On “Mission: Impossible” and Unaccountable Government

IN HIS FIRST full on-screen assignment as Ethan Hunt, way back in 1996, Tom Cruise didn’t fly a helicopter over the Kashmir mountains or perform a HALO jump. He didn’t scale the Burj Khalifa in Dubai or hang on to the hull of a cargo plane as it takes flight. The guy didn’t even sneak into a vault. For his first assignment, Tom Cruise appeared on The McLaughlin Group.

Technically, it was “Senator John Waltzer” of Virginia appearing on the (real) show, debating with the (real) host, John McLaughlin. But Hunt was going undercover (and under heavy makeup) as the senator, and that really is Tom Cruise debating with McLaughlin—specifically about the complexities of governing US intelligence agencies. “No, John,” says Hunt in an affected southern lilt. “I want to know who these people are and how they’re spending our taxpayers’ money. We were living in a democracy the last time I checked.”

Given what Mission: Impossible has become—a series of death-defying set pieces with just enough plot scaffolding for Cruise to cling precariously to—it’s hard to believe these wonky references to real-world legislative drudgery are from the same genre, let alone the same franchise. But with this month’s arrival of Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise’s blockbuster series will have been with us in four different decades. Over time, Ethan Hunt and his geopolitical exploits have remained a rare cultural constant through a time of real-world geopolitical upheaval. Mission: Impossible’s six installments have been with the United States across three recessions, five presidents, at least two wars, and a global pandemic. That’s the kind of longevity that transforms a franchise from a series of ephemeral blockbusters with loosely connected plots into a quasi-reliable witness to history who has stuck around long enough to recall a few important things, even if its memories are a little hazy, and for some reason all involve Ving Rhames wearing a fedora.

Of course, trying to gauge the political philosophy of the Mission: Impossible franchise is a little like trying to gauge the guests’ feelings during an orgy. Sure, they must have something on their minds, but asking would just ruin everyone’s good time. But the franchise's unprecedented durability, combined with the fact that Mission: Impossible is, however obliquely, about a US intelligence agency (the IMF, literally the “Impossible Mission Force”), has made it an unlikely chronicler of American hegemony in the first quarter of our century—about the only thing the series has ever “quietly” done. And, as they say, you dance with the cultural mirror that brought you. The Greatest Generation got Tom Brokaw; we have Ethan Hunt, straddling administrations on an ankle he just shattered. From this perspective, Cruise kicking off the series with a round-table debate about the legacy of the Frank Church intelligence hearings of 1975 is appropriate: we thought we’d been watching Tom Cruise, but all this time it’s been Ken Burns wearing a latex Tom Cruise mask.

The start of the Watergate scandal was nearly 25 years old when the first Mission: Impossible hit theaters, one of the many big-screen TV adaptations greenlit after the Addams Family remake became a surprise hit. But the institutional distrust of the Nixon era still looms over the film. Its original director was Sydney Pollack, whose most famous film, 1975’s 3 Days of the Condor, was about a CIA analyst (Robert Redford) who uncovers a conspiracy within his own bureaucracy. After Pollack dropped out, the script’s 1970s-vintage paranoia was only enhanced by his replacement, Brian De Palma, who adds the same disorienting angles and slow zooms that made Blow Out, his own movie about a sinister political operation, so terrifying.

Mission: Impossible also maintains its connection to the 1970s in its casting of Jon Voight as an IMF leader who betrays Hunt and murders his team. In 1996, Jon Voight was best known as a pillar of the countercultural New Hollywood, starring in films like John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), serving the latter as a Vietnam veteran opposed to the war. So casting him, as not only an authority figure but also a corrupt one, was a playful subversion of his persona. That Voight is today more known for his right-wing politics, including speaking at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebration in 2017, only reinforces the radical cultural changes the Mission franchise has witnessed in its long life. (It also reinforces how pathetic the guest list at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebration was.)

Voight brings a post-Soviet element to Mission: Impossible. Near the film’s finale, his character lays out his motivations to Hunt. “[I]t was inevitable,” he says. “No more Cold War. No more secrets you keep from everyone but yourself, operations you answer to no one but yourself.” He goes on: “And then one day, you wake up, the president of the United States is running the country without your permission. The son of a bitch—how dare he? Then you realize it’s over. You’re an obsolete piece of hardware not worth upgrading.” On one level, this is a meaningless soup of political buzzwords. But on the other hand, watching a baby boomer legend referring to himself as outdated and ranting about the good ol’ days of the Cold War and unchecked US authority points to a crisis within the intelligence world itself, a theme the franchise would come to embrace and explore in later films.

But not before John Woo momentarily took the reins. If the original Mission: Impossible’s subtext is that the politics of the Cold War were outdated, Mission: Impossible 2’s subtext is that politics themselves are outdated. And boring, brah. Released in 2000 and helmed by the legendary Hong Kong action director, M:i-2 is the last Mission film made before 9/11, and it shows in the movie’s laid-back nihilism. Although ostensibly about a madman plotting to unleash a deadly virus, the movie is totally disinterested in exploring anything scary or contentious about global terror. One of its villains, a greedy pharmaceutical executive played by the wonderful Brendan Gleeson, is so one-dimensional that he sums up his entire motivation by hissing, “[I’m] in business to make money!”

M:i-2 is, in fact, the only installment where the villain is motivated purely by money; it is, perhaps consequently, the worst-reviewed in the franchise’s history. (It holds the lowest scores on CinemaScore, Metacritic, and Rotten Tomatoes, and is widely seen as a misstep for both Woo and Cruise.) Sure, it’s easy to blame this failure on the grotesque, Mountain Dew–drenched aesthetic of the early 2000s, which put Hunt in Oakley sunglasses and let Limp Bizkit loose on the soundtrack. But I, for one, will not scapegoat Fred Durst. The flaw was the film’s decision to abandon a deeper look at the ethics of spycraft in favor of immediate sensory pleasures. In other words, it did it all for the nookie.

That Limp Bizkit needle drop follows M:i-2’s famous opening, in which Cruise climbs a cliff high above the Utah desert. It’s a playful scene (Hunt, we learn, is literally on vacation), so it’s jarring when, six years later, Mission: Impossible III opens with Hunt’s wife being tortured in front of him. What a difference two wars make. M:i-III is the most overtly topical of the entire Mission series, right down to its aesthetic decisions. Hunt opts for military tactical gear rather than the catsuits of the original or the VH1’s Pickup Artist–inspired wardrobe of M:i-2. It’s also peppered with Bush-era digs, mostly from a principled IMF director played by Laurence Fishburne. “I don’t care if your daddy plays golf with the president,” he says. “This is intelligence. So far, I haven’t seen any.”

Despite the heroic public servant at its center, the Mission series has never been traditionally “patriotic.” (I don’t think the series has stepped foot in the United States in a decade.) In fact, in this Mission: Impossible made three years after George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished,” misguided patriotism is Hunt’s greatest threat. Midway through J. J. Abrams’s film, Hunt is framed for an attack on a US convoy, and is questioned by the IMF while gagged and strapped to a gurney. The allusions to “enhanced interrogation” are obvious, and the risks of American zealotry brought into relief by Hunt’s interrogator. “You can look at me with those judgmental, incriminating eyes all you want,” he says to his wrongfully accused prisoner, “but I bullshit you not: I will bleed on the flag to make sure the stripes stay red.”

These lines are coy digs at the Iraq War’s false pretenses, but the plot itself is a broader assault. In the final act, Hunt wins a meeting with the bad guys after stealing a mysterious weapon from the roof of a Shanghai skyscraper and delivering it to an arms dealer who planted an explosive capsule in his brain. (Look, trenchant or not, Mission: Impossible films are still batshit crazy.) Here, Hunt learns that the entire scheme was orchestrated by a war-hawk IMF assistant director (Billy Crudup) who intends to plant the weapon in a Middle Eastern country as “credible intel” to justify an invasion. “We’re talking a military strike within a week,” Crudup’s character says. “And when the sand settles, our country will do what it does best. Cleanup. Infrastructure. Democracy wins.” At this point, the series has turned 180 degrees from the evil of the first installment. The danger is no longer a jaded US agent who has given up on democracy; it’s one who will do anything in the name of it.

As cutting as this revelation is, Mission: Impossible can’t really villainize false intelligence when its main protagonist has probably engaged in more international deception than anyone in American history. The more essential line in M:i-III is harder to catch, whispered by Fishburne’s director as he reprimands Hunt: “[W]hat I won’t stand for […] is the idea of an irresponsible, rogue agent working in my office.” This demand for accountability ties M:i-III back to the original film, when Senator Waltzer wanted to know what agents were doing with taxpayer dollars and Voight’s character lamented the days when they had “operations you answer to no one but yourself.” If the Mission series has an overarching message about international law and diplomacy, it lies here, in its tension between espionage and accountability. With the notable exception of M:i-2, every film in the franchise sees either Hunt disavowed by his agency, Hunt made a fugitive from the justice system, or the IMF itself under investigation by Congress for its opaque use of public dollars.

Today, it’s natural to read the above and picture the same insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol blindly adopting Ethan Hunt as some kind of right-wing hero rebelling against the “deep state.” However, those insurrectionists would be wrong. (Those assholes were wrong about a lot of things.) Agents disobeying their superiors is an action movie cliché that predates Trumpism, and big-screen heroes have been snubbing authority since the first time a detective was ordered to turn in their “badge and gun … NOW.” To define Hunt as conservative because he doesn’t always like the government is a little like defining Jason Voorhees as conservative because he doesn’t like teenagers. Both characters are more likely animated by the tropes of their genre than any personal point of view.

Moreover, the remaining Mission films mostly step away from allusions to real-world news. In an overview of films of the Obama years, critic Adam Nayman observed the way the end of W. Bush’s urgently chaotic presidency shifted the audience’s taste away from polemic filmmaking. “One interesting byproduct of this shift,” he writes, “was the arrival of movies manifesting a progressive agenda without ever strictly defining themselves as political works.” Ghost Protocol (2011), the first Mission following Obama’s election, fits tidily into this trend. Gone, for the most part, are the monologues about the Cold War or thinly veiled Iraq War references that added immediacy to the movies up until then. (Hell, even M:i-2 and its deadly virus allowed for a subplot about Big Pharma; it was just difficult to see underneath all those leather jackets.) Ghost Protocol’s most famous scene features Hunt climbing the Burj Dubai (as it was called in 2010) in a stunt that was stunning for the fact that human beings executed it, not because we found it remotely relatable. Likewise, the film’s politics moving forward disassociate themselves from the real world.

This dissociation is the very basis of the plot of Protocol, in which Hunt is framed for blowing up the Kremlin, threatening a nuclear standoff between two global superpowers. It’s a setup that feels ripe for the kind of State Department thrills you’d find in a Tom Clancy novel, yet the entire diplomatic aftermath is swept under the rug in a single line: “Tension between the United States and Russia hasn’t been this high since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” says the new IMF secretary (Tom Wilkinson). So divorced is Ghost Protocol from the reality of modern East-West relations that the secretary drops that he was scheduled, presumably on behalf of the United States, to “accept the Order of Friendship from the Russian prime minister.”

In the four years between Ghost Protocol and 2015’s Rogue Nation, US Army Specialist Chelsea Manning was court-martialed for giving classified documents to WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden exposed the National Security Agency’s unconstitutional global surveillance programs. These incidents, with their mixtures of War on Terror fallout, emerging technology, and old-world, globe-hopping spycraft seemed custom-made for Mission: Impossible. But rather than take specific inspiration, the franchise collapses them into broader, long-standing questions of intelligence accountability. These questions are even given a franchise mascot in CIA Director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), who introduces himself by condemning the IMF before a congressional committee. “[T]he so-called Impossible Mission Force is not just a rogue organization,” he says. “It is an outdated one, a throwback to an era without transparency and without oversight.”

Putting aside the absurdity of the CIA lecturing anyone about appropriate behavior, Hunley’s speech is a crucial one for the series. He may be talking about the IMF, but we the audience can also apply his testimony to the Mission franchise itself and its star, who represents an era of action star that, despite M:i’s box office dominance, is beginning to feel like a cultural relic. In the previous movies, Hunt’s place in a modern world was a brushed-aside detail. Now, it feels like the backbone of a much bigger observation.

The technical villain of Rogue Nation, a literally faceless organization with the comically vague name “The Syndicate,” feels secondary to the boisterous Baldwin and his crusade to reign in Hunt. In addition to Hunley, the movie introduces Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), an MI6 agent, and her subplot with British intelligence similarly evokes the institutional infighting of John le Carré, right down to the casting of the 2011 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy adaptation’s Simon McBurney as another British bureaucrat. At one point, the two meet in London, where McBurney’s Atlee lectures her. “There are no allies in statecraft, Ilsa, only common interests,” he says. When I rewatched this scene in relation to all the movies, I almost laughed to hear Cruise’s insanity in these films referred to as “statecraft.” But I guess it’s technically true? It must include the moment when Hunt shoots the British prime minister with a tranquilizer dart, prompting Baldwin to deliver the film’s most diplomatically nuanced bit of dialogue: “Hunt! I hope you realize you’ve set back US-UK relations to the American Revolution!”

Hunley not only forgives Hunt for singlehandedly destroying the “special relationship”; he’s also impressed. By the opening of Fallout (2018), the most recent Mission, Hunley is himself a member of the IMF. The knee-jerk reaction to this move is “Ethan Hunt is always right,” but it cuts both ways. The incorporation of an uptight Washington suit into Hunt’s team just as much suggests the IMF’s willingness, after 25 years, to evolve and incorporate Hunley’s more restrained attitude. Early in Fallout, Hunley tells an IMF agent: “[C]oming over here from the CIA was a lateral move, some say a step down.” IMF agents are thinking about their résumés now?! It doesn’t get much less “rogue” than that. Depressingly, this naked careerism is probably one of the later films’ more realistic moments. But overall, Hunley provides a refreshing counterbalance to Ethan Hunt.

Fallout, which brings back both Hunt’s missing wife and his archnemesis, is the franchise’s most intimate chapter. So it’s ironic that it generated the most public discourse. In the movie’s opening, Hunt’s team puts an agent in a Wolf Blitzer mask and stages a CNN broadcast to fool an asset. In the grim years of the Trump presidency—as misinformation became a massively profitable online industry and “deepfake” technology seemed on the horizon—this gambit led to real-world panic. It came “at a particularly thorny time for the news media,” said Vanity Fair. “Journalists are under intense pressure from a White House crying ‘fake news’ about unflattering coverage.” A former CBS correspondent called the scene “dangerous.” Even Hollywood’s own Los Angeles Times published an op-ed under the blunt headline: “Journalists Need to Stop Playing Themselves in Movies.”

While I don’t agree with all of those arguments, as a Mission: Impossible obsessive, I must admit that I was exhilarated to see people taking these movies as seriously as I do, if only for a news cycle. If those critics took a step back and looked at the series as a whole, they’d find a richer political subtext to unpack. Throughout four decades, Mission: Impossible has presented us with a vision of American foreign intervention that operates with zero oversight, yet somehow maintains complete morality, doesn’t destabilize regions, and occupies a role that sovereign states are, for some reason, totally chill with. This, of course, is a fiction of hard power. Through those same four decades, we’ve learned the hard way that shadowy adventures abroad are rarely so harmless. This is why we’re excited when someone like Hunley sticks around at the IMF; we know he’s always been kind of right about Hunt. It’s strangely appropriate when Hunley, in the most outrageous line of the series, refers to Hunt as “the living manifestation of destiny.” The description is accurate, just not in the way the movie intended. Like the historical Manifest Destiny, Ethan Hunt is an American fantasy that would have disastrous consequences in the real world.

This is also why the franchise’s outrageousness, as far as it has taken us from the humble days when Cruise appeared on The McLaughlin Group, remains tied to Mission: Impossible’s messaging. The increasingly unbelievable stunts are a necessary complement to the films’ politics. If we believe that Hunt can drive a dirt bike, as he does in Dead Reckoning, off a thousand-foot cliff and live to accomplish his goal, we can believe he’ll accomplish that goal without compromising the United States’ highest ideals. That’s hard to buy these days, but every Mission has warned us, right at the start, that the world we’ve sat down to watch will require some imagination: we choose to accept it.

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Pat Cassels is an Emmy-winning writer, actor, and comedian. He wrote for TBS’s Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and CollegeHumor, and has contributed to The New York Times Book Review, Slate, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker.