MAKES IT ONE OF TOP DOZEN TOM CRUISE FILMS, SAYS PARADE CRITIC
As the trailer for next year's Mission: Impossible film made the rounds this past week, ahead of this weekend's release of Top Gun: Maverick, several articles delved into the M:I trailer for clues as to the upcoming film's links with Missions past. At Den of Geek, David Crow writes:
“It’s all led to this.” That is what Tom Cruise tweeted out Monday morning alongside our first taste of the Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning – Part One teaser trailer. It’s an old familiar line in movie franchises that have survived, or even thrived, for decades: every previous film has been building to this moment!And yet, while watching how the dazzling sizzle reel footage is framed in Dead Reckoning, it is hard not to think this will be some kind of capstone on the entire Mission: Impossible franchise. After all, this is the first feature in nearly 30 years to directly call back on the events of the original Mission: Impossible movie from 1996.
Most obviously, that is apparent in the way the trailer is structured around a verbal dressing down from an IMF and/or CIA handler. At this point, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt getting chastised for his insubordinate and showboating ways is pro forma. The price of doing business as “the gambler” of super-spy espionage (as previously described in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation). However, the fact that the man chewing Hunt out this time is the first superior he ever had to deem Hunt more enemy than ally is significant. Indeed, that is Henry Czerny as Eugene Kittridge.
If his distinct sneering cadence sounds familiar to you in the trailer—as he informs Ethan the ideal he’s fought for doesn’t exist and never did—that’s because Czerny’s Kittridge was previously the IMF Director in the 1996 movie directed by Brian De Palma. Due to the machinations of the film’s true villain, Jon Voight as Jim Phelps, Kittridge came to be convinced by a frame job that Ethan Hunt was a dirty agent. He then spent most of the film chasing Hunt down until he was led to a fateful chunnel ride between London and Paris where he learned of Phelps’ culpability… and arrested a covert crime boss named Max (Vanessa Redgrave).
That ending to the original Mission: Impossible is also important to the new trailer since we see the daughter of the Max character, Vanessa Kirby’s “the White Widow,” on her own fateful train ride in a desert terrain. The familiarity of the action set-piece is unlikely to be coincidental.
Meanwhile, with a new Tom Cruise movie in theaters, there have been many articles and podcasts delving into best-of overviews of Cruise's film career. At The Big Picture podcast, Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins are joined by Chris Ryan as they all attempt to figure out which ten films to place into a "Tom Cruise Hall of Fame." And at Parade, Samuel R. Murrian has put together a pretty solid list of the "25 Best Tom Cruise Movies of All Time." Any Tom Cruise list that places Michael Mann's Collateral and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report is a list that seems to have its cinematic priorities in the right place. Murrian places De Palma's Mission: Impossible at number 12:
Brian de Palma is a master of unforgettable, operatic set pieces: the shootout on the steps of Union Station in The Untouchables, the prom scene in Carrie, the shock ending of Blowout, the list goes on. He was an unexpected but ultimately inspired choice to helm 1996’s franchise starter, and his stamp of directorial bravura is unmistakable.Mission: Impossible was released in a golden age of special effects—when computer-generated imagery was a new innovation, sparingly used. Mission: Impossible‘s climactic helicopter vs. train sequence through the Britain-France Chunnel, though technically preposterous, still stands up today as pure visual candy. The most common criticism directed at the original Mission is that its plot is too hard to follow—maybe even flat-out incomprehensible. It’s hard to complain about that when the entertainment value is this high.