‘Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part One’ and Tone Management
Is this a grim spy thriller or a fun action romp? Yes!
Every time I watch a film starring Tom Cruise I get the distinct impression there is an ongoing effort to humanize him1. Similarly to the way script doctors will be brought in to punch up dialogue or re-work wonky third acts, I suspect entire sequences of Tom Cruise films are engineered to make Tom Cruise look like a normal human being with a sense of humor and of his own mortality2. I don’t mean that Tom Cruise is an alien or anything like that; I think the man has been so famous for so long that he has no idea how to reliably behave in a way even remotely relatable to us peons. So I think big chunks of his movies are written just to make him look normal3.
But! Tom Cruise is exceptionally entertaining, and so I see a lot of his movies. The Duchess and I crawled out of the house recently to watch the latest Mission: Impossible movie (does it matter what the subtitle is?), and had a very good time doing so, despite the uncannily youthful appearance of its 61-year old star4. The film is so long it violates many rules of polite society, and is doubly insulting because there’s no real reason it needs to be so long, the storytelling is muddy, the villains a bit of a yawn, and the entire concept of the Impossible Missions Force increasingly and untenably silly. But the action sequences remain extremely entertaining, and thus there I was.
The film does have one problem, possibly related to the aforementioned campaign to Make Tom Appear Human: Its tone is seriously all over the place5.
That’s Great! It Starts with an Earthquake, Birds and Snakes, an Aeroplane
On the one hand, Mission: Impossible: Colons Colons Colons wants to be a SuperSerious spy film. People have sober conversations about the end of the world in the form of super expository exchanges that just go on and on. It’s like the writers know their dimly-imagined artificial intelligence villain (known as The Entity) and its thinly-written meat puppet servant Gabriel (Esai Morales) don’t seem very dangerous and aren’t very scary, so they repeatedly have minor characters overexplain how scary and dangerous The Entity is so a napping audience understands just how totally scary and dangerous the Entity is6.
And there are several grim sequences in the film where the characters reflect on recently-imagined backstories where they had criminal pasts and made a choice to serve their country instead, and where characters express regrets and sadnesses about dead colleagues or poor decisions.
On the other hand, Mission: Impossible: Yet: Somehow: Possible wants to be a lighthearted caper romp where Haley Atwell plays a snarky pickpocket and high-end grifter who gets handcuffed to Tom Cruise and the two engage in a delightful, sprawling car chase through Rome in a very improbable car7. This sequence—a really fun and entertaining and very long action scene—is peppered with hilarious facial expressions from both Cruise and Atwell as they experience many humiliating setbacks in their attempts to drive a car very fast through city streets and snap off a few amusing one-liners.
In other words, this movie can’t make up its mind on how serious it is to be taken, and as a result the experience of watching it is like settling in with a nice long tone poem where every stanza explores a wildly different, er, tone.
Punchy
There are only two credited writers on Mission: Impossible: Dead at The Box Office Thanks to Barbieheimer: Christopher McQuarrie (also the director) and Erik Jendresen. But uncredited script doctoring isn’t uncommon in Hollywood, and it’s also not uncommon for writers to be brought in to punch up very specific aspects of a film, like when Quentin Tarantino was hired to nerd up the dialogue in Crimson Tide8. So I suspect the tone poem nature of this movie has something to do with manually injecting fun and humor into it. I imagine a meeting at Tom Cruise’s Bond Villain Villa9 where the dourness and heavy tone of the script is discussed, and someone is asked to lighten up or insert the Rome chase sequence to give the story some lighter moments.
Of course, I don’t know that’s what happened. Maybe McQuarrie and Jendresen decided this on their own, maybe there was never a conscious effort at lightening the mood and it just happened. Maybe Atwell and Cruise just have delightful chemistry and so that sequence sparkled10?
It doesn’t matter: Tone management is important, and can be very tricky in big stories like this. Because you do need your stakes to feel important and dramatic, but you also want folks to have fun and you do need some comic relief, some lightness. Getting this balance right isn’t easy. Go too light, and no one believes your characters are ever in any danger, reducing your stakes to zero. Go too dark, and stabs at humor can feel bizarre and out of place, making everyone uncomfortable. Mission: Impossible: Again! And Again and Again!, while fun, ends up feeling like two different movies entirely11. Still, there are two crackerjack action sequences in here that were worth the price of admission, as long as you are inoculated against blurry exposition about a dangerous AI that is dangerous because a bunch of ponderous folks in suits and uniforms spent 15 minutes telling you how dangerous it is.
Of course, the film has other delights. Tom Cruise runs a lot, which is always fun. Vanessa Kirby shows up as the White Widow again and apparently was in a third, different film that required her to mug shamelessly for the camera, which was also fun12. And Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg show up to collect presumably hefty paychecks for what appears to be a few days of filming, most of which is Rhames sitting comfortably and Pegg somehow making crunchy expository dialogue seem fun through sheer charisma. Is it a great film? No! But it’s fun.
Of course, I’m usually bored and irritated at weddings and funerals, so my own mastery of tone is ... not great.
Next week: Oppenheimer and the bell tolling for thee.
Is this exactly what a Lizard Person would do? Yes.
As someone else who pretty much assumes he’ll live forever, I can relate. I firmly believe the universe will shut down when I die, and I am okay with this.
You know this man has eaten an entire endangered bird while wearing a bag over his head, possibly every night this week.
I looked about 13 for most of my life, and then about five years ago woke up and realized I resembled Yoda. Genetics are a hell of a thing. And since I’m, like, the first Somers male to make it to middle age alive, I have no reliable idea of what’s coming. DAMN THIS HEALTHY WHISKEY-BASED LIFESTYLE.
Sort of like the way I go from uproarious laughter to ugly crying every time I go out to a bar. It’s a ride, people.
In other news, I would like my official nickname to be The Entity. Please make this happen.
When driving a manual transmission I routinely stall the car just doing normal everyday driving, so I would never survive an afternoon racing for my life with Tom Cruise.
As a writer, any time someone has asked me to write something because they want the “Jeff Somers”ness of it all, they hate whatever I do and I never hear from them again. It’s almost as if the “Jeff Somers”ness of it all is an instinctual thing that can’t be consciously replicated. Also, “‘The Jeff Somers’ness of It All” is definitely the title of my memoir, isn’t it?
Very little doubt in my mind that there are human beings acting as furniture at this house.
As another human being who has effortlessly chemistry with everyone he meets, I can totally see this happening. I’m delightful!
Sometimes literally, because Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg are almost always in completely different locations, just sitting around computer screens. It feels like their scenes were shot all in one day, many years ago.
The lesson here appears to be that your movie can feel like 3 or 4 distinctly different movies as long as all of those movies are fun. I don’t see the flaw in that logic, actually.
I think this movie has the distinction of featuring one of the worst exposition dump sequences I've seen in decades. The "let us spell out the plot" scene at the CIA or whatever is horrendous, and quite shocking given how taut and well-made the previous M:I films have been.
And Lenny Bruce is not afraid