Mission Impossible 3
Friday, June 02, 2006
Mission Impossible 3
Mission Impossible 3 begins a little too jarringly for its own good. A battered Tom Cruise, strapped to a dentist's chair, engages in some banter with his enemy--too "intense" to be well written--and watches as his frightened girlfriend gets shot in the face. The cartoonish, terrific dice-in-a-tin-can theme song rolls, and we're supposed to be picking ourselves up off the floor, or something, when the film cuts backwards in time to Cruise's engagement party. I'm still not sure which scene is more horrible, the party or the assassination. The party must be Tom Cruise's idea of ordinary domestic bliss: even the part about the preordained death. The whole thing is lit like a Golden Delicious apple, and at one point, as Cruise passes by, a severely manicured woman turns to another severely manicured woman and blurts, "I'd marry him." The peacetime world of Mission Impossible is essentially a Hollywood wrap party at which everyone would marry Tom Cruise, and if this is what the Impossible Mission Force serves to protect I guess I prefer total annihilation on both sides. Stir the ashes and make sure nothing's left.
The major myth about Hollywood is its risk-aversity. If Hollywood were risk-averse it would be in real estate. Either that, or it would engage with real gangsterism (where "relevance" is so codified as to be a moot issue) instead of letting itself be portrayed by gangsters in the parallel universe of the movies. Thus the appeal of the Mission Impossible movies to the people who make them. They celebrate an unbelievable amount of hyperefficiency, and feature eminently qualified middle managers crawling around on their bellies and proudly whispering into headsets about how they don't have time for real relationships. Mission Impossible 3 (I refuse to write it as the anti-literate scribble--M:i:3--it seems to demand) is the fever dream all addictive gamblers eventually come across, the guaranteed money-making system, something that will defeat chance with the application of a little elbow grease and critical thought. Or scratch that, it's not so much a fever dream as a powerpoint presentation. You can almost hear the guy with the thumb-sized ponytail and the thousand-dollar suit pointing out setpeices in this movie and saying, the numbers were phenomenal on this, this tested through the roof. And sometimes even this sort of front-loaded manipulation feels okay in a scummy, Glengarry Glen Ross kind of way, like watching a good salesman work the room, or like it did back when Micheal Bay was emboldened by power and full of his own bullshit, and before we all knew that he originally went to art school and thinks of himself as Warholian or something. But not this time. Mission Impossible feels like someone sticking something in your pocket you don't want there. And like a robot from another, better special effects movie, it has grown self-aware.
I hate the Mission Impossible movies. They alienate me even further than the vapid collegiate interiority of art films. I find it a great pleasure to lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass, etc., and I try to, whenever the middle managers aren't watching me. It's in this spirit that I go to see the summer blockbusters, to see gamesmanship and aliens and, to paraphrase Frank O'Hara, anything, any of the few things at all, that let me know people don't completely regret life. So it sticks hard in the craw to spend money on a movie so exactly the opposite of the precarious life I try to inhabit, one which sees my world and wants to put little beeping things behind the walls of it, either to blow it up or employ everything in it to some end.
From what I hear, the numbers were not so great for Mission Impossible 3. Did people suddenly start hating Tom Cruise, or this kind of movie, or what? Didn't they always? Doesn't everyone hate the movies their bosses like? Or--and I would believe this--maybe everyone is the boss now. If so, perhaps the nature of management has changed.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:17 AM,
