Human Resources.

I will give credit to Dead Reckoning for a great establishing-the-stakes scene where the heads of the intelligence agencies — including one of Maverick’s bosses from the last Top Gun movie! — inform the new director of national intelligence (a perfectly smarmy Cary Elwes) of the slightly absurd way that the U.S. national-security community deals with crises in this fictional world. Apparently, when the U.S. government detects some world-threatening menace, they regularly conclude that the Pentagon, CIA, FBI, NSA, and every other part of our government just can’t do anything useful, and they very politely ask Ethan Hunt if he feels like handling it for them. “Good evening, Mr. Hunt. Your mission, should you choose to accept it . . .”

As if there’s a chance Ethan will someday say “nah, I’ve got plans for this weekend.”