Sept. 1: Mission Impossible

At various points over the summer, my bedtime routine consisted of lying in bed and watching the last three Mission Impossible movies on Netflix. I did this partly in preparation for the new Mission Impossible movie that hit theatres in July, but I also did it to test a hypothesis that has stood since I was in high school, which is that Tom Cruise is the best in the world at everything.

By the time he started making the Mission Impossible movies in the mid 90s, moviegoers had been trained to believe that with Tom Cruise, nothing was impossible. We had seen him master the world of New York bartending, photograph rival pilots while flying fighter jets, convince the powers that be to let him be the caregiver of his older autistic brother, and manipulate Jack Nicholson into incriminating himself. So when he’s on a helicopter that explodes and the force of the blast propels him safely onto a speeding train, we don’t groan and say “oh come on.” We simply accept it because it’s Tom Cruise. No other actor can get away with that unless they’re playing Superman.

We know that Tom Cruise is indestructible. This is both a good thing and a bad thing – good because this quality provides for some goofy CGI eye candy, bad because it robs his movies of suspense. We know that at the end of Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise (or Ethan Hunt) is going to stop the bad guys from using plutonium to blow up Vatican City or whatever it is that the bad guys are trying to do. The identity of the bad guys don't matter. In fact, the bad guys could belong to an international terrorist group called BAD GUYS LTD and it wouldn't detract from the Mission Impossible oeuvre at all. The missions in Mission Impossible don’t matter. The only things that matter are the vicarious adrenaline rushes we get when Ethan Hunt (or Tom Cruise) rides a motorcycle onto that airplane that is flying over an underwater volcano. I couldn’t tell you the plot details of any of the Mission Impossible movies. All that remains after the movies are done are dream images – Tom Cruise (or Ethan Hunt) hanging from a cliff somewhere or beating some guy up in a sterilized white bathroom. This is well and good. The Mission Impossible movie does not exist to challenge my worldview or to ask ethical questions about how we conduct ourselves, it is there to entertain in a way that is momentarily intense and then instantly forgettable.

Tom Cruise is likely the very best person in all of history at convincing us that he can do anything. If Tom Cruise is in a movie and Tom Cruise is about to get into a fight, you know that Tom Cruise is going to win. It doesn’t matter if he’s fighting Mike Tyson or the Mighty Hercules. Tom Cruise is going to win because he is Tom Cruise. And so, paradoxically, it is interesting to note that the two best Tom Cruise movies are the ones where Tom Cruise fails at his mission. One of those movies is Collateral. The other one is Magnolia.

In Collateral, Tom Cruise plays an assassin who has to kill five people so that his client won’t go to jail. Tom Cruise succeeds in killing four of those people. The last person is not killed by Tom Cruise because Tom Cruise is killed by the taxi driver Tom Cruise has hired to drive him to the places where he has to kill people. So really, Tom Cruise kind of succeeds because he reaches 80 per cent of his goal. 80 per cent. That's enough to put you on the honour roll in most Canadian high schools. But he's still a failure since the testimony of that final witness will still likely land his client in jail. So boo Tom Cruise.

Collateral features lots of dialogue between Tom Cruise and the taxi driver, who is played by Jamie Foxx. Most of the dialogue is ethical in nature – it asks if anything is absolutely right or wrong if there is no God. (This is why Christians really really like the movie, Collateral.) Tom Cruise doesn’t see anything wrong with killing people – he sees human beings as Darwinian cosmic accidents – but we don’t hate him or even pity him while he utters these amoral salvos. Quite the opposite, in fact – we are drawn to him. 

There is a reason we are drawn to him. 

It is this: He is Tom Cruise. 

No other actor could have played that role. It had to be someone everyone is used to liking so he could play against type. If I played the killer, everyone would think I'm a slime ball.

In Magnolia, Tom Cruise played a slimeball who conducted seminars to teach men how to seduce women. That was in 1999 and it was the last time Tom Cruise was nominated for an Academy Award. In that movie, Tom Cruise wanted to make money on his seminars, to hide behind a fictional past so he wouldn’t have to be vulnerable, and to remain estranged from his family. He failed in all three of those missions but darn it all anyway, he gave us the best Tom Cruise performance we’re ever going to see. It is funny when you think about it. Tom Cruise's best work was in a role that is the antithesis of a Tom Cruise role.

Since Magnolia, Tom Cruise has made seven Mission Impossible movies. These movies will likely be his legacy. Fifty years from now, he will be remembered as a dude who resurrected a cheesy espionage television show from the 1960s and adapted it for the big screen. 

Tom Cruise has been part of my life since high school, which was a quarter of a century ago. Tom Cruise has not aged much since. This is likely due to lots of exercise, diet, surgery, and the ghost of L. Ron Hubbard. Sometime in the mid 1990s, some magazine somewhere announced that Tom Cruise was the most iconic actor of the 1980s (this was before he even did one Mission Impossible movie.) Honestly, I don't know what it is about him that gives him so much universal appeal. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd suggest that people feel safe when they're around him, like he could protect them from anything.

I'm going to end this with a suggestion for Mr. Cruise should he ever decide to write his autobiography. Since his birthday is July 3, he should call it this: BORN THE DAY BEFORE THE FOURTH OF JULY!

Oh I slay me.