DE PALMA, MANA, CINEMA BY FRENCH ESSAYIST JEAN-FRANÇOIS BUIRÉ


Some notes from the publisher about the book De Palma, Mana, Cinema by Jean-François Buiré, which focuses on Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way (1993). It was published in France by Pot d'Colle Editions in September 2024, and can be ordered here.

- In the field of cinema, Jean-François Buiré is an essayist (notably in the French journals Trafic, Cinéma, Cinémaction and Cahiers du cinéma, and for various video distributors), a teacher (in film departments at French universities and at a film school in Lyon), a creator of educational videos and a lecturer. He has directed ten short fiction films. Some of his work (in French) is available here: https://vimeo.com/jeanfrancoisbuire

-Carlito's Way was released in the United States in 1993 and in France the following year under the title L'Impasse. Though emotionally and dramatically intense, it received only a lukewarm reception and, thirty years later, remains relatively unknown — at least compared to other works by Brian De Palma, such as Scarface, released ten years earlier. Both are Latino gangster films starring Al Pacino in the lead role, but whereas Scarface is harsh, cold and ironic, Carlito's Way is melancholic, lyrical and vibrant. Through the journey of its protagonist — a former gangster, aging and trying to escape a past that keeps pulling him back —, the very powers of cinema are brought into play. In his analysis of the film, Jean-François Buiré compares these powers to those of magic: he sees the character of Carlito Brigante as a weary mage, wielding his faltering powers in the disenchanted New York of the 1970s and constantly at risk of losing his mana, the elusive principle of efficacy characteristic of belief-based magical societies.

There’s something cruel about Brian De Palma’s output being a strictly literary endeavor as of late. His films are such sumptuous visual experiences, as a critic I find it can sometimes be difficult to convey the intoxicating pleasures of their mellifluous camera movements and exquisitely-timed payoffs. There’s a musicality to De Palma movies and words don’t always do it justice. Alas, a new Brian De Palma film hasn’t opened in area theaters since his 2007 “Redacted,” with 2012’s lurid, underrated “Passion” and 2019’s budgetarily crippled, but not uninteresting “Domino” banished to straight-to-video bargain bins.

Die-hard fans have had to content ourselves with the likes of “Are Snakes Necessary?” The director’s 2020 debut novel (co-written with Susan Lehman) reads like a De Palma movie you’re watching in your head, dense with allusions to classic Hollywood, extravagant, unfilm-ably expensive set-pieces and characters saying that they felt like they were seeing things in slow motion. It was a fun way to pass the time and somewhat frustrating as a substitute for a movie. AMBROSE CHAPEL is even more so. This unproduced screenplay penned by De Palma in the 1990s and recently published by Sticking Place Books is a glimpse of what might have been – the blueprint for a most eccentric thriller.

Hailed as “The Masterpiece That Wasn’t” in an introduction by the estimable film archeologist and Edward Burns superfan James Kenney – a heroic scholar who discovered Peter Bogdanovich’s discarded director’s cut of his final film on eBay – “Ambrose Chapel” was written between 1993’s “Carlito’s Way” and 1996’s “Mission: Impossible,” but finds the filmmaker in the playful, self-referential mode of his 1992’s “Raising Cain.” Kenney smartly cites the screenplay as the missing link between “Cain” and the filmmaker’s 2002 rapturously naughty “Femme Fatale.”

Over 30 years ago, I began the journey of producing my first film, Mission: Impossible. Since then, these eight films have taken me on the adventure of a lifetime. To the incredible directors, actors, artists, and crews across the globe that have helped bring these stories to life, I thank you. It has been a privilege to work alongside you all.

Most importantly, I want to thank the audience, for whom it is our great pleasure to create these films, and for whom we all serve. We’re thrilled to share The Final Reckoning with you.

What is Double Exposure? Double Exposure is an ongoing Quiet Axis series that reconsiders the public images of actors whose most complex work has been overlooked, misread, or flattened by history. Drawing on psychoanalytic and film theory, each entry reframes a career not through fame or downfall, but through the roles that disrupted coherence — formally, emotionally, culturally. These are not tributes. They are reclassifications.

Margot Kidder is remembered as Lois Lane — sharp, quick-witted, and iconic. Yet that image, cemented by the 1978 Superman and its sequels, overshadows a different trajectory: one marked by fractured performances, destabilising roles, and a refusal to conform to coherent femininity. The dominant narrative — fame, decline, disappearance — is not just reductive. It reflects a deeper structural failure in cinema’s cultural memory. Kidder’s most radical work — formally and psychologically — has been omitted from her legacy not because it lacked substance, but because it threatened the frameworks through which we remember women on screen. This essay argues that Margot Kidder’s career exposes the limitations of critical and cultural systems that favour legibility, coherence, and control. Her performances, rich with instability and layered contradiction, demand a re-evaluation of how we process female complexity in film.

Kidder’s role in Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1972) is central to this re-evaluation. Playing conjoined twins Danielle and Dominique, Kidder inhabits a narrative of bodily fragmentation, voyeurism, and erasure. The film’s surface may be pulp, but her performance is anything but shallow. She doesn’t simply switch between two characters; she fractures, spills, collapses. Her voice slips between registers; her gestures oscillate between seduction and disorientation. In a genre that often reduces women to victims or threats, Kidder plays both — and neither. She resists categorisation.

Theoretical frameworks deepen our understanding of what Kidder is doing here. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) famously argues that classical cinema renders women as passive objects of the male gaze. Yet in Sisters, the gaze is anything but stable. De Palma disorients the spectator’s position. Kidder’s body provokes surveillance but also disrupts it. She cannot be fully possessed by the camera. Barbara Creed’s concept of the “monstrous-feminine” applies here: Kidder’s character(s) embody the cultural fear of female multiplicity, of women who do not resolve into one.

There's this hesitancy in contemporary adaptations to experiment with the legacy of the source material in fear of upsetting their fanbases. Phelps' turn was considered a betrayal of everything the character stood for, to which I say, that's what makes it so great. If you want what you enjoy about the television show, De Palma doesn't negate it. Voight's Phelps doesn't exactly conjure images of Graves' performance anyway. The twist plays into the larger picture of using familiar iconography and team tactics to lull the viewer into a state of security before kicking their chair out from under them.

Phelps' sleight-of-hand was always there, such as the moment where he utilizes the IMF mission tape's self-destruction to mask his own puff of cigarette smoke. The audience, like Ethan, could never fathom the original series' ringleader as the domino to bring it all down for nefarious reasons. A common criticism I would hear lobbied against "Mission: Impossible" was the plot being too confusing, which is hilarious in hindsight. There's a lot going on, but De Palma is such a delicate craftsman who knows how to keep track of everything, even when he's not directly telling you. It's incredibly effective when De Palma, Hirsch, and Cruise display a metatextual recollection of events that show one thing while Ethan says another. By the time we get to the train chase, we have seen the truth in Ethan's perspective and are now fully onboard his crusade to fight for what's right.

Q: When the first “Mission: Impossible” came around, where were you in your career?

A: I was doing the David Mamet play “Oleanna,” touring around Wales. I got a call from my agent, saying they wanted me to audition for a Tom Cruise movie. I said great, I took a three-hour train ride to Pinewood Studios near London and I met with Brian De Palma for three and a half, four minutes. I thought, well, that was a waste. I thanked the casting director for calling me in, but told her I didn’t think it went very well. And she said, “No, no. No! Oh, no. He loved you! You were in there the longest of anybody.”

Q: So you got the part. How long was the gig?

A: They offered me the gig, but I had another film job to finagle a little, to make them both work. It meant working three or four weeks, seven days a week, which was fine. Great, actually. Three weeks on “Mission,” then another week or so finishing up while I did this other film. I was younger then.

Q: At that point in your career were you thinking, well, good gig, small part, big movie? Or did you have anything like a hope of it turning into something more?

A: No! I mean, I got to do a Tom Cruise movie directed by Brian De Palma, and to be honest, if it hadn’t been for those two, I probably wouldn’t have gone in for the audition, because it meant six hours on the train back and forth from Wales and I had a show that night. Donloe was a tiny part, walk-on stuff. That’s how it started, although it did develop a little bit more as shooting went on.

Q: How so?

A: I was very at ease on set, having a good time, and I was sort of messing around one day, you know, cutting up, making people laugh. I don’t even remember how. But then I got a tap on the shoulder from the first assistant, who said: “Mr. De Palma wants to speak to you.”

Q: And he fired you.

A: (laughs) You’re joking, but believe me, that’s what I thought was happening. The look on the first assistant’s face — we’re still in touch today, a great guy — seemed to indicate exactly that. All he said to me, as we walked over to De Palma, was: “Watch me. Watch me when you’re talking to him.” So he stands behind De Palma and De Palma says to me, “I saw you messing around up there.” And I say, “Yes, sir.” And he says, not smiling at all, “Yeah. Everybody seemed to be enjoying that.”

And I started to say something, and right then Chris, the first assistant, who’s standing behind De Palma, just does this (holds his finger up to his lips in a “shush!” gesture). So I didn’t speak. De Palma says, “Uh, well, could you do that again, whatever it was you were doing?” And I said sure, and he said, “Because I have an idea for something. After lunch we’ll film for an hour or two.” So that afternoon, and then the next morning, we improvised all the throwing-up bits, and Donloe running to and from the bathroom. And that came from just messing around on set. Most of it ended up on the (cutting-room) floor, but it was fun.

Q: You barely talk in that entire scene, which for a lot of people was the best thing in the first movie. It makes Donloe seem like an accidentally crucial figure.

A: That’s De Palma. I’m forever in his debt for that scene. A masterful filmmaker.

Q: And you had no reason to hope, any time over the last 25 years, that Donloe might find some excuse to return to the “M:I” universe?

A: Only in my own mind (laughs). I did draft a letter years ago: “Dear Tom: What about if we did this?” Some ridiculous excuse to bring back Donloe, you know. Then I thought, who am I kidding? I crumpled it up and threw it away. And then years later this happens.

Being only in the first movie and the last movie you have an interesting perspective. What’s the difference between a Brian De Palma-directed “Mission: Impossible” and a Christopher McQuarrie-directed “Mission: Impossible,” other than a lot less Dutch angles?

Brian, from what I remember, was under a considerable amount of pressure. For a variety of reasons. He was dealing with technical aspects of the film rather than with the actors.

What do you mean by that?

He’s not a great people person. He’s a genius filmmaker. To say that I worked with him and to watch him work, that’s amazing. That’s a wonderful thing. And, of course, with my character there wasn’t a lot there. That was sort of left up to me. And that was great, I was happy with that. And Chris is a different kind of director.

In my experience, he’s very cerebral and in the weeds with filmmaking.

He’s also in the weeds when it comes to working with actors. It was a very unique experience working with someone like him. He improvises a lot. A lot of improvisation. It took me a minute to realize it’s not he didn’t like what I was doing, he just wanted to see what else could come up. And once I got a hold of that, it was great.

Speaking of the first movie, that has to be an odd scene to do with Tom Cruise just hanging above you the entire time.

Well, he’d been up there for quite a while, a couple of days. So I had seen him up there a lot.

You had to know that was going to be a showstopper of a scene, right?

No.

Really?

What happened with that sequence, I was messing around on set one day, just joking around, it was a long day. I got a tap on the shoulder from the first assistant director, Chris Soldo. And he says, “Mr. De Palma wants to see you.” “What?” He says, “I’m going to stand behind him, just follow my lead.” I’m going, oh shoot, this is not going to be good.

I came up to him and he said, “I saw you messing around over there.” I said, “I’m sorry, sir, if I was being distracting.” He says, “No, no, no. It was funny. People were laughing. People really seem to enjoy what you’re doing, can you do it again?” And Chris is behind him mouthing, “Say yes.” So we spent the whole day after lunch and the whole next day doing the vomiting thing. It wasn’t in there before. The thing with the knife I think was there, but the whole vomiting thing was brought in.

I’m glad Donloe kept the knife. A nice souvenir for him.

I love that. I did ask because it isn’t the real one. They said they had to remake it. They are like $100,000 now.

What?

They are really expensive, so they couldn’t get them. One of them is in a museum. So they just remade them.

Yeah, maybe you should have kept that knife like Donloe did.

No kidding! “What knife? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Premiering in 1996, the first Mission: Impossible had director Brian De Palma at the helm, which in and of itself was a statement of intent. De Palma’s work has frequently drawn comparisons to that of Alfred Hitchcock—albeit with a liberal sprinkling of sex and violence—and that sentiment carries over to Mission: Impossible. The film opens with Hunt and his team on a mission in Kyiv that ends with everyone other than our hero dead; in what becomes a recurring theme in the series, Hunt goes on the run, as his own agency mistakenly believes he’s betrayed them. While Mission: Impossible culminates with an explosive train and helicopter sequence, the film is more in its wheelhouse as an exercise in suspense—nothing if not on-brand for a Hitchcock heir.

That willingness to make Mission: Impossible an auteur-driven tentpole extends to the three sequels that follow it. Mission: Impossible 2 is an unmistakable John Woo joint—all the way down to the white doves—in which Hunt becomes less of a traditional spy than a gun-wielding, motorcycle-driving martial artist. (Mission: Impossible 2 wasn’t for everyone, but I see the vision.) Mission: Impossible III hails from J.J. Abrams, who, taking some world-building cues from his work on Alias and Lost, adds some new dimensions to Hunt, including a fiancée in peril (played by Michelle Monaghan). Were it not for an all-time villain performance from the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, however, I suspect Mission: Impossible III would be viewed as the franchise’s low point, which is more indicative of Abrams’s limitations as a filmmaker than anything to do with the plot. Then came Ghost Protocol, wherein Brad Bird makes a seamless transition from the world of animation to live-action filmmaking. Indeed, some of the best set pieces in Ghost Protocol have a playful, cartoonish quality to them—in a good way.

Hollywood is littered with the bloated corpses of movies that were made with the intention of kicking off long-lasting franchises (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, John Carter, The Dark Tower, etc.). But it was obvious right out of the gate that Brian De Palma’s first Mission: Impossible would lead to a series of legs (even those legs wouldn’t be attached to De Palma). We were lured into the theater by the name-brand cache of the vintage TV series and, of course, Cruise’s star power. But we were immediately put on notice that the M:I movies wouldn’t really have all that much to do with the small-screen storytelling of the show—that these movies would be massive Rube Golberg-ian exercises in pyrotechnics and triple-cross pretzel logic. So this is really where it all begins. And now, it seems like a quaint throwback to a time when blockbusters could be…smart. Clearly, it’s hard to discuss this film without talking about the trickle-of-sweat hanging-spider break-in at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. Twenty-five years later, movie magic has come so far. But this set-piece really hasn’t been topped in terms of pure ingenuity and suspense. Over time, the M:I series’ trademark set pieces would get bigger and louder and more lavish and expensive, but nothing has yet come close to topping this economical masterclass in dangling, white-knuckle delirium.

Film scholar and returning guest James Kenney has a knack for uncovering lost and forgotten cinematic treasures. You can listen to episodes 18 and 32 of the Movies In Focus podcast to learn about his headline-making work on Peter Bogdanovich’s Squirrels To The Nuts and the rediscovery of the original version of the Keanu Reeves and Ana de Armas film, God’s Daughter.

James now returns to discuss his latest find: Brian De Palma’s ‘lost’ film script, Ambrose Chapel. The now-published screenplay features an introductory essay from James, which examines De Palma’s fascinating and stylish career as a master of suspense.

Written by De Palma in the 1990s between Carlito’s Way and Mission: Impossible, audiences can finally catch sight of De Palma’s ‘screwball noir’. Virtual reality, mind control, and De Palma’s famed voyeurism are the order of the day for this Hitchcock-inspired, Mexico City-set thriller. James digs into the origins of Ambrose Chapel, exploring how it fits within many of De Palma’s signature themes.

The conversation takes a broader look at De Palma’s legendary career, tracing his evolution as a filmmaker and examining how Ambrose Chapel fits into the director’s cinematic legacy – ultimately offering a look at one of Hollywood’s most misunderstood auteurs.

The book, originally written and published in French and now translated into English by Paul Cronin, is available from Sticking Place Books in hardback or paperback. (Keep in mind that while both have photos included, only the hardback edition includes full-color photos, while the paperback includes them in black-and-white.)

In the introductory chapter, Réra discusses his approach and lists the people he interviewed for the book:

I quickly realized that my project would make sense only if my research was as broad as possible. Without aiming for completeness - which is ultimately illusory - I decided I would embark on a quest to pull together the recollections of Casualties of War's crew, and, in doing so, assemble a new archive." In total, including the filmmaker, producer and screenwriter, I interviewed thirty-three people. I spoke with the production manager (Fred Caruso), the production coordinator (Sallie Beechinor), the director of photography (Stephen H. Burum), the Steadicam operator (Larry McConkey), the on-set photographer (Roland Neveu), the second unit director (Eric Schwab), two assistant directors (Brian W. Cook, Carl Goldstein), the production designer (Wolf Kroeger), the chief makeup artist (Paul Engelen), De Palma's personal assistant (Monica Goldstein), the props master (Mickey Pugh), a special effects technician (Yves De Bono), a historical advisor (Deborah Ricketts), two military advisors (Mike Stokey and Art Smith), a costume designer and Thai stand-in (Pasiree Panya), a Thai assistant (Charlie Sungkawess), seven actors (Sean Penn, Don Harvey, John C. Reilly, John Leguizamo, Thuy Thu Le, Erik King, Holt McCallany, Dale Dye), the San Francisco extras casting director (Nancy Hayes), the editor (Bill Pankow), the head of the sound department (Maurice Schell) and one of the sound designers (Marko A. Costanzo).

I opted for semi-structured interviews, most of which took place by phone, though videoconferencing applications were also employed. Whenever possible I met with my interviewees in person. In a few cases, only written correspondence was exchanged. Our discussions, which ranged from half an hour to over two and a half hours, often led to additional exchanges via email or phone so I could clarify details or ask new questions. I transcribed each conversation in its entirety and sent the result to the interviewee for review. I extracted the essence of these conversations, which are spread throughout the second half of this book. Contacting several of these individuals meant trading the methods of an art historian for those of a detective, and sometimes-as was the case with Sean Penn-great patience was needed.

Though it looks almost quaint in comparison to the ambitious, muscular chapters that followed, O.G. auteur-turned-crowd pleaser Brian De Palma delivers a franchise-starter that codifies all of the essential ingredients needed for a “Mission: Impossible” film (with proportions to be determined by each subsequent director). The vault heist remains an all-time gold standard for action set pieces (here or elsewhere), and it’s where Cruise first really began to hone the smoldering, delicately-cheeky intensity that has made him an A-list mainstay for decades. Those old enough may remember David Koepp and Robert Towne’s script absolutely bewildering audiences at the time of its release, but in retrospect not only was it deceptively — and delightfully — complex, but ultimately a template for intriguing misdirection that, like so many other elements in the film, has become a franchise hallmark.

Two complaints were frequently lobbed at Mission: Impossible when it arrived in theaters in the summer of 1996: The plot was too convoluted to follow, and the finale didn’t live up to the rest of the film. Of the two, only the second still sticks. Byzantine but clever plots are as much a part of the M:I films (and original TV show) as masks and explosions. The climax — a battle involving a train, a helicopter, and the Channel Tunnel — isn’t bad, but it does feel more conventional than the film’s other set pieces. That’s largely because they’re so exquisitely choreographed by director Brian De Palma, one of the best-ever creators of suspense sequences and a filmmaker capable of wringing as much tension from a bead of sweat falling to the floor as from a high-speed chase (and of paying homage to the Jules Dassin heist classic Rififi in the process). It also lays down a solid foundation for future films, establishing Hunt’s gift for improvisation, willingness to break rules, and a sense that no one on the team is safe from harm (except maybe Hunt).

There are a lot of self-reflexive montages in The Final Reckoning, which runs nearly three hours. In addition to his confab with the Entity, Ethan gets treated to a personalized super-cut of the previous Mission: Impossible movies, a highlight reel delivered via VHS cassette. The presence of this tape and the old-school VCR it’s played on ramps up the subtext of what comes billed, from its title on down, as the ultimate installment of the 21st century’s ranking blockbuster franchise. (For the record, we’ll count the original Mission: Impossible as a millennial movie, even though its Brit pop–heavy soundtrack has an I Love the ’90s vibe.) On the one hand, Dead Reckoning is primarily a movie about the necessity of flesh-and-blood heroism as an antidote to the tyranny of algorithms. On the other, it’s an extended victory lap over hallowed ground, strewn with reminders of the IMF’s glory days and haunted by the ghosts of its failures.

There’s a lot to keep track of in The Final Reckoning, and not everything works equally well. Suffice it to say that the script’s Luddite allegory, with its callbacks to analog spycraft in the form of Morse code broadcasts, floppy disk backups, and some makeshift, on-the-fly surgery, is more compelling than the stabs at fan service. All those clips and callbacks from previous installments wind up being double-edged. Sure, it’s fun to see footage of an almost impossibly young-looking Cruise dangling from the ceiling of a secret CIA vault in the original Mission: Impossible; the vitality of those images serves as a reminder that Brian De Palma’s movie was not just lean and mean (and filled with sexual energy) but also relatively modest in scope and scale. On the other hand, that reminder also makes one realize how far we’ve come. Of all the qualities displayed by M:I’s various sequels, modesty is not one of them.

Sadly, Final Reckoning’s montage does not include Alec Baldwin’s deep state power broker referring to Ethan Hunt in hushed tones as “the living manifestation of destiny” (probably the best monologue in the entire series). But it doesn’t have to because the notion of this particular secret agent as a kind of secular deity—a world-beating savior on par with Cruise himself—has become fully baked into every single plot point and character interaction. In a movie in which the world’s nuclear powers are all poised to launch simultaneously, the bulk of the discussion is about Ethan and how awesome he is. It’s not enough that his teammates—from old heads Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) to new recruits Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff)—idolize and swear fidelity to their fearless leader, or even that Ethan’s old rival Kittredge (Henry Czerny) is willing to violate the chain of command to get his licks in. Ethan’s reputation precedes him to the point that the Entity, which has absorbed the sum total of human knowledge, respects and fears its adversary enough to see him as an equal. From the bottom of its Deep Blue CPU, it understands that in a world where everybody else is playing checkers, Ethan is playing chess.

Ethan’s quasi-psychedelic encounter with the Entity (and Cruise’s agonized close-up blinking as he goes all parallax view) is easily the most enjoyable part of The Final Reckoning’s first hour. But there isn’t much competition. Typically, M:I’s resident director and Cruise whisperer, Christopher McQuarrie, is adept at moving things along; what he lacks in visual style or personality, he makes up for in sheer momentum. This time out, though, the opening is so heavy on exposition and apocalyptic portent that it just sort of sits there on the screen, as if waiting for something to kick in. The announcement a couple of years back that Mission: Impossible would be splitting its finale across two movies was in line with the increasingly supersized nature of tentpole blockbusters, but there’s a difference between a story that feels genuinely epic and one that’s been stretched to the breaking point. Ethan’s determined pursuit of a bejeweled cruciform key that can potentially unlock a box containing the Entity’s source code—and thus reverse its across-the-board restructuring of international economics and missile defense systems—doesn’t have much juice as a MacGuffin, even after the revelation (tied to the increased emphasis on franchise mythology) that he’s actually responsible for letting the digital genie out of the bottle. Neither does the main human villain, Gabriel (Esai Morales), a well-dressed cipher whose menace remains mostly hypothetical. All it takes is one swift glimpse of Philip Seymour Hoffman as the arms dealer Owen Davian in M:I:III—the monster ruthless enough to kill off Felicity Porter—to remind us what it looks like when a bad guy is truly cooking with gas.

Of course, trying to kill Tom Cruise is a thankless task—one that’s probably best handled at this point by Cruise himself. It’s a shame that the actor’s proposed Harry Houdini biopic never worked out; at this point, the real question is who will play Cruise in the movie about his own life and whether they’ll do their own stunts in the process. The comparisons to Houdini, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin stick in terms of both choreography and psychology. As a movie star, Cruise is a great dictator. And his fanatical commitment to showmanship—defined specifically by the consistent risk to his own life and limb—has grown from an endearing trait into a legitimately kamikaze pathology. It’s a fine line between giving an audience its money’s worth and exercising a death wish, and Cruise’s insistence on tap-dancing all over it at the age of 62—about the age when Clint Eastwood sent himself toppling off a horse in Unforgiven as a joke about his own encroaching obsolescence—is more enthralling than anything pertaining to Gabriel and the Entity. I myself had been hoping for a deeply symbolic, mano a mano showdown between two Cruises: one real, one a doppelgänger in one of those bespoke IMF masks. Sadly, it was not meant to be.

What’s funny is that after so many years of literal publicity stunts, Final Reckoning’s money shots feel weirdly routine. It’s cool that it took “years of development” to create the sequence in which Ethan plunges hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the Bering Strait to explore a sunken submarine; the sequence is a silent, drawn-out immersion into pure suspense. It’s meant to generate terror as well, however, but what it really conjures up is awe. That’s not a bad trade-off, but so much awe can get boring after a while. It’s telling that The Final Reckoning has fewer jokes than its predecessors, a certain grayscale grimness being a by-product of when a franchise Really Means It This Time. (See also: No Time to Die, which seemed to place a moratorium on one-liners.) The problem isn’t that we’re being asked to take Ethan’s quest to save the world seriously so much as that the ostensibly serious moments blend, sometimes haplessly, into comic relief, like when a bedraggled, barely resurrected Ethan and Grace roll around together half naked in a portable decompression chamber.

This is the closest The Final Reckoning comes to anything sexy, and it isn’t really that close. All Grace wants Ethan to know is that she has faith in him to wield the absolute power of the Entity, if and when the time comes for him to do so. He can’t wait to get dressed and back into the field. The first Mission: Impossible was a De Palma movie in every way; it pivoted on themes of adultery and illicit desire and made them count. When Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust made eyes at Ethan back in Rogue Nation, she seemed turned on by being a spy (Ferguson is missed here, as is Vanessa Kirby, the comic MVP of Dead Reckoning). Atwell is a charming performer, but after making a winning impression in her debut, she gives the sensation here of an actress shanghaied and hypnotized. She’s happy to be there, and that’s about it.

Mission: Impossible’s slick and sensuous surface bears no trace of the drama behind the scenes making it. During production, the screenwriters of Jurassic Park (David Koepp) and Chinatown (Robert Towne) sent in duelling script pages for director Brian De Palma and producer Tom Cruise to wrestle over. The magnificent outcome is an intense tango between the modern blockbuster and a classic film noir, circling each other warily, and beautifully, like no Mission: Impossible that would follow. De Palma’s original is a sexy wrong-man thriller, a Hitchcockian affair that comes disguised as an action-heavy corporate product (or maybe the mask is worn the other way around?). In it, Cruise’s coiled IMF agent, framed for the murder of his entire team and surrounded by slippery allies, is constantly trying to play it cool through the plot’s knotty parlor games, all while feeling the noose tightening around him. If Cruise’s career up to this point was all about often leaving his relaxed boyish middle-American charm on the surface, Mission: Impossible pushed him to try on layers – not just the latex ones – while also pulling off those incredible high-wire stunts, which would only escalate but never improve on the hair-raising tension the first time out.

If you are only going to be in one part of a movie, it’s best if it’s the most memorable part. For example, a thrilling set-piece that sets the template for an entire franchise.

So it was for actor Rolf Saxon, who appeared as a befuddled CIA analyst in the very first “Mission: Impossible” film. The sequence, in which Tom Cruise dangles from the ceiling of a stark white vault room to infiltrate the computer system overseen by Saxon’s character, is now the stuff of action-cinema history.

From a throwaway punchline in that 1996 film — exiling Saxon’s William Donloe to a remote radar station in Alaska — comes one of the most unexpected storylines in the new “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.” His part in the new film is substantially larger and provides the film with some of its emotional heft, making Saxon’s return as Donloe a triumph. (A rather memorable knife makes a comeback as well.)

For Saxon’s work in the first film, he was in the same physical space as Cruise but their two characters never interacted and had no dialogue together. So a moment late in the new film when Donloe makes a heartfelt expression to Cruise’s Ethan Hunt of what his life has been like all these years in Alaska provided relief for the character of Donloe — and for the actor portraying him too.

“It was something I was hoping for, and then it happened,” says Saxon, 70. “It’s a great scene. Working with one of the biggest movie stars in the world, that’s kind of cool too.”

Finally sharing a proper scene with Cruise also gave Saxon some insight into the reason Cruise has been one of the world’s biggest movie stars for more than 40 years.

“There’s no question why he is,” Saxon says. “The energy that he personally brings into a room, I’ve never witnessed before. It’s focused, it’s practiced. I know this sounds like I’m supposed to say this about him, but it’s true. This guy’s unbelievable. And he does those effing stunts.”

Saxon is impressed, too, by the real-life mission Cruise is often vocal about. “His whole raison d’être is to enhance the industry that’s given him so much and bring people in, bring them back to theaters. And I just applaud that on my feet.”

Having had a steadily successful career between his two “Missions,” Saxon lives in the Sierra Foothills of Northern California but was recently on a Zoom call from New York City the day after attending the new film’s U.S. premiere there. It was Saxon’s second time seeing the movie, having also attended a premiere in London just a few days earlier.

Born in Virginia, Saxon studied acting in England, where he would land parts in numerous British TV series as well as assorted film and theater roles. Throughout his career he has also done voice-over work for video games, including the “Broken Sword” series, and was the narrator for the American edition of the popular children’s show “Teletubbies.”

According to Saxon, much of the business of what Donloe does onscreen in the first movie directed by Brian De Palma came from an unexpected interaction on set.

“I was given the script,” he recalls, “I read it and I thought, OK, there’s not a lot to do here. And then one day I was messing around on set, joking around, there was some downtime. And I got a tap on the shoulder from the first [A.D.], who said that Brian De Palma wanted to have a word with me. And I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’

“And I walked over and he had a very stern demeanor. Great guy, but he just always looked angry and he said, ‘You’re playing around on set.’ I said, ‘Yes, Mr. De Palma.’ He said, ‘Could you do that again?’ I said, “Sure, of course.” What am I going to say to say, no? He said, ‘OK, after lunch, we’re going to have you messing around onstage. We’ll film that.’” All of Donloe’s memorable physical mishaps — the vomiting, the double take — were Saxon improvs.

The vault sequence has become one of the signature set-pieces of the first film, seemingly lifting from both the silent heist in “Rififi” and the spacewalk of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and setting a stunts-centric guide for the franchise to come. To perform the scene, Cruise spent hours in a harness suspended from the ceiling.

“I mean, it was a long time,” says Saxon. “And they’d bring him down sometimes, but he’s that guy. He does what needs to be done. I was in the room a number of times with him, while he was filming it, but [our characters] never were supposed to meet.”