TYBOX: Mission Impossible review: one final jump of superspy myth

MindaNews / 4 June — Has everyone accepted the mission of watching probably Tom Cruise’s last Mission Impossible movie in the past weeks?

Not if you find it hard to part ways with ₱300 for a ticket to a three-hour spy thriller. If you’re saving ₱300 from what remained from your pay, the ayuda, the election ulan-ulan or kamang. If you’re saving that for the school opening, or spending it for a day’s meal.

Is it better to find a DVD copy selling on the sidewalk if there is still one that exists in your city. Ah, street vendors survive through the times, now they’re selling cellphone accessories, combs and slippers.

But the mission is accepted by the youth market, who would love to see a Tom Cruise action, his jaw clenched as he does those stunts that defy his age. And that smile. Given that cinema houses are growing in Mindanao in 10 cities now, and perhaps a way to escape from crazy politics, it’s time to step into a spy thriller movie with crazy stunts and crazy people thinking of nuking the world.

But we are here for the stunts, which Cruise has done and outdone in every Mission Impossible series. In that way, Cruise is the real Last Action Hero. That title came from a Schwarzenegger movie, but Cruise owns that title. 

Because in the past two decades, he has shown what an ordinary sized American actor can do what no Terminator, Commando or Rambo can do: wall climbing and swinging on Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, hanging on a military plane door, plunging into an underwater vault, jumping across rooftops and breaking his ankle (his Jackie Chan stunt-gone-bad moment), doing a Halo jump, hanging on a helicopter, flying a motorcycle off a cliff. In his latest and perhaps final Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning, he plunged into the deep blue sea and hung on two biplanes.

But through all these stunts and feats, what is the plan, or the plot?

Mission Impossible has always been about Ethan Hunt, ideal American superspy, stopping the world’s megalomaniacs by doing crazy stunts, wearing masks, hacking a lot of systems and doing a lot of running on screen.

In spy films, America or Britain is always the hero. Ethan is the American counterpart of James Bond, and even the number of letters in their names are the same.

Like Bond, Hunt is weary of saving the world for the nth time. Maybe that’s why actor Daniel Craig decided that Bond dies in the latest Bond film, finish na. But Cruise needs to live the American myth of superpower, of masculinity with the smile, that the hero lives and saves the world and waits for the next mission. In Rogue Nation, he is even called “the living embodiment of destiny.” Meanwhile, reality shows how American troops in the past like in the Philippines have done horrors, abuse of women and transgenders, and scaring Moro people during Balikatan exercises.

But back to the film. It gets repetitive through the MI series. In Ghost Protocol, Cruise, or Hunt, stopped the launch of nuclear missiles. In Rogue Nation, he disrupts the plans of an ex-British spy turned terrorist by destroying his…. secret slash funds. In Fallout, he stopped a plutonium bomb. 

Hunt has outsmarted all terrorists, so in the last two films, Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning, his ultimate villain is artificial intelligence (AI), known as The Entity, which has hacked all global weapons that could melt the world as we know it. Yet, Hunt saves the world again, by being smarter than AI.

The premise of AI as the enemy is relevant, as we live in this digital age where disinformation and misinformation thrives and controls our thoughts and choices. Now, if only Pinoys can be as bright as AI, or as Hunt, and not vote for trapos and dynasties.. But that would be destroying the Philippine structure programmed by automated elections and socmed. But that’s another story…

For now, are we entertained? That three-hour movie was dragging at the start. A lot of clunky dialogues, flashbacks, with lack of character buildup. It’s the stunts that we are here for, and for that we are good. 

Interestingly, this film imagines America having a black female president in the time of Trump, a woman navy admiral and a Black submarine commander. That is an American pipe dream, equality happening with firepower.

That’s the only thing they can flex now through the Hollywood machine, even if Agent Hunt retires with no more ticking timebombs to diffuse while that pulsating movie soundtrack will grow faint. For now, it’s mission accomplished for action entertainment’s sake. But whether the ticket prices will go down for the masses’ sake, that seems impossible.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Tyrone A. Velez is a freelance journalist and writer.)