Pursuits: Cruise is the greatest male star of our times

I don’t suppose you remember the original Mission Impossible TV show.

Few people do. It ran for a very long time in the late 60s and early 70s (they made 175 episodes or maybe, even more) and became a huge hit in the

West.

 

   When we do remember the show, it is the title sequence that lingers in the memory. Jim Phelps (played by Peter Graves), head of a top-secret team of agents, receives a tape containing details of his mission (“should you choose to accept it”) which then self-destructs within seconds.

 

   The point of the original Mission Impossible, as I remember it, was that there was no one hero. Phelps’ team had many different agents and there were several guest stars who came in to act as agents. So, each episode seemed fresh and different. The only other thing I recall about the show now was that there was always an agent (first Martin Landau and then Leonard Nimoy) who was billed as a master of disguise, wore latex masks and changed his appearance so convincingly that the villains were always fooled.

 

   Mission Impossible was revived in the 80s as a TV show with Peter Graves reprising the role of Phelps but this was a cheapo operation, filmed in Australia and left no deep impression. It was only in 1996 when Tom Cruise released the first of the Mission Impossible pictures that the concept became a global craze. The first movie broke box-office records and spawned a franchise which has just delivered its fourth picture: Ghost Protocol.

 

   The first movie remains my favourite though fans of the TV show were outraged by its plot. It starred Jon Voigt as Phelps and though it began in the now familiar way (self-destructing tape etc.) it went on to take some strange twists and turns. In the end, Phelps was revealed to be a bad guy, which, of course, was heresy to fans of the original show.

 

   Nobody minded that Cruise played an agent called Ethan Hunt, a role that was not in the original show. The point of the TV series was that it was not associated with individual characters but that different agents turned up in many episodes. What nobody realised at the time, however, was that the series would go on to junk the multi-character premise of the TV show and become a vehicle for one man: Cruise.

 

   Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ghost Protocol. Cruise is in nearly every scene in the movie. The only character who is at all fleshed out is Ethan Hunt. The others might as well be figures in a video game. And the only reason anyone would go to see the movie is to see Cruise work his way through an array of incredible stunts.

 

   The most spectacular of these – leaping off the wall of the Burj-al-Khalifa – will please Dubai audiences though Bombay audiences may have a right to feel cheated. The sequences set in India’s commercial capital were clearly not filmed in the city. Instead, footage from some sound stage has been mingled with exterior shots of Bombay locations. I don’t think Cruise even came to India till he turned up to promote the picture a couple of weeks ago.

 

   Nor will Indian audiences be particularly delighted by Anil Kapoor’s role. He appears only in the last part of the movie and plays a caricature Indian playboy for laughs in a few scenes. It is hardly the co-starring role that the producers led us to believe it would be. At best, it is a cameo.

 

"But it’s no longer Mission Impossible as we used to know it. Now, it’s all about Ethan Hunt. Perhaps that’s just as well. I’ll take Cruise over the old TV show any day."

   Watching Ghost Protocol, I thought back to the first Mission Impossible. Perhaps because that picture had real stars and actors (Jon Voigt, Emmanuelle Beart, Vanessa Redgrave, etc.), real script-writers (David Koepp and Robert Towne) and a great director (Brian De Palma, whose commercial comeback it was – though he fell out with Cruise while making the movie), it worked as an action movie not just as an instalment of a franchise.

 

   De Palma’s set pieces are justly famous – the break-in at the CIA headquarters, the fight on top of a train in the Channel tunnel, the exploding fish tank, etc – but the movie actually had a plot involving deception and betrayal.

 

   Even the second picture – distinguished by great performances from two British actors, Dougray Scott and Thandie Newton – had an emotional core that kept you engaged no matter how improbable the plot was.

 

   By the third movie, however, the Mission Impossible series had gone the way of all other action franchises: a video game with the frenetic pace of TV’s 24. Cruise had decided that viewers only came to the cinemas to see him perform stunt after stunt and the fourth movie sticks to that formula. Even by the standards of the Mission Impossible franchise, the plot is laughable and there is no attempt to maintain any kind of plausibility.

 

   So: should you go and see it?

 

   Oddly enough, I think you should – at least if you are a Tom Cruise fan. What I like about Cruise is that he understands the genre so well that he is able to play his roles any way he likes. In Night and Day, he played an Ethan Hunt-kind of character in a send up of the genre. Here, he plays the role in all seriousness.  And yet, he manages to pull off both kinds of portrayals. It is easy to make fun of him but there is no doubt that he is the greatest male star of our times, a man whose sheer charisma can hold any picture together.

 

   As for the Mission Impossible TV show and its conventions, they are finally given a complete burial in this instalment of the movie franchise. Even the famous opening sequence, where the tape containing the instructions self-destructs, is played for laughs. Cruise receives his instructions from a public phone in Moscow and when it does not self-destruct, he actually goes back and hits it to get the self-destruct mechanism going. The top-secret organisation that Ethan Hunt and his fellow agents are supposed to work for is disavowed and Cruise and his team operate as individuals out on their own.

 

   I am guessing that Ghost Protocol will do well. It is slickly made, has spectacular stunts, and despite the ending being a bit of a dud (with its echoes of 60s James Bond movies in which the hero has to stop a nuclear missile from flattening a Western city) it holds your attention throughout.

 

   But it’s no longer Mission Impossible as we used to know it. Now, it’s all about Ethan Hunt. Perhaps that’s just as well. I’ll take Cruise over the old TV show any day.