TT 395: Seven MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE Movies and Two Frederick Forsyth Novels

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read my comments on pop culture

Apr 18, 2024

Before getting to my own material, let me inform everybody who likes great film criticism that they must sign up for Ray Banks’s new internet home, “Under the Influence.”

Banks has a unique perspective and an engaging style. He’s covering “Movies from 1966 - 1980, hopefully avoiding the much-discussed in favor of those that might warrant another look-see…Those fifteen years were a weird and wonderful time for movies, especially genre movies…”

There are two fabulous posts so far, on The Wild Angels (1966) and Hickey & Boggs (1972).

The Mission: Impossible movie franchise starring Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt started in 1996 and has continued until the present day. There are now seven completed missions, and number eight is currently in production.

In a related topic, I needed something to turn my mind off while on an extended tour last month…

While I’ve never liked Cruise or M:I that much, certain friends suggested the franchise deserved another chance. In the end it was amusing enough to sit through this predictable sequence of extremely popular and reasonably bland action movies. Since all the scripts are heavily reliant on technology, there is also a compelling meta-narrative simply in how the gear and special effects develop though the decades.

I saw a bit of the original television series with Peter Graves when I was a boy. I loved it back then, the same way I loved the equally ludicrous costume action of The Wild, Wild West with Robert Conrad and Ross Martin. (The charismatic TV themes by Lalo Schifrin or Richard Markowitz were surely part of the appeal.)

At that time, Mission: Impossible was essentially naive. The bad guys wore black hats, the good guys wore white hats, and the whole conceit of “pulling off a con to save the world” was simple pro-American fun. The general idiom was restrained, not too many people died, and the focus was surprisingly intellectual: How do you trick an enemy into acting in a way contrary to their own best interests?

To kick off each episode, a tape recording was delivered to an agent: “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is…” (Insert plot of the day.) “…As always, should you or any of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This message will self-destruct in five seconds.”

These famous phrases are delightful and memorable, but nobody in their right mind would think any real government agency would actually use self-destructing audio to brief a task force. The concept is pantomime theatre, perfectly fine for kids or an adult choosing to relax with some frothy fun.

The 1996 cinematic reboot helmed by Brian De Palma takes all this silliness at face value and remakes it as something fierce, deadly, and upsetting. Af first, Jim Phelps (originally played by Peter Graves, now by Jon Voight) enters the story as before with an audition of “This message will self-destruct in five seconds.” Sadly, by the end of the movie, Phelps will have betrayed the IMF and killed his own agents (one being his wife) before Ethan Hunt finally kills Phelps.

Betrayal is one way to make it more serious and personal for the hero. These days, betrayal is the default cliché for everything with explosions: Marvel, DC, Disney, James Bond, Star Wars, you name it. The script can discard an inventive plot and investigate the character’s relationships instead.

(There usually doesn’t seem to be a good enough reason for all this betrayal. In the case of M:I, Jim Phelps is grumpy that the Cold War is ending and that he only makes $62,000 a year. Is that truly enough incentive to turn his life into a ghastly rebuttal of all he had lived and worked for, even going so far as to kill his wife and friends along the way? Of course not. The only good reason Phelps turns traitor is because the creative team thought it would be an edgy twist and comparatively easy to write.)

What feels genuinely new is the action, especially the famous arial break-in to the CIA vault. I remember seeing that in the theater and being impressed. This kind of feat, always performed by Tom Cruise himself, would go on to define the franchise. In general Brian De Palma offers a creative and almost garish palette, although like many other De Palma movies I don’t think Mission: Impossible has aged particularly well. By some metrics, Mission: Impossible was actually the last truly successful De Palma production, almost 30 years ago now.

M:I 2 was directed by John Woo and ups the idea of betrayal further with sex. Ethan Hunt sleeps with a hot thief (Thandie Newton), and then has to endure sending her back to romance an ex-boyfriend for the sake of the mission. It’s a fraught moment: When Tom Cruise tells his boss that making his new girlfriend into Mata Hari will be difficult, Anthony Hopkins responds, "Well, this is not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt, it's mission impossible.” To some extent I appreciate classic Woo touches like flocks of doves punctuating a gun battle, but I doubt even fanatic fans of the franchise would claim that M:I 2 was objectively a good movie.

M:I 3 was the big screen directorial debut of J.J. Abrams. The opening sequence where Philip Seymour Hoffman tortures Hunt and Hunt’s wife is very well done and absolutely dire. It’s also something that I would never show to a kid. The disconnect between “This message will self-destruct in five seconds” and a whimpering woman being beaten about the head is vast. Elsewhere in the movie I fault Abrams for poorly-edited action sequences, at times I had simply no idea what I was looking at. However, I admit that Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in a memorable performance as the pure embodiment of cartoon evil.

Endless destruction becomes even more epic in Brad Bird’s M:I 4 Ghost Protocol. Characters are gunned down right and left and the Kremlin in Moscow is blown up with presumably immense collateral damage as a result (although the movie is careful to never actually say how many innocent were killed by the bomb).

To be clear, I’m not against violence in movies. I’m not against sex, torture, or betrayal either. In the hands of serious filmmakers these are all fabulous tools for telling a story. But I resist the notion that the best way to make aging intellectual properties edgy or contemporary is by adding betrayal, sex, torture, and epic violence. This is simply a failure of imagination, not to mention a quick side door into the capitalist side of the entertainment industry at its most cheesy and exploitative.

That said, this is the way we live now, and the best and the brightest will always find a way to turn the zeitgeist to good account. Vince Keenan suggested to me that the movies straightened out and became much better when Christopher McQuarrie took over directorial duties for M:I 5 Rogue Nation, M:I 6 Fallout, and M:I 7 Dead Reckoning. As usual, Vince was right. The first four films are all a bit unsettled and uncentered. Beginning with Rogue Nation, a slightly surreal but still unified aesthetic accommodates subtle shifts of character and story. It its way, it is a return to the innocence of the original TV show. The opening of Rogue Nation features an airstrip and heavy air transport in Belarus plus comms to Washington and Malaysia. This deeply silly yet almost unbearably tense set piece goes nowhere nor needs any context. It exists merely for itself.

The self-referential jokes are better now as well. When geeky tech Benji (Simon Pegg) plugs in his laptop backstage at the Vienna Opera, he sarcastically says to himself, “Join the IMF!….see the world…on a monitor…in a closet.”

M:I will never be my favorite franchise, but in McQuarrie’s hands amazing practical effects and extended fight sequences sport an acceptable mix of tension, surprise, and comic relief. Everyone involved knows why they are there, especially Tom Cruise, who still delights in doing the most unlikely stunts himself even as he ages out of prime time. For me, though, Cruise is almost the least interesting aspect of the franchise. It is the sum of all parts together that is finally making up a sequence of worthy popcorn flicks. In fact, the submarine prologue of the latest, Dead Reckoning, is truly good action filmmaking by any standard. For the first time since De Palma’s launch in 1996, I plan to see the next installment in first release at the nearest megaplex.

Mission: Impossible has almost nothing to do with the real world. This is common with most thrillers in the Ian Fleming/James Bond lineage, where Bond goes out and fights the enemy with technology and bare fists.

John Le Carré was the original alternative, offering a dour world of subtle treachery, where dumpy George Smiley interrogates his way towards the truth. Some see the Le Carré tradition as more realistic than Fleming, but in his own way Smiley is just as much of an aspirational figure as Bond.

In the early 1970’s, Frederick Forsyth arrived on the scene with The Day of the Jackal. If James Bond was active and George Smiley was thoughtful, Forsyth was proposing something more like a star reporter researching after-action reports and filing copy.

Forsyth had served time in the military, had been a reporter on the ground in war-torn places like Biafra, and even was a low-level informant for the British security service MI6. Unusually for a thriller, The Day of the Jackal is told in two halves, with the first half being essentially journalism, the true story of an attempt to assassinate Charles de Gaulle. The second half is a fictional imagining of a follow up assassination plot.

Forsyth’s second novel, The Odessa File, is also quite journalistic in nature and includes an appearance from genuine Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Apparently the film of The Odessa File even provoked the flight of real-life Nazi Eduard Roschmann from Argentina to Paraguay. (Wikipedia article.)

Forsyth writes well but perhaps not much more than that. My impression is that few of his later novels penetrated the culture nearly as much as The Day of the Jackal or The Odessa File. If his work is receding from collective memory, it may be simply because Forsyth tries hard to tell the truth, like any good reporter should. The result can be a bit dry. His press kit says he writes nail-biting thrillers, but that’s not quite right, in my experience it is pretty easy to put down a Forsyth when it’s time to go to sleep.

I hadn’t read any Forsyth in a long time, so it was time to check in. Accordingly I looked at two later novels, The Deceiver and Avenger. They are both excellent, better than The Day of the Jackal or The Odessa File. The author has risen in my own private estimation.

The Deceiver from 1991 is standard issue British espionage told smoothly over the course of four long short stories. I suspect Forsyth was inspired by the brilliant Ian Mackintosh television production The Sandbaggers. If you like The Sandbaggers, you’ll want to track down The Deceiver, it is very much in that sort of idiom.

While a certain amount of internal Whitehall politics gets in the way of justice, there is never any doubt that our hero is doing what is required for Queen and country. Forsyth is a patriot, but like all good military men he also admires the other side. The conclusion of “The Price of the Bride” suddenly sees the conflict from the opposing viewpoint, and the result is quite moving.

At some point Forsyth settled in with a bunch of similar titles: The Shepard, The Negotiator, The Deceiver, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan, The Fox. The plots are not usually connected, and sometimes the books are quite different from each other. (The Shepard is a splendid first-person illustrated novella about flying a plane written for young adults.)

In Avenger Forsyth takes his reporter’s eye to America, where two opposing solo personalities try to bring forth justice better than either the FBI or the CIA. There’s a long episode set in Vietnam during the war, and also quite a lot about the Bosnian conflict. At the time of first publication in 2003 I found Avenger enjoyable but just too hawkish for my own politics. I’m not a hawk now — I never will be — but today I appreciate the balancing act attempted by the author.

The trolley problem, whether to sacrifice one or few to save a larger number, is a standard ethical question in escapist entertainment. In Avenger, Forsyth wants us to love and support the hero, and expends much literary effort painstakingly setting up the backstory of every character in order to make a final Mission: Impossible-style confidence trick seem “possible." (Again, there can be something a bit unstylish about all this; reading Forsyth can feel like reading a newspaper.)

Since the history of the story is real history, it turns out this hero’s victory provokes a much greater loss. It is unusual for a conventional commercial thriller to take this kind of risk.

Taking risks is unfashionable these days. It seems like most smart thriller, espionage, and crime authors have collectively agreed to write books where the lead characters are pure of heart and always behave in an ethically appropriate manner.

Of course, many of the people who write and read novels are liberal, as am I myself. In our hyper-polarized environment, we don’t want to ever be seen rooting for the wrong team.

But there’s a lot of creative juice to be found in grey areas, the places where easy definitions of right and wrong are not so available. Reading the down-to-earth imperialist perspective of Frederick Forsyth in 2024 felt surprisingly fresh and entertaining.