Nothing is a better barometer of American culture than the summer action blockbuster.
Critics may decry the explosions, the plotless plots, the jackhammer music that
echoes with perfect THX fidelity, but look past these conventions, dig into the
nuances (scarce as they may be), and we get a whiff of the Zeitgeist, the public's
current fears and desires, what's in circa
now. When it works, genre has the pull
of myth as it takes the standard archetypes (valorous heroes, hissable villains,
life-threatening crises) and uses them to pull us into worlds and stories that
twist conventions into shocking new shapes. Nowhere is that more evident than
in TV action dramas -- we may be living in the dark ages when it comes to sit-coms
(Everybody Loves Raymond?
Will and Grace? C'mon, now), but look at 24,
Lost, The
Shield or Battlestar Galactica
-- stories that hurtle with momentum and purpose when they're firing on all cylinders,
solid character work married with technical proficiency and the liberating sense
that anything goes. These are entertainments for the post-9/11 age, where bad
things can and indeed do happen; Presidents are assassinated, those who are near
and dear to us lose their lives, no one is completely trustworthy, and action
is played out not as an amusement park fantasy, but as spiritual and physical
crucibles where the good guys get it as good as they dish it out -- sometimes
more. Sure we're still in the realm of packaged entertainment and formula, but
no one complains when the wrapping and the contents are well-executed.
So when the monolith that is Tom Cruise got around to hiring the latest director
to navigate the latest edition of his Mission:
Impossible franchise, he made what looked to be an inspired choice: J.J.
Abrams, the mastermind behind Alias and
Lost. I have an appreciation for early
Alias,
and the way it luxuriated in the trappings of the spy genre while turning it inside
out (spy family drama! How very American) and charging it with emotional resonance.
After the bloodless shenanigans of the previous M:I
movie (RIP, John Woo), an infusion of earnest yet playful energy seemed the perfect
prescription. But while the media has its field day with Cruise's, ahem, eccentricities,
the ongoing saga of his Tom-ness obscures the real problem with M:I:3,
and what undermines Abrams at every turn: the weight of by-the-numbers Hollywood
filmmaking. (In contrast to the quotation that opens this essay, the big studios'
idea of bold is making sure they don't look stupid, but this only results in risk-averse
formula.) Series like Lost or 24
think nothing of killing off a major character, or providing drama and
plot turns that test their actors, and even the audience's connections with them.
Risk, in short. But a summer blockbuster has no time for these complications.
Better to roll A to B, one action setpiece to the next, the dialogue and drama
between the money shots serving only as plot advancers, characters reduced to
straitjackets, product placements taking the place of details (watch for that
DHL truck). And of course, a sunny happy ending. In Hollywood's world, 9/11 may
have happened, but it's only a reference point, as opposed to serving as an emotional
backdrop that might have a ring of truth about it. (In its way, 24,
which features Kiefer Sutherland gritting his teeth and breaking laws and human
rights for President and country, plugs into terrorist-age anxieties and assuages
them by presenting a hero who does the dirty work better than the worst of them.)
And so what we have in M:I:3 is a summer
action "dream" that plays out more like a migraine. Abrams wants to have his cake
and eat it, too -- sketch out an intimate, harrowing emotional drama while providing
the thrills and spills. This time out, Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt is the dedicated
family man, ready to walk away from the spy gig and marry his longtime sweetheart
(Michelle Monaghan in a thankless role), but the kidnapping of a former disciple
(Keri Russell, trying to channel Jennifer Garner) by a ruthless arms dealer (Philip
Seymour Hoffman) forces him back into the game, and into a sadistic no-win torture
scenario with a microbomb planted inside his skull (migraine indeed), a gun pointed
at his love's head, a countdown to death commencing. As the execs would say, "This
time it's personal." There is actually some grit in that scenario (and more than
passing resemblance to the pilot of Alias),
but instead of taking the premise to its logical, bracing conclusion, the film
backs away, content to fall back on greatest hits -- situations cribbed from hallowed
moneymakers (Schwarzenegger's True Lies
should get some sort of copyright mention) or echoed from previous M:I
films (how many different ways can you show Cruise rappelling down from a great
height?), all presented in maximum nausea-inducing shakycam. Alias
may have been limited by its TV budget (watch for the L.A. buses in Taipei!),
but Abrams showed a deft ability to wring out glamour, suspense, and fluid action
under those constraints. M:I:3 screams
"big budget" in every frame (hey, that's really Shanghai!), and its very bigness
all but overwhelms Abrams. A helicopter chase through a forest of windmills could
have been gripping, but is filmed with the coherence of a car crash. A high dive
between Shanghai towers looks good on paper, but comes off as an overload of CGI
and green screen. In such a context, Abrams' emotional underpinnings are hopelessly
outclassed. What sticks with us from Alias
are the quiet character moments, rather than the sturm
und drang of the missions; in M:I:3,
these same moments have a perfunctory air, as if we're just killing time until
the next missile blast. It doesn't help that Cruise is no longer capable of portraying
convincing human behavior (more on this in a bit).
M:I:3's good moments, and there are a
few, are like deserted isles in the ocean. A kidnapping operation set in the Vatican
builds up a good bit of steam, and it's not a coincidence that it's the most team-oriented
sequence in the film. (Abrams makes token gestures toward a teamwork ethic, but
blink and you'll miss the names of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Maggie Q's characters.
When you have charismatic young performers like those two reduced to taking phone
calls and looking pretty, you know it's that
kind of movie.) Some of Abrams' snarky humor shows up in unexpected places,
especially when Simon Pegg (essaying a geeky Brit variation on Kevin Wiseman's
gadget master Marshall from Alias) gets
into his "anti-God" theory. As the baddie, Hoffman takes what is essentially a
nothing role -- note to filmmakers: best not to describe the major bad guy in
the script as a "weed," it tends to deflate said bad guy's stature -- and invests
it with far more personality than it deserves. Muttering and hissing his lines
with curdled flatness, he ratchets up the film's tension every moment he's on-screen.
Too bad he's in the film for 15 minutes, tops.
Whither King Tom? He's pretty insufferable, and the film languishes when it's
all about him. But he isn't so much the problem as he is a symptom -- he's no
different from any other preening superstar who wants to hog the best lines and
camera angles. Lambasting the M:I movies
because they're too Hunt-centric is beside the point; it's like saying the James
Bond movies are too much about James Bond. Trouble only erupts when the film becomes
the latest gleaming tribute to the icon that is TOM. M:I:1
was truer to the original TV series' notion of team-oriented espionage, and yet
it was nigh-impossible to sit through due to Cruise's hammy, mugging performance.
In contrast, while M:I:2 was all about
Hunt, Woo actually coaxed a relaxed performance from his star. In M:I:3,
though, the gloves are off, and Tom is dead-set on proving his acting chops throughout.
Take the aforementioned torture sequence -- watch Tom as he runs the gamut of
Actors Studio emotions, replete with a single tear running down his cheek! Or
the tender proposal scene -- hold your breath as Tom takes a pregnant pause when
his wife-to-be asks him about his secret life! Is he thinking of a possible answer?
Counting the number of seconds in his head and equating them to dramatic significance?
Or if dialogue ain't your bag, watch him as he long-jumps across a burning bridge,
or runs headlong through the crowded canals of Shanghai, arms pumping, shouting
in Chinese for people to "move aside!", resembling nothing so much as a deranged
streaker just before he doffs his clothes. By the time the plot collapses into
an anticlimatic showdown between the Cruisemeister and Hoffman, the inexperienced
civilian Mrs. Hunt suddenly mowing down bad guys left and right, and then a finale
of hugs, smiles, and feelgood laughter, you can be sure of one thing: missions
and directors come and go, but Tom reigns supreme. Or does he? Like a mission
assignment that self-destructs in five seconds, the clock is ticking on Cruise's
career as a convincing young leading-man type. His performances early in his career
may have been callow, but they also contained pliability and promise. However,
since Rain Man (his one great performance)
and Born on the Fourth of July, which
took a torch to his everyman American hero image, a stubborn masochistic streak
has inhabited his work (no big surprise, as narcissism and masochism go hand-in-hand).
It's not enough to be Tom Cruise, universally loved and envied; now he must be
Tom Cruise, suffering for being who he is (hello there, Magnolia
and Vanilla Sky). At this stage of his
career, he's served best by a story or a director who can poke gentle fun at his
image while still acknowledging his movie-star sparkle (i.e., Cameron Crowe's
Jerry Maguire). In M:I:3,
it's business as usual -- that is, it's all about Tom Cruise, the hardest working
man in the movie business. But look closely at his face as he goes through his
patented quirks, strains, and grins, and you can see the waxen features, the unearthly
mix of wrinkles and babyish cheeks, as if he has become his own android. Perhaps
years from now people will look back on this film, and its star, as a representation
of a lost age -- a time when formulas determined movies rather than compelling
stories, and the notion of a superstar actor huffing and puffing to prove he is
a star actually seemed quaint.
