High Knees and Explosions — Mission: Impossible is the Perfect Action Franchise
My brother has a term he uses to classify action movies: “high knees and explosions”. It’s pretty self-explanatory: in action movies, there’s a lot of running and a lot of explosions. It’s an integral part of the genre. Well, over the last 27 years, there’s been one franchise that has mastered the art of the action genre better than anyone else. Let’s talk about Mission: Impossible.
For those who have been living under a rock for the last 3 decades, here’s a CliffNotes summary. Mission: Impossible is based on the TV series of the same name created by Bruce Gellar. It stars Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, an agent of the Impossible Missions Force (IMF), and the movies revolve around horribly impossible missions that Ethan and a selected team (usually involving Luther Stickell) have to accomplish. Since the first movie was released in 1996, there have been 6 sequels, with the most recent one being Dead Reckoning Part One which was released in late July. Collectively, the movies have grossed over $4 billion on a collective $1.1 billion budget. These movies are really fucking profitable. There area lot of reasons for that. One of them is Tommy boy.
Tom Cruise is many things: thrice divorced, a scientologist, the inspiration for Christian Bale’s portrayal of Patrick Bateman, etc. But one thing that rises above all that is his place as a really fucking great actor. Tommy has been in a wide variety of movies in his long and hugely successful career, and in every single one he has given everything needed to the role. When the Mission: Impossible movies came about (which he also produced), he did what only he could do. He became an action star the likes of which has never been seen in our generation. The tales of Tom’s stunt work and (to borrow CinemaWins’ term) “unimpeded devotion” to realism raise much of the action sequences in the franchise above those of other action flicks. You get a different feeling watching this than you get watching something like The Expendables or any movie in the Fast and Furious franchise post-Fast Five (this is my cut-off because it’s my favorite F&F movie). The action sequences feel real because they are real. He’s really hanging off the edge of a plane. He’s really climbing the side of the Burj Dubai. He really did fly a chopper in that final sequence in Fallout. It helps us buy into the action, to suspend our disbelief for the 2+ hours we’ll be here. And this leads to my next point.
When a franchise is built on set pieces as much as the story and plot, the next movie in the chain has to think, “How do we top what we did in the last one?” And this is where a fair few action movie franchises fall off the rails. Classic example: Fast and Furious. It’s basically a meme at this point about how physics isn’t a real thing in the F&F universe and when you consider the steep escalation in the death-defying stunts that Dominic Toretto and his family have pulled off, your eyes start to get very acquainted with the inside of your head. In F9, Dom drives off a cliff without a bridge, manages to tangle the bridge cable to one of his wheels, swings across the chasm like a motorized Spider-Man, slams into solid rock on the other side, and somehow comes out unscathed (despite not even wearing a seatbelt). This is a problem that Mission: Impossible skillfully sidesteps. How? Simple. There’s a measured level of upping the ante that goes on in each subsequent movie. The biggest set-piece in the first Mission: Impossible was the legendary NOC list heist at Langley. In part 2, there’s the car sequence with Ethan and Nya and the ending sequence on motorcycles (To be fair, Mission: Impossible 2 is perhaps the most outlandish of them all, but that’s what you get when you hire John Woo). Part 3, Rome and everything on the bridge (J.J. likes to be grounded in reality). Part 4 has the Burj climb, Rogue Nation has the underwater sequence in Morocco, and Fallout has the HALO jump sequence. The major set pieces have a feel of steady increases over time, not a massive jump from one to the next. In addition to this, there areall the “smaller” set pieces. The car/motorcycle sequences that increase in number in each movie help to add “extra danger” without blowing the big things out of proportion. The second bit that helps this is Tom himself. His “unimpeded devotion to realism” sells all the sequences as real and dangerous because (as we’ve covered) he’s really doing that shit. Is it crazy that Ethan is doing a HALO jump? Yes. But you can tell that he’s really jumping out of a plane and not phoning it in on a soundstage somewhere in L.A. He’s really zipping past multiple cars on a highway, and this keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Final point: the franchise allows itself to evolve. When the franchise began, it felt like it was going to be an action movie version of the Agatha Christie detective novels. You have your main character (Hunt), a revolving set of castmates (the bad guys, his IMF team), and constantly changing creative teams. There was even a rule that every movie had to have a different director. But by the third movie, there was an attempt to give our hero some depth. A life outside the IMF. He got married. He was retired from fieldwork. This attempt to humanize (for lack of a better word) Hunt marked a turning point in the franchise. The next movie shows a level of continuity unseen in the franchise thus far (and it has one of my favorite scenes in the whole franchise), and this allows for a different side of the character to be used. In Rogue Nation, Christopher McQuarrie uses all these new sides of Ethan that we’ve been shown to craft a wonderfully gripping tale. His loyalty to his friends and a romantic storyline all add depth to a franchise that wasn’t hurting for spectacle. McQuarrie returns for the next three movies (Fallout and both Dead Reckonings) and wields these tools to perfection. Bringing back characters from other movies (Ilsa from Rogue Nation and Max all the way from the first film, through her daughter Alanna). There’s more continuity. The characters feel alive and real, not just replaceable pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Hell, in Dead Reckoning Part 1 (SPOILER ALERT!!!!), he even gave Ethan a backstory, a life before the IMF, and in doing so, crafted lore for the eternally foreboding Impossible Missions Force. These creative decisions allow the franchise to survive long beyond what would be expected for an action movie franchise.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part 1 is the seventh installment in this marvelous franchise. It is (in my humble opinion), the best one yet. Rarely do action movies get a 3rd sequel, much less a sixth. But Christopher McQuarrie, J.J. Abrams, and Tom Cruise have crafted a wonderful formula for success, and in doing so have perfected the art of high knees and explosions.
