Twenty-five years ago, Cruise balanced himself horizontally at that computer terminal, clung to the top of a speeding train, and perfected the infamous Tom Cruise Run. He somehow made the act of ripping a goofy plastic mask of someone else\u2019s face<\/em> off his face<\/em> look suitably serious. His laser-focused twitchiness paired well with the paranoid energy of Brian De Palma\u2019s filmmaking style. And he had such good chemistry with Ving Rhames that the two of them remain the only actors to appear in every single M:I<\/em> film. M:I<\/em> went on to make more than $450 million at the box office (with only $40 or so million separating it from 1996\u2019s second-highest international earner, Twister<\/em><\/a>), and Cruise\u2019s cinematic legacy became tied to M:I<\/em> \u2013 and the uncanny way Cruise continues to understand that the most appealing quality he has an actor is a believable defiance of mortality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A star since the age of 21 who skipped college, never took an acting class, and vaulted right into the business, Cruise\u2019s onscreen persona has always been one of self-aware (almost smug) cockiness, coupled with calculated spontaneity. The haughtiness of his Steve Randle in The Outsiders<\/em>, or his lothario mimicry in Risky Business<\/em>, or\u2014of course\u2014the recklessly chest-beating rah-rah-ism of his Maverick in Top Gun<\/em><\/a>. Early in his career, that wide-grinned display of overwhelming confidence gave way every so often to, as Tom Shales described in a 1983 Washington Post<\/em> profile<\/a>, moments in which he is \u201cingenuous and vulnerable\u201d\u2014but only moments. And as Cruise\u2019s career reached its peak form during his 1990s dominance, Cruise vacillated between two personas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the one hand, Cruise spent a good portion of his 20s and 30s as the American everyman fighting a corrupt or unjust system, going up against Jack Nicholson in 1992’s A Few Good Men<\/em>, Gene Hackman and the Mob in 1993’s The Firm<\/em>, the greed of the professional sports industry in 1996\u2019s Jerry Maguire<\/em>, and that sex cult in 1999\u2019s Eyes Wide Shut<\/em>. On the other hand, as Cruise has settled into the stage of his career in which it\u2019s clear no one says no to him, he continuously rejects the idea of being seen as average. Nearly every character Cruise has embodied in the past couple decades is defined primarily by their singularity, regardless of genre: sci-fi supercop John Anderton in 2002\u2019s Minority Report<\/em>, the Jamie Foxx-terrorizing assassin Vincent in 2004\u2019s Collateral<\/em>, the exceptionally petty Les Grossman in 2008\u2019s Tropic Thunder<\/em>, the swaggering rock star Stacee Jaxx in 2012\u2019s Rock of Ages<\/em>, the charismatically law-breaking pilot Barry Seal in 2017\u2019s American Made<\/em>. There is no one who exudes trying<\/em> as much as Cruise does, and M:I<\/em> is both the root of that relentless, admirable, bordering-on-obsessive perfectionism, and the well that continues to water the man who has made onscreen effort into a kind of alchemy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow many identities do you think Hunt has? How many times has he slipped past customs, in how many countries? These guys are trained to be ghosts.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of actors like to save the world onscreen: Vin Diesel with The Fast and the Furious<\/em> franchise, Robert Downey Jr. during the years he was Iron Man<\/em>, Mark Wahlberg in his collaborations with Michael Bay and Peter Berg (admittedly, they might care about just saving America, not all those other <\/em>people). But no one has been doing it as long as Cruise, whose Ethan Hunt is introduced in M:I<\/em> as a kind of hot-shot, know-it-all agent in the U.S. government\u2019s secret Impossible Missions Force, or IMF. Hunt is bossy most of the time, wild-eyed some of the time, and loyal all of the time, and he trusts his superior agent Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) fully. So when a mission in Prague to intercept a rogue agent who is planning to sell a secret list of IMF agents goes bad\u2014very, very bad, with the entire team killed, save for Hunt\u2014he, in the immortal words of Michael Jordan in The Last Dance<\/em>, takes that personally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Who could have had it out for the team? Why did Ethan survive while everyone else died? Phelps, shot by an unseen assailant; Sarah (Kristin Scott Thomas), stabbed; Jack (Emilio Estevez), smashed inside an elevator shaft. When IMF Director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) meets with Hunt to get to the bottom of what happened, de Palma revels in off-kilter, angular compositions, shooting both Cruise and Czerny from below, their entire faces filling the frame, their eye contact never breaking. Kittridge is convinced Hunt is a traitor looking to sell the IMF-agent list for his own personal gain; to prove that he\u2019s not at fault, Hunt decides to do just that, to lure the real villain out into the open. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After escaping from Kittridge, reuniting with the last surprisingly still-alive member of his team, Phelps\u2019s wife Claire (Emmanuelle B\u00e9art), and asking illegal arms dealer Max (Vanessa Redgrave) to set up a potential buyer for the list, Hunt puts a new crew together of other \u201cdisavowed\u201d agents. With Cruise\u2019s Hunt, B\u00e9art\u2019s Claire, Rhames\u2019s hacker Luther Stickell, and Jean Reno\u2019s helicopter pilot and muscle Franz Krieger in place, M:I<\/em> then delivers, one after another, the action scenes and set pieces that would set the tone for the series\u2019 ensuing bigger, wilder, better<\/em> methodology. The heist at CIA headquarters, a calcavade of moving parts: Claire\u2019s diversionary tactics, Luther\u2019s cool head under pressure, Krieger\u2019s burliness as he holds up Hunt, who levitates over the floor of a temperature- and weight-controlled vault and breaks into the most secure computer system in the world. The fantasy sequence in which Hunt puts together all the pieces of Phelps\u2019s betrayal, re-imagining each element of Phelps\u2019s plan in Prague and realizing that his mentor sold him out. And the final train assault, in which Luther jams Max\u2019s uploading of the list of IMF agents, Phelps turns on Claire, and Hunt rolls around on the train\u2019s roof while battling Phelps and evading Krieger\u2019s helicopter attack in the tight Channel Tunnel. At the end of M:I<\/em>, with Hunt\u2019s and Luther\u2019s names both cleared, they return to work at the IMF for whatever future mission, if they choose to accept it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Cast members of the original Mission: Impossible<\/em> TV series weren\u2019t impressed; Martin Landau derisively called it \u201can action-adventure movie<\/a>.\u201d But what the film franchise understood early on is that these movies are fundamentally about Hunt\u2019s Road Runner-like ability to evade death and Cruise\u2019s willingness to court it with increasingly elaborate, consistently hair-raising stunts. The de Palma signatures of the first film\u2014in particular, a first-person perspective in which we see everything head-on alongside Cruise\u2019s Hunt, an approach that collapses our experience as an outside viewer of the film and places us directly inside the narrative\u2014wouldn\u2019t be mimicked by later directors. But watch any of the subsequent films from John Woo, J. J. Abrams, Brad Bird, and current series guardian Christopher McQuarrie, and each of them takes on the blueprint that de Palma laid out. The IMF is in danger, threatened either by a former ally (Dougray Scott in M:I2<\/em>, Billy Crudup in M:I3<\/em>) or a compellingly nefarious enemy (Philip Seymour Hoffman in M:I3<\/em>, Michael Nyqvist in MI:4<\/em>, Sean Harris in MI:5<\/em>, Henry Cavill in MI:6<\/em>); there is no in-between level of villain. A beautiful woman with mysterious motives floats in and out of the narrative (Thandiwe Newton in MI:2<\/em>, L\u00e9a Seydoux in MI:4<\/em>, Rebecca Ferguson in MI:5<\/em> and MI:6<\/em>); Luther is along for the ride; and there are masks, always masks (Simon Pegg\u2019s domain in MI:3<\/em> and onward). And most importantly, only Hunt, and the force of Cruise\u2019s presence, can save the day.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each M:I<\/em> film builds on the first version of Hunt established by Cruise, de Palma, and writers David Koepp (who would work with Cruise again on The War of the Worlds<\/em> and The Mummy<\/em>), Steven Zaillian, and Robert Towne (who wrote Days of Thunder<\/em> and M:I2<\/em>): resolute and tenacious, especially when faced with deception or doubt. And each M:I<\/em> film requires that Cruise maintain tight control on himself, a tautness that has become so synonymous with his persona that co-stars talk about it (like Newton\u2019s story about Cruise\u2019s relationship with a pimple<\/a> while filming MI:2<\/em>). In that Post<\/em> profile, Shales said of Cruise, \u201cThere\u2019s nothing of the neurotic wimp about him,\u201d an oddly prescient line since Shales couldn\u2019t have known that over the course of 25 years, Cruise would be daring himself, and us, with each new M:I<\/em> stunt. Sprinting down the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai; hanging out of and hanging onto helicopters and planes; holding his breath underwater for six minutes for one uninterrupted take; climbing his way up a 2,000-foot cliff. Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt, Ethan Hunt is Tom Cruise. Mission: Impossible 7<\/em> (in which Czerny returns as Kittridge) and Mission: Impossible 8<\/em> are slated to come out in May 2022 and July 2023, and who knows however many sequels will follow, for however many years. Jack Reacher wishes.![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/MI-2-1024x667.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/MI-3-1024x614.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/crookedc-01.svg\")
<\/p>\n\n\n\n