![]() ĭustin Hoffman won a Best Actor Academy Award for his role as an autistic savant in Barry Levinson’s 1988 Rain Man. even if we’ve been paying good money for 27 years to disavow ourselves of that knowledge. To that end, Cruise continues to kill it, so to speak, and his advancing age only makes Ethan Hunt seem more mortal. Seven films in, he continues to be a real-life action figure and his performance in Dead Reckoning Part One is less one of character-crafting than physical endurance and a willingness to possibly die on camera. All we really need to see is Cruise running, jumping, and fighting and we’re happy. There’s only a handful of actors we’re willing to spend that much time with while knowing next to nothing about who they’re playing, their history, their desires, and their personal wants and needs. The Mission: Impossible series has one thing in common with the James Bond franchise pre-Daniel Craig: despite spending decades watching the character’s exploits, the amount of things we know about them personally can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. For maybe the last time, Hunt felt like a genuine underdog. When the inevitable big stunt comes-Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa, on the outside-it’s telling that, as enthusiastic as Cruise himself may have been to do the stunt, Ethan Hunt’s in-character reluctance (and frustration that the circumstances keep getting worse) is palpable. The feature live-action directorial debut of beloved animation auteur Brad Bird, Ghost Protocol was the first in the M:I series to really feel like a “team saving the world” movie rather than a mostly personal revenge narrative-with Bond-level nuclear war stakes. Ghost Protocol was the installment in which the transition occurred, and remains the best fusion of both approaches. In the beginning, however, it was an extension of Cruise’s desire to work with visionary directors, from Brian De Palma to John Woo, and allow them to put their own distinctive spins (or doves) on the material. Nowadays, the Mission: Impossible series is best known as the franchise in which Tom Cruise risks his life trying some crazy stunt for the sake of an Imax screen. Whatever its merits (or demerits) the film did one thing right: it introduced Cruise to writer Christopher McQuarrie who would go on to direct Cruise in 2012’s Jack Reacher and then shepherd the M:I series starting with 2015’s Rogue Nation. ![]() However, the film is a meticulously plotted retelling of a fascinating chapter in the history of World War II. ![]() Cruise, attempting a measured twist on his all-American persona by playing a Nazi who nevertheless wants to kill Hitler, doesn’t always look comfortable in his eyepatch and questionable German accent. Cruise plays real-life German Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who led an assassination attempt on Adolph Hitler in 1944. The worst of the four was 2007’s boring PoliSci lecture Lions For Lambs and if you remove the failed franchise starter Knight And Day, and his glorified cameo in the hilarious Tropic Thunder, you’re really left with 2008’s Valkyrie as the best of the bunch. Cruise released four movies between Mission: Impossible 3 and Ghost Protocol and they show his career listing a bit while he attempts escape velocity on the rocket ship of M:I sequels. ![]()
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