What is the worst thing you can say to a raging narcissist with a saviour complex? And I don’t mean “worst” as in “what will hurt their feefees the most?”; I mean what would make this already-precarious situation even worse?
You tell him that he might actually be onto something.
Katie Holmes , and his ego becoming so inflated that he decided to inflict The Mummy
on an unsuspecting public. But in recent years, Cruise has basically become the
vanguard for the traditional cinema industry as it now stands.
His last film, Top Gun: Maverick, was not only the highest-grossing film of Cruise’s career, but also a very important release as far as recent film history goes. His insistence that it be released exclusively to cinemas, at a time when every big studio has been swerving to streaming in a vain attempt to recoup losses caused by the COVID-19 shuffle, has been seen as a last stand for the survival of the theatrical release. I’ve even seen a few filmmakers in interviews openly say that they owe him one for that move, and looking at the state of the industry today, it’s easy to see where they’re coming from.
Of course, it helps that, since the blunder of The Mummy, he’s been doing his damnedest to deliver films that audiences would want to head out to the cinemas to see. The aforementioned Maverick, while unabashedly military porn, lived up to the pop culture legacy of the original, and Mission: Impossible – Fallout… well, I recently called it one of the greatest modern action films, and upon rewatching it recently in preparation for this film, I 100% stand by that. It is the Platonic ideal of the action-thriller, and a hell of a bar for its follow-up to clear. But while I would (and will further down) argue that it doesn’t quite reach those heights, it gets pretty damn close.
The main reason why I opened my review going over the Passion of the Cruise is because the whole meta-narrative of Tom Cruise saving the film industry from the threat of streaming… is kind of part of the actual narrative here. After fellow action-spy franchises like James Bond and Fast & Furious, and even this film’s own predecessors, made it a point of highlighting artificial intelligence as a looming enemy in their line of work, this one cuts all pretences and makes the Big Bad an actual AI. Specifically, The Entity, which has gained sentience and infiltrated just about every digital system in the world, including all things ‘push the button and the world goes boom’. Naturally, Ethan and his team have to stop it, along with what is basically its prophet in the form of Esai Morales’ Gabriel, a terrorist with ties to Ethan’s past.
However, more so than merely being a man vs. machine parable, what really makes its place in the metanarrative stick is how it puts emphasis on the key difference between the two: How easily they see human beings as ‘expendable’. It’s an expansion of the themes from Fallout, only made to encompass basically every interaction between people that takes place amongst the myriad of different alliances they fall under, with Ethan serving as the one fighting for humanity’s freedom. The use of religious iconography, like the crucifix-shaped keys that the film revolves around, and the Entity being described both as a god and as “godless, stateless [and] amoral” (by people who want to use it to create a military-controlled super-state, funnily enough), thicken the sauce a bit, but it’s ultimately about how no-one should have access to something this powerful, and that it shouldn’t even be in the first place. With how much I’ve been warming up to Solomon Lane’s way of thinking since first seeing Fallout, I kind of like that stance for the hero.
As for the spy shenanigans specifically, Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen’s scripting really leans into the overthink to deliver on twisty-turny plot developments and character interactions. Right from the Red October-esque submarine introduction, there’s an emphasis placed on misdirection and sleight-of-hand, which occasionally manifests in Cruise and Hayley Atwell’s Grace straight-up doing their best Now You See Me impression. It’s definitely not nearly as clever as it thinks it’s being, and it unfortunately leans away from the more dramatic irony approach to plot twists shown in Fallout, but it doesn’t come across as needlessly convoluted either. There’s a decent balance to it, and the new way it reflects back on the iconic “should you choose to accept this” line sets up what should be some interesting developments for Part Two.
And on that point, considering this is the third film I’ve seen this year that is a feature-length first-half of a story (after Fast X and Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse), along with the first to actually admit to being just a Part One in its title, I should point out that this easily works the best as a Part One. There’s a lot going on, with a lot of moving parts and characters to keep track of and new faces to integrate with the returning ones, but there’s an actual completeness to the story here. As said above, this revolves around the crucifix keys that have something to do with the Entity, and while there’s quite a bit of setup for what comes next, those keys serve as a more-than-adequate throughline for this film in its entirety. It can feel a bit drawn out at times, but that comes across (to me, at least) like a result of the filmmakers having more time to let the tension slowly escalate rather than just spinning their wheels.
It helps that this film’s approach to action and thrills is as tight as ever. It maintains that buttery-smooth pacing from Fallout, where all the espionage gambits and the action scenes lead in and out of each other very nicely, and the set pieces themselves are highly effective. The long con at an Abu Dhabi airport, the car chase in Venice, an absolute monster of a backdrop with the Orient Express; goddamn, this is good stuff. That Venice sequence in particular sticks out because, on top of being quite thrilling, it also leads to some very hearty laughs. And not out-of-nowhere or ironic laughs either; this is more in the spirit of M:I 3 where the film is openly admitting to its own silliness, but without going all the way into acting like it’s better than its own contents.
Then there’s the performances, the all-important humans at the heart of this film’s message, and man, the casting on this thing is superb. From its opening US alphabet agency meeting with Rob Delaney, Indira Varma, Mark Gatiss, and Henry Czerny returning from the first M:I film as Kittridge, to Shea Whigham as an agent sent to hunt Ethan down does very well (his description of Hunt as “a mind-reading, shapeshifting incarnation of chaos” is so bloody ridiculous that it swings back around to being awesome), to Pom Klementieff as assassin Paris… okay, Klementieff is already having a phenomenal year just off the back of her work on Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, but she is simply brilliant here in the exact opposite kind of role. She’s like the personification of a brick weighing down a gas pedal in how single-minded and ruthless she is on-screen, the fight scenes especially. Shame that Morales is kind of naff as Dark Ethan (or, depending on the extent of your separation of art from artist, Ethan), but otherwise, solid cast that I’m looking forward to seeing again.
And if we're judging this as part of the wider (and frankly absurd, just on its face) narrative concerning Tom Cruise trying to save the physical cinema, I would consider this a successful skirmish in that particular war. It not only delivers a long-ass sit that itself is worth taking, but makes the promise of another one just like it properly enticing. It’s a pretty close second to Fallout as far as the series’ batting average goes, with some incredible set pieces, fantastic performances (again, I must stress, Pom Klementieff is the MVP of this film), and a narrative that not only rounds up a lot of ideas that the series has been wrestling with since the beginning, but makes for some fascinating parallels with the industry that released it. At a time when both the Writer and Screen Actor guilds are on strike due, in part, to the potential of AI to fuck up their livelihoods, there’s another layer to the notion of Tom Cruise fighting a rogue AI in a film that is part of his own impossible mission to save cinema as we know it. There’s something about movies where the story of their own existence within the industry could very well be their own movie that I find quite appealing.
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