Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Tom Cruise is mortal. I’ll admit I don’t have much evidence to support this assumption. Cruise has never died (good!); has aged only minimally during his 40-plus-year film career (weird, but nice for him, I guess); has never exploded or shattered every single bone in his body despite stuffing his beloved Mission: Impossible films with stunts that seemed tailor-made to explode him and/or shatter all his bones (fuckin’ rad, frankly); and has not even suffered the metaphoric “death” of true cancelation despite repeatedly sabotaging his own public image with ill-timed couch leaps and so forth. It’s possible that Tom Cruise cannot be killed. I freely concede this.
However, there was also the one time he played an immortal vampire and frankly kind of sucked at it (not in the vampire way). So let us assume that Cruise, like all of us, only probably not me, will someday die. Given that prospect, it’s no great surprise that the run-up to this week’s release of Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning Part One has been dominated by talk of The Stunts. The Stunts dominate most of the conversation around every M:I movie. Cruise famously does all his stunts himself, and any time you take the World’s Last True Movie Star™, strap him to a high-velocity wind sock, and hurl his frail, perishable body around a range of knifelike mountain peaks, people will inevitably pay attention.
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M:I is about stunts. I get that. But you know what other aspect of M:I rules extremely hard and does not get nearly enough attention? The masks. The masks, bro. I’m talking about the masks. Let’s take a moment to celebrate the masks of Mission: Impossible, simultaneously the greatest and laziest special effect in the history of motion pictures. They’re the perfect complement to the stunt sequences, and quite possibly the key to the fizzy joy underlying this whole absurd, delightful franchise.
The premise of the masks in Mission: Impossible is as follows. The technology of disguise has advanced so far, via secret government laboratories or whatever, that with access to the right tools (generally a silver briefcase that sends out a little puff of smoke when you open it) any person can become any other person at any time. This means—critically—that any character in the movie can be played by any actor at any time. Cruise, for instance, mostly portrays Ethan Hunt, the secret agent who pulls off missions: impossible for a living. But say there’s an evil arms dealer played by Philip Seymour Hoffman (shout-out Owen Davian in M:I III, the best villain in the series). You can never be absolutely sure the Hoffman on-screen isn’t Ethan Hunt in disguise. There’s always a chance that everything you hear the evil arms dealer say is actually something Ethan Hunt is saying, as part of his master plan.
That’s how good the masks are. They enable one-to-one identity swaps, not through any CGI wizardry or elaborate prosthetics, but by literally enabling the filmmakers to point at Simon Pegg and go, “Yo, you’re this other dude now.”
I mean, what sort of frozen-hearted plot-twist-allergic Grinch could possibly object to this??
From a filmmaking standpoint, the genius of the mask contrivance is obvious. Pretend you’re the director. You get to deploy, at will, a special effect that is always 100 percent convincing, because nothing could possibly look more like Jon Voight’s face in a movie than Jon Voight’s face in the same movie. And what’s even better: This flawless, infinitely repeatable magic trick doesn’t cost any money or add any time to your production calendar. “You’re this other dude now” is the entire effect. All you have to budget for is the tiny bit of fast-drying goo that sometimes seems to be left on a mask-wearer’s face after the mask is peeled off. How much does fast-drying goo cost?
This is Hollywood, my friends. Goo, like dreams, comes cheap.
From the audience’s standpoint, the mask gimmick is even better, because it liberates the M:I films to toy with our usual understanding of how an action movie works. In many ways, the M:I films are like action movies in reverse. In a normal action movie, you know there’s a lot of trickery. You know you’re watching a sustained attempt to fool your senses, and you know the filmmakers’ powers of illusion are mostly concentrated on the special-effects-heavy action scenes. What you’re watching in the action scenes isn’t really happening—Harrison Ford is not actually about to be crushed by a giant boulder, Robert Downey Jr. is not truly whizzing around in the sky over New York—and all the fun of the movie lies in the stuff it does to persuade you that it is. So the non-action scenes are mostly about enabling your suspension of disbelief. The story’s job—not its only job, but one of the big ones—is to coax you into accepting this strange universe of violent cartoon physics by giving you a stable simulated reality to ground yourself in. Characters do not arbitrarily change identities; if someone is introduced in Act I as the director of the CIA, that person will almost always still be the director of the CIA in Act III. A typical action movie doesn’t want you to doubt your own eyes. In fact, that’s the last thing it wants.
In the M:I movies, though? This state of affairs is flipped gleefully on its head. In Mission: Impossible, the action scenes are real, or at least as real as action scenes get, and everyone knows it. That’s the franchise’s whole promise: that when you see Tom Cruise dangling from the door of a helicopter, that’s actually Tom Cruise—the quite possibly mortal Tom Cruise!—whipping in the breeze over the North Atlantic. When John Woo directed 1997’s classic action farce-opera Face/Off, he famously left the faces of the stunt doubles visible in parts of the climactic boat chase, because he valued verisimilitude over illusion. This is not a choice you have to worry about when you’re directing a Tom Cruise flick. All you have to worry about is not crashing Tom Cruise into the side of a glacier. (In addition to Face/Off, Woo directed 2000’s underrated Mission: Impossible II, making him inarguably the patron saint of “you’re this other dude now” filmmaking.)
And because Mission: Impossible’s action scenes are—bizarrely, uniquely—trustworthy, the non-action scenes are free to mess with our heads. They’re free to keep us guessing about what’s “real” and what isn’t. Suspension of disbelief is the only game in town for most tentpole blockbusters, but Mission: Impossible practically begs for your disbelief. The meaning of any scene can always be reversed, because thanks to the masks, anyone in the scene can always be revealed to be someone else. Surprise, suckers!
And this, in turn, is what makes the experience of watching the M:I movies so distinct from that of watching other action films. M:I movies win your trust, then betray it, then win it back, then betray it again. They win your trust in the types of scenes in which normal action movies risk losing it, and then they deliberately betray your trust in the types of scenes in which normal action movies work hard to win it. And these acts of deliberate betrayal only make audiences love the films more, because that feeling of being kept a little off-balance, a little teased and playfully uncertain, turns out to be a whole lot of fun.
I haven’t seen Dead Reckoning Part One yet. All I know about it is that it contains Tom Cruise’s most dangerous stunt to date (using both a colon and an en dash in the title of the same movie). But it’s telling that, as much as I’m looking forward to watching the action scenes, what I’m really excited about is having the rug yanked out from under me at least twice by mask shenanigans. Jumping a motorcycle off the hour hand of Big Ben while exchanging machine-gun fire with terrorists? That’s all well and good. But a plot twist is still the best adrenaline rush of all.
