Amy Nicholson, Los Angeles Times

CANNES, France — Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt arrived in France in 1996’s “Mission: Impossible” clinging to a high-speed train through the Chunnel, pursued and nearly skewered by a helicopter. It was, as the French might say, une entrée dramatique. In 2018’s “Mission: Impossible — Fallout,” he leapt from an airplane to plummet 4½ miles down to the glass roof of Paris’ Grand Palais, and now, for the big finale of his franchise, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” he’s come to conquer the Cannes Film Festival. One boisterous fan outside the premiere shoved her Chihuahua at Cruise so he could see it was wearing a pink sweatshirt with his face. Another brandished a DVD of 2000’s “Mission: Impossible 2,” arguably the worst entry in the series. Cruise took a photo with her anyway. “Le selfie!” the red-carpet announcer cried.

The series hasn’t been kind to its French actors: Emmanuelle Béart was shot, Jean Reno blown up by exploding chewing gum, Léa Seydoux kicked out of a window at the Burj Khalifa. (Pom Klementieff, whose character’s name is Paris, has survived to co-star in this eighth entry.) Yet, you didn’t have to parler français to glean the excitement on the ground.

This is only Cruise’s third trip to Cannes, and it took him nearly half an hour to walk the 60 yards of red carpet, an exhausting amount of waving, even for someone lauded for his cardio. He took care to acknowledge everyone who’d come to cheer, even trotting back down a few steps to make eye contact and thump on his heart for the fans in the corner flank.

In 2022, as part of the lead-up to “Top Gun: Maverick,” the blockbuster that would defibrillate the pandemic box office, Cruise received an honorary Palme d’Or and a salute from eight zipping French jets. During his first visit, for 1992’s “Far and Away,” times were different and he felt free to be outspoken, telling the press that the then-recent Rodney King verdict “sickened me.” Today, he seems to feel the weight of championing the theatrical experience, just as Ethan Hunt is repeatedly forced to shoulder the burden of saving the world. Neither of them truly has the freedom to “choose to accept it.” More than any of his movie star peers, Cruise seems aware that someone has to symbolize an increasingly bygone era of filmmaking, to be this century’s Charlie Chaplin.

The vibe before the screening of “Final Reckoning” was a bit bar mitzvah. The DJ alternated between dance-floor classics — Kool & the Gang, Joan Jett — and remixes of Lalo Schifrin’s pulsating “Mission: Impossible” theme, one by four beatboxers who mimicked police sirens, another classed-up by a live saxophone and violins. This year’s big Cannes fashion headline is that women are no longer allowed to wear “voluminous” frocks on the steps. Nevertheless, Hayley Atwell, who plays Grace, a pickpocket-turned-secret-agent, wore a gown on the daring end of puffy. Red with large flares at her hips and ankles, she resembled the vintage biplane Cruise dangles from in the film. He could have clung onto her elbow for a teaser.

But when the movie started, the mood turned funereal. This farewell to Ethan Hunt begins with a three-decade-spanning montage of Cruise that could double as the intro to his inevitable honorary Oscar. “I want to thank you for a lifetime of unrelenting and devoted service,” Angela Bassett’s President Erika Sloane tells Ethan in the opening minute. Later, she slips him a code with an important date — May 22, 1996 — which also happens to be the day the “Mission: Impossible” movie franchise launched. The whole film is a panegyric: big speeches and weighty moments with very little sense of play. Tonally, it starts with an ending and keeps on ending for the next two hours and 49 minutes.

The eight “Mission” films can be cleaved into two groups. The first four made a point of swapping directors and moods and even Ethan’s core identity: Brian De Palma made him a jaundiced naif; John Woo, a hot-blooded flirt; J.J. Abrams, a devoted husband; Brad Bird, a near-mute human cartoon. The last four are all helmed by Christopher McQuarrie, who’s co-written this script with Erik Jendresen, but neither has added much to his personality. We’re told, over and over, that Ethan is a gambler and a rule-breaker — and paradoxically, that he’s the only human worthy of our trust, an odd thing to say about a spy who wears masks of other people’s faces like party hats.

Of all the “Mission: Impossible” films, this is the only one that needs you to remember what happened in the previous entry, 2023’s “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” which introduced an all-knowing AI villain called the Entity and its equally unemotional minion Gabriel (Esai Morales) that made a fun foil for Cruise himself, as a sinister duo that values digital trickery over human sweat. Now, the Entity intends to annihilate humanity in four days unless it can be taken offline by a key that accesses a gizmo in the Arctic Sea that connects to a whatsit that Ving Rhames’ weary Luther is attempting to invent from a makeshift hospital bed somewhere in the subway tunnels of London. A grunting Cruise batters a goon while huffing, “You spend! Too much time! On the internet!”

That last film managed to introduce Atwell’s Grace and collect the key while still enjoying a sense of play, like an axle-cracking Fiat chase through Rome and flirtations manifested via close-up magic. Here, the plot weighs everything down. Not just the threat-of-extinction stuff, which includes Bassett’s POTUS debating which American city to blow up as a preemptive gesture, but by its own irritating God’s-eye omniscience that rarely allows the suspense to spool out in the present. The editing is always cutting to the past or the future. There are flashbacks to things that happened five minutes earlier and flash-forwards to how a stunt could look instead of just getting on with it.

Just as exhausting is how the entire cast trades lines of exposition to explain Ethan’s daredevil feats before he actually does them. There are almost no conversations, only premonitions and plans delivered in bullet points like a group research project. No one steps on anyone else’s dramatic pauses. They may as well be reciting how to build an IKEA Billy bookcase. I can’t think of anything more thrill-stifling, even with cinematographer Fraser Taggart lighting everybody’s eyeballs to look so shiny that the actors continually appear on the verge of tears. Still, even within those limitations, Simon Pegg is delightful as Hunt’s longtime tech-whiz teammate Benji, as are new and returning ensemble members Tramell Tillman, Lucy Tulugarjuk and Rolf Saxon, the latter of whom plays a throwback character once threatened with manning a radar tower in Alaska — a punishment that did, in fact, come to pass.

But Cruise is the reason audiences will, and should, see “Final Reckoning” on a large and loud screen. His Ethan continues to survive things he shouldn’t. (One too-miraculous rescue tries to distract us from asking questions by inserting an out-of-place close-up of Atwell’s heaving bosom.) Yet, what I’ve most come to appreciate about Ethan is that he doesn’t try to play the unflappable hero. Clinging to the chassis of an airplane with the wind plastering his hair to his forehead and oscillating his gums like a bulldog in a convertible, he is, in fact, exceedingly flapped.

About halfway through “The Final Reckoning,” as Ethan descends into the frigid depths of the Bering Sea, something overdue and wonderful happens: the movie falls silent. Until now, there has been a chatty overabundance of micro-logistics, even for a “Mission: Impossible” movie: there are aircraft carriers to be commandeered, secret coördinates to be transmitted, and laws of physics to be preposterously circumvented. (Also, fine actors playing top government and military leaders to be acknowledged, including Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer, Hannah Waddingham, and, most impressively, as a submarine captain, Tramell Tillman.) So much information is laid out—and so much emphasis placed on risks, stakes, and disastrous potential outcomes—that you strongly suspect only a fraction of it will matter in the end, and you’re right. For perhaps the first time in McQuarrie’s assured handling of these movies—for my money, “Rogue Nation” (2015) remains the underappreciated best of the lot—he makes the mistake of detailing the action so thoroughly in advance that actually dramatizing it becomes almost superfluous.

But, finally, the expository blather dies away, and the mission is upon us: Ethan Hunt, meet shipwrecked submarine. His aim is to retrieve a chunk of hardware holding lines of digital code (it is written!) with the power to override and perhaps defeat the Entity for good. For a few spellbinding minutes, Cruise does everything he could possibly do underwater, short of singing “Eat your heart out, James Cameron” into his oxygen tube. He sloshes his way through waterlogged chambers, juggles unexploded Russian torpedoes, and, in a delightful and probably unintended homage to “Risky Business” (1983), briefly swim-dances in his underwear. It’s action cinema at its purest and most existential: “The Ethan Hunt for Red October.”

For all the dangerous missions that Hunt has embarked on solo, I can’t recall one that has conveyed such a primordial sense of abandonment. For a moment, Lalo Schifrin’s irresistible theme is a distant memory, and the fate of humanity really does seem to rest on the shoulders of the most unreachable man on the planet. Such loneliness is another I.M.F. occupational hazard, but a self-imposed one: again and again, both “Reckoning” movies emphasize that Ethan’s most heroic virtue—his refusal to sacrifice his teammates for the greater good—is simultaneously his gravest weakness. It explains why, beyond a valedictory sense of full-circle symmetry, McQuarrie piles on so many callbacks to the first “Mission: Impossible” film, in which Ethan’s teammates were murdered before his very eyes—a formative trauma that he seemed to forget for long stretches of the series, but which has been selectively retrieved, like sublimated source code, for this movie’s narrative purposes.

More than once, McQuarrie splices in an indelible image from the 1996 film: a knife falling into a top-secret vault, the blade embedding itself in a desk. It’s a reminder that the director of that movie, Brian De Palma, remains the series’ most intuitive visual stylist and most concise storyteller. Not that I craved concision from McQuarrie’s film; God knows he and Cruise have earned their double-decker climax. But, amid the brooding sprawl, I wanted less big-screen doomscrolling, less self-indulgent gravitas, and less of the unspeakably boring villain Gabriel (Esai Morales), who bears the name of an archangel but never achieves the stature of an archenemy. There are also far too many repetitions of the I.M.F. creed—“We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close and for those we never meet”—which soon starts to sound like greeting-card John le Carré.

I also wanted more from the teammates whom Ethan professes to care about so much—particularly the women, with no shade intended to Luther or Benji (Simon Pegg). I suspect that the apocalypse will rob more than a few of us of our wits and personalities, but must our movies be so willing to prove the point? As Grace, the wily pickpocket who joined Ethan’s team in “Dead Reckoning,” Hayley Atwell has been stripped of humor and playfulness. And I missed the vicious verve of the still formidable, now reformed Paris, although I suspect that Klementieff’s days as an action star are just beginning. What new adventures could bring out—and deepen—her combustible mix of vulnerability and ferocity? Finding that out will be her mission, and I choose to expect it.

Forty years ago, Barbara Crampton was at the beginning of her screen career when director Stuart Gordon cast her in his debut film “Re-Animator,” a wildly funny and audacious horror movie based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft. “I had come from the theater and it was one of my first jobs,” Crampton told IndieWire. “I had worked with Brian De Palma for a minute and on a soap opera, but I think I was too green to understand that we were doing something special.”

“Re-Animator” was something special indeed, a bold and original film that not only ignored the boundaries of good taste but demolished them, yet exhibited an artistry that earned it positive reviews from critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert. “Re-Animator” quickly attracted a cult following, thanks to Gordon’s rollercoaster script, cinematographer Mac Ahlberg’s dynamic and expressive visual style, and performances (from Crampton as well as co-stars Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, and David Gale) that felt more grounded and assured than what one was used to seeing in low-budget horror.

Gordon who, like Crampton, had a background in theater, rehearsed the actors for three weeks before shooting, a choice that Crampton said was instrumental in giving the actors the confidence they needed to hit the ground running once the arduous low-budget shoot began. Because De Palma had been similarly thoughtful and rigorous in his approach when Crampton worked on “Body Double,” the actress was surprised to learn later how exceptional her experience on “Re-Animator” had been.

“Working with Stuart and Brian, I thought, ‘Oh, this is how it is in Hollywood,'” Crampton said. “You get three weeks of rehearsal and then you make the movie. And that’s never happened to me again.” During the rehearsal process Gordon and the actors delved into the characters’ motivations for each scene and over the course of the film as a whole, which helped Crampton stay focused during the long days covered in gore. “Most days we were on the set for a minimum of 13, 14, 16 hours, because Stuart wouldn’t stop filming. Everything on the set was slippery and gooey. But I learned to use that as part of the reality in the moment,” she said.

Well, I originally had three scenes. They were conversations with Craig Wasson, where he was trying to reconcile with me after we broke up. The day before shooting, they said they were cutting the two dialogue scenes and I'd only have the one; you know which one that is. I was like, "Darn, oh well, it's Brian De Palma; I'm sure it will lead to something." And it didn't; I'm still waiting for Brian to call me with something else. For what it's worth, we did that scene about 60 times, which was sort of interesting.

We had scenes together," says Pom Klementieff, a Mission superfan who remembers watching the first movie on an old black-and-white TV in her native France. "And I saw him do a scene with another character that is very important to the story, and I was tearing up. It's a beautiful link between the movies."

The Langley Heist

For some, it’s still the signature sequence of the Mission: Impossible series, even though it doesn't involve a life-threatening stunt. Ethan Hunt infiltrates the CIA headquarters at Langley, to retrieve vital information from a high-tech, temperature-controlled computer vault that is seemingly impossible to access. Enter Ethan, gliding down from the ceiling in complete silence, showing perfect balance and poise before making off with the info...

“I was in Japan promoting a film, and De Palma called me and pitched me this. It was Rififi, but how do we do it? I knew this rig and I came back and showed him the rig that I wanted to wear. I was showing him different kinds of equipment and movement, and I would find out, ‘What could I do? How could I move through this space? What looks elegant?’ I would practise to make it look elegant. And we were testing different metals (to hold Cruise in place).

“The first metal I tested was soft, and it broke. If I’m up high and it breaks that's a problem. I’ll never forget that day, because when I go from the computer down to the floor, it was very challenging, physically. We wanted it all to be in one shot. And my face kept hitting the ground as I went down. So I went to the crew guys and said, ‘Empty your pockets’, and put British [bank] notes in my toes, and balanced myself. And I went from the computer down, and didn't hit the ground. I’m holding, I’m holding, I’m holding it, and I was sweating. Everyone’s holding their breath, and then I could hear Brian start laughing. He goes. ‘Alright! Cut!’ And we both laughed and hugged each other.”

It all started with a tweet that caught my eye. It was a shot that featured both the batter and the pitcher, and many people on X likened it to the work of Brian De Palma.

And when you see it, you feel an emotional swell as you witness the inherent beauty of the game.

How did we get here?

Enter Mets Director for SNYtv John DeMarsico, who is a self-described film junkie and who has been putting some of the most insane shots into broadcasts of Mets games. Shots that are so beautiful and cool that they have sort of reignited people's love of the game, and have also encouraged them to explore the movie homages.

DeMarsico tweets with the tag #Baseballiscinema, and he's living up to it. Just cruising through highlights, I was in awe of shots with shallow focus, shots that homage Lord of the Rings, split screens, cross fades, and many more neat ways to edit, cut, and shoot America's pastime.

It really is cinema.

The only downside is that, as a Phillies fan, I hate that the Mets have this guy, and I demand we find our own auteur to step things up.

But that's beside the point.

Honestly, all of Major League Baseball should be lauding these efforts. Sports are often shot in boring and standard ways. But it is a game rife with emotion and tension and stakes, so we should have these edits. We should lean into the story of the game and get different angles.

The touch here is flawless. It doesn't distract, it only enhances. It makes a sport with 162 regular-season games feel important, and it gives gravity to shots that sometimes can bear no weight.

The trailers have not given much away, leading online sleuths to form their own theories about how that on-stage moment in L.A., which Tesfaye has attributed to psychological factors like stress, plays into the narrative. That ambiguity is "very intentional," the singer-turned-actor told Entertainment Weekly in a CinemaCon sit-down with Ortega and director Trey Edward Shults, who, along with Reza Fahim, also co-wrote the script. "With me and Trey, we romanticize the idea of giving out a trailer that doesn't give away anything."

"We never really see that anymore," Tesfaye added of that mystery. "It's always like these three-minute trailers that give out the whole plot because they want people to come to the theater. We trust the audience."

"I also think it's honest to the tone of the film," Shults added. "You can take everything at face value and go on an emotional ride with it, but also, if you want to read things in a deeper layer and infer a lot of stuff, it's pretty rich." In his own personal experience, "the least I know about films, the better," the filmmaker said. "So they can surprise me and I can interact with them."

Ortega, who also executive produces the film, did her best to tease what audiences can expect, calling it an emotional tale with themes of self-interrogation. "Speaking from Ani's perspective, she feels very neglected and unseen," Ortega said. "And she knows that she cares deeply about Abel more than anyone else ever could. It's frustrating when you feel like you're almost talking to a wall of somebody who's so unwilling to look at themselves in the mirror. And that's kind of what the film is about: the fear of having to deal with yourself and open up to yourself."

Expect nods, albeit unintentional ones, to the 1974 rock horror Phantom of the Paradise — about a disfigured composer who sells his soul — and the 1966 thriller Persona — about a famed stage actress who suddenly goes mute. "As things were evolving, we'd start connecting it to certain movies," Shults said.

"We weren't really [looking for] references for the film, it kind of just came to us," Tesfaye added.

Ultimately, Shults said, "the goal was to make something that feels fresh to us and different and unique."

Mission’s progression from spy craft to death-defying action with Cruise at the center of every stunt started almost by accident. Brian De Palma says that after watching the disappointing returns of Carlito’s Way, he needed a hit, and when Sydney Pollack pulled out of Mission to direct a Sabrina remake, super-agent Mike Ovitz pounced. De Palma had never watched the original television series, but he came recommended to Cruise by Steven Spielberg, and so, the match was made. And De Palma had a radical plotline: “The first problem was that Tom wanted Mission: Impossible to be about five guys doing impossible tasks. First thing I said was, ‘We got to kill all the other guys so we can start with Tom as the leader of a new group.’”

Paramount tried to hire the original TV actors, but Peter Graves, the incorruptible lead operative Jim Phelps in the show, reacted angrily upon learning he would become a turncoat in the movie. “I had nothing to do with that,” De Palma says. “Who knows what [co-producers] Paula Wagner and Tom were doing? Feeling out different actors for those parts? I had no knowledge of the original series, never saw an episode. All I knew was there were four or five guys with different specialties that did something on each mission. No characters, just technicians.”

De Palma had other problems. He’d cracked the script after convincing his Carlito’s Way scribe David Koepp to write it with him. “I got Tom finally to commit to the script David had written, and then Paula called me the next day and said, ‘We’ve gotten a go from Paramount, but we want to fire David and hire Bob Towne.’ Paula and Tom thought he was going to bring something more to the script, but that became a big problem.” Luckily, De Palma kept the fired Koepp close at hand. “I had two screenwriters in different hotel rooms in London while I was building sets, each working on their script. David used some of Towne’s ideas in the script he rewrote, and that became the movie.”

As for Cruise and those notorious stunts, De Palma recalls exactly when his star’s fuse got lit. A scene in which Hunt flees after exploding a giant fish tank in a restaurant didn’t look right with the stuntman. “I said to Tom, ‘You’ve got to do this to make it really work.’ I remember when we were just about to shoot it, he came over to me. There was going to be so much water coming out, and glass, and this was really scary. He walked over and said, ‘I’m just an actor.’ I said, ‘Tom, you gotta try.’ And he did it. I think he got into doing all the stunts himself when he realized he could probably do it better than a stuntman.”

By the end, Cruise executed the signature spider web scene where he drops into a vault full of alarm sensors in the CIA’s headquarters, strung from a wire. “He worked out a way to be still when he was so close to the floor, and when we lowered him, he’d flip over, but he figured out that by putting some coins in his shoes to balance his body when held on the rig, he didn’t flip. It was his genius that finally made it work. And then he put his body in quite dangerous situations with the train stunt.”

That “train stunt” is the climax where a speeding train, with Cruise hanging off the side, is chased into the Channel Tunnel by a helicopter. “The wind is blowing by him, at god knows how many miles an hour. You had to tie people down or they’d fly off the set. Then Tom does this flip, and we didn’t get it the first time. So, he did it again.”

De Palma showed a rough cut to his friend George Lucas. “I was mixing at the Skywalker Ranch, and showed it to George,” he says. “We had a very complicated setup scene with Jim Phelps [Jon Voight], having to do with him going to Chicago and setting something up at the hotel. George says, ‘Where’s the scene where they’re all sitting at the kitchen table and Phelps is telling everybody what they’re supposed to do?’”

So, De Palma brought back the cast. “That was a great advantage when our group of directors would look at each other’s movies and say, ‘Wait, you’ve forgotten something.’ Our group was George, Steven [Spielberg], Marty [Scorsese] and myself, and sometimes Francis [Coppola]. I wish that tradition was carried on.”

A romantic angle between Hunt and Phelps’ wife (Emmanuelle Béart) was also scrapped. “This plot was complicated enough,” De Palma says.

De Palma and Towne had a harsh disagreement over the climax. The director favored the train action scene, while Towne wanted a character-based conclusion between Hunt and Phelps, inside the train. “We got into a knock-down drag-out argument in front of Tom that ended when I said, ‘You want to play this scene out in the boxcar? Fine. I think it stinks.’ Tom called me up and said, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, and I think we should do the helicopter chase.’ Tom ultimately made the decision, and he’s a very smart producer. He went with what he thought would be more effective, and fortunately, it was the idea I had come up with.”

The movie grossed $457 million worldwide and De Palma was invited back for the sequel, but he could see it would scale more toward action, and outside of The French Connection, he’s never seen a car chase he admires. “When Tom asked me to direct the second one, I said, ‘Are you kidding? Who wants to do another one of these things again?’ I accomplished what I wanted, which was to make the biggest hit I ever had. And I have no belief you should spend your time making sequels.”

Wagner was involved with the first three films but has obviously kept an eye on, from afar, the subsequent five Mission: Impossible pictures. She’s “thrilled,” indeed “absolutely thrilled” about its success “and to see what Tom has done with this and his team, and Chris McQuarrie.”

She’s rightly proud of the work Brian De Palma did on the first movie released in 1996, and she still gets excited by his vision of it, as do I!

“All the twists and the turns, and it was the first three, which were the ones I was involved with, where it was really finding itself. What is this we asked ourselves? We know it’s something amazing, but what is it and what are the concepts? And who is Ethan Hunt? That was always a big question. And I’m proud of everyone that has taken this series to make it what it is today.

“It’s a movie, and it was always designed that way to bring people into the theater, get them out of their houses into the theater.” she adds.

I mention the stellar lineup of actors cast for the first Mission: Impossible movie. Vanessa Redgrave, for starters!

“What happened,” Wagner explains, “is her agent called me and said, ‘Do you have any male roles for Vanessa Redgrave to play? She always likes to play things kind of out of the box that aren’t the obvious.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’ I said, ‘Let me talk to Tom and Brian.’ So we all conferred about this. And the idea came up to have her play Max, the villain in Mission 1. So that role was originally a man … but when Vanessa Redgrave wants to play a male role in your film, you go for it,” she shrugs.

Cruise talked a little more about his quest for cinematic motion during an on-stage conversation yesterday at the British Film Institute, according to The Independent's Greg Evans:

“ I love the theme music,” Cruise joked. “ I thought it'd be interesting to take a Cold War TV series and turn it into an action movie.  I wanted action and suspense and lots of motion. I studied silent movies, Fantasia (1940) and musicals. How do you utilise motion?

“ I was constantly working and developing my abilities and developing technology.  It was such early days that the harnesses that I was wearing were very new and the cables were very new and we were all experimenting.

“ I remember the scene where I got blown from the helicopter to the train and there were pipes from the camera rig sticking out and I was like: ‘Guys, I might impale my skull’. No one had thought about stuff like that.”

Mission: Impossible [Brian De Palma, 1996] was your first film as producer.

Yes, with Sherry Lansing, who was the first female head of a studio-Twentieth Century Fox. I met her when I was doing Taps. And she was always a huge supporter of mine. And when she moved to Paramount, she came and said, Look, please start a production company. And I looked at the landscape, and I wanted something that was exploring motion in a different way. I wanted to go make a film foreign, it was always my passion to go to different countries. And I said, "Look. I will take Mission: Impossible, and I want to produce this as my first producing gig. And I remember, at that time, people were like, "What are you making a TV series for, into a movie?" You know what I mean? I remember. I was like. "I think it's gonna be cool, you know, we'll see what happens!"

I'm fortunate that my first time that I produced a film was with Brian De Palma, an incredibly skilled filmmaker. He started his career in the 60s and the guys that he was training with, some of them were from the 30s and 40s and 50s. So, that wealth of knowledge, that craftsmanship that has been passed down to me, that's stuff that I very much value.