Each main film franchise has bins to test. In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs should run amok; in Planet of the Apes, apes need to meditate on intelligence; in The Quick and the Livid, Vin Diesel completely has to evangelize the advantages of household, Corona beers, and tricked-out automobiles. However Mission: Unimaginable took 4 movies to totally set up its franchise must-have: the ever extra blurred strains between its death-defying, stunt-loving star, Tom Cruise, and the superspy he performs. For greater than a decade, the sequence was outlined as an alternative by its lack of definition—at the very least, past having Cruise within the lead position as Ethan Hunt, and Ving Rhames recur as Hunt’s ally. Every installment felt made by a director with a selected tackle the fabric, and Cruise was their versatile instrument.
However the 4 Mission: Unimaginable movies that adopted—culminating within the eighth and purportedly closing installment, now in theaters—have taken a unique method. As a substitute of counting on a choose few characters and story beats to hyperlink the movies collectively, the films have abided by a stricter canon. Mission: Unimaginable—The Closing Reckoning, which earned a record-setting $63 million on the field workplace over its opening weekend, represents essentially the most aggressive pivot away from the saga’s extra freewheeling origins: It self-seriously inserts supercuts of footage from its predecessors, reveals the aim of a long-forgotten plot gadget, and turns a bit participant from 1996’s Mission: Unimaginable into an important character. Within the course of, it streamlines these earlier, delightfully unpredictable tales to the purpose of overlooking their true enchantment.
That tactic could also be acquainted to immediately’s audiences, who’re used to cinematic universes and intersecting story threads, however the Mission: Unimaginable franchise initially distinguished itself by eschewing continuity. New forged members got here and went. Hunt lacked signature abilities and catchphrases. The films had been messy, and didn’t appear fascinated by constructing towards an overarching plan. But of their inconsistency, they show the worth of ignoring the brand-building pressures which have turn into the norm for big-budget options immediately.
Just like the Nineteen Sixties tv present on which they’re loosely primarily based, the early Mission: Unimaginables had been stand-alone tales. The primary two motion pictures specifically caught out for his or her daring authorial kinds. First got here Brian De Palma’s movie, which he drenched in noir-ish aptitude whereas additionally deploying vivid colour and Dutch angles. It arrived at a time when blockbusters akin to Independence Day and Tornado leveled cities and prioritized world-ending spectacle. And not using a components in place, De Palma received to problem style conventions—as an illustration, by mining stress out of mere silence in the course of the central set piece, which noticed Hunt’s crew staging a difficult heist.
The second movie, 2000’s Mission: Unimaginable II, went maximalist beneath the route of John Woo, who punctuated nearly each sequence with slow-motion visuals and dizzying snap zooms. The filmmaker additionally asserted that Hunt himself was malleable: Whereas within the first movie, he fights off his enemies with out ever firing a gun, in Woo’s model, he’s a cocksure Casanova mowing down his targets in hails of bullets. Woo additionally indulged within the motion pageantry that De Palma had prevented—Mission: Unimaginable II appeared to include twice the quantity of explosions vital for a popcorn movie—however the climactic stunt is maybe the smallest Cruise has ever needed to pull off: When the villain stabs at Hunt with a knife, the purpose stops simply earlier than reaching his eye.
The 2 movies that adopted conveyed an analogous sense of unpredictability. For 2006’s Mission: Unimaginable III and 2011’s Mission: Unimaginable—Ghost Protocol, Cruise, who additionally served as a producer, picked unconventional decisions to direct: J. J. Abrams, then finest identified for creating twisty TV dramas akin to Alias and Misplaced, took on the third entry, whereas Brad Fowl, who’d minimize his tooth in animation, dealt with Ghost Protocol. Like their extra completed predecessors, each filmmakers had been entrusted by Cruise and firm to deal with Mission: Unimaginable as a playground the place they might show their very own inventive strengths.
The place De Palma and Woo centered on visible panache, Abrams and Fowl stretched the boundaries of tone—and in doing so, revealed the adaptability of the franchise. Mission: Unimaginable III is unnervingly sobering amid its shootouts and double crosses; the movie contains a memorably chilling Philip Seymour Hoffman because the villain, a personality’s disturbing dying, and a subplot about Hunt getting married. Ghost Protocol, in the meantime, is basically a screwball comedy: Simon Pegg’s character, Benji, offers a humorous button to most of the movie’s greatest scenes, and Fowl treats Hunt like a marble caught in a Rube Goldberg machine full of goofy devices, whether or not he’s pinballing by way of a jail or being launched out of a automotive in the course of a sandstorm. (Hunt even declares “Mission completed,” just for the movie to play the road for laughs.)
Within the years since Ghost Protocol, a lot of big-budget filmmaking has come to really feel made by committee. Studios provide followers remakes, legacy sequels, and spin-offs that join disparate story threads, bending over backwards to make sure that viewers perceive they’re being proven one thing associated to preexisting media. (Simply take a look at the title of the upcoming John Wick spin-off.) The brand new Mission: Unimaginable suffers by making related strikes. It struggles to make sense of Hunt’s story as one lengthy saga, yielding an awkwardly paced, lethargic-in-stretches movie. The Closing Reckoning insists that each project Hunt has ever taken, each ally he’s ever made, and each enemy he’s ever foiled have been related, forming a neat line of stepping stones that paved the way in which for him to save lots of the world another time.
Taken collectively, the primary 4 Mission: Unimaginables had been compellingly disorganized, a stark distinction with Hollywood’s ever extra inflexible notion of tips on how to assemble a franchise. They didn’t construct constant lore. Every new installment didn’t attempt to prime the earlier one—a preferred transfer that’s had diminishing returns. Though some observers critique their various high quality, the dearth of consensus emphasizes the singularity of every of those efforts. They remind me of the situations of a person filmmaker’s imaginative and prescient discovered amid main cinematic properties nowadays, akin to Taika Waititi placing his witty stamp on a Thor sequel, Fede Alvarez turning Alien: Romulus right into a soundscape of soar scares, and on tv, Tony Gilroy guaranteeing that the Star Wars prequel Andor by no means included a single Skywalker. If the older Mission: Unimaginable motion pictures now really feel dated and incongruous—whether or not inside the franchise itself or as a part of the cinematic panorama writ massive—that’s to their profit. They let inventive sensibilities, not industrial ones, take the lead.
