mission: impossible iii, or rise of the sofa surfer
in which this is not tom's beautiful house, and this is not tom's beautiful wife
Hey, look - it’s Keri Russell! Keri!!
Times are good for Keri Hive, with her big recent starring role in Cocaine Bear. Most famous for her role in The Americans, she is one half of showbiz’s favourite couple alongside her former co-star (also in Cocaine Bear) Matthew Rhys. They are my Tom Holland and Zendaya. I adore them.
Keri Russell is briefly in Mission: Impossible III. Before that, she was, not so briefly, Felicity in Felicity, a show created and produced by J.J. Abrams.
We have a lot to get to this week.
Welcome to Mission: Impossible III. There’s a lot to get to.
We left Tom Cruise in a good place. 2000 saw him notch his second Oscar nomination, and he even banked the highest-grossing film of the year with M:I 2. He was successful and famous and liked. That seems like a stable situation, right? We can fast forward six years, safe in the knowledge that everything ought to be fine when we pick back up.
Okay. It’s 2006. How is Tom Cruise doing?
Oh. Oh God. Oh man. This isn’t good. Guys, this is not good. What happened in those six years?
There’s only one way to let you know.
Vanilla Sky, Cameron Crowe,
9/11, oh no
Steven Spielberg, Minority Report,
Austin Powers, who’d have thought?
Collateral, Michael Mann
Snubbed for Oscars, not a fan
Steven Spielberg, back again
Box office top ten
You’d have thought a good streak
But off the screen, his shit was bleak
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning since the world was turning
We didn’t start the fire
No, we didn’t light the fuse, we tried to fight it
Nicole Kidman divorce
She walked out on him, of course
Then he found another Cruz
(Penelope, they let him choose)
Brooke Shields, Paxil
Tom has views on those pills
Strange reports on his weird church
L. Ron Hubbard’s in the lurch
Katie Holmes, Oprah’s show
Where else do I have to go?
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning since the world was turning
We didn’t start the fire
No, we didn’t light the fuse, we tried to fight it
I hope that summarises it all for you.
I think we have to spend a little additional time on Oprah and the sofa, since it is of direct relevance to this movie. Once ubiquitous, I think the sofa jump has begun to fade from our collective cultural memory. But it can never truly fade.
The only word I have to describe this is “choreomania”, the ritual hysteria of Middle Ages Europe (helpfully explained to us recently by Florence Welch), in which entire villages were afflicted with a mania that caused them to dance frantically until they collapsed and died. Collective hysteria never left the human condition. It never left.
The vibe is unhinged. Unhinged. It’s difficult to tell if Tom is simply absorbing the hysteria of the audience or whether he himself is feeding it - more likely, a toxic symbiotic connection has formed in which all feed on all - but the end result is the same. This is a man who prides himself to an obsessive degree on control, absolutely losing it. He is behaving in a way in which I have never seen anyone else described before.
Oprah’s studio audience were here for it, but nobody else was. The sofa jump came at a remarkably bad time, as YouTube was worming its way out of its cocoon into becoming a mainstream cultural force, so it was primed to become one of the first ever viral moments.
For his part, Tom had fanned the flames. In early 2004, he parted ways with his long term publicist Pat Kingsley, and until the end of 2005, he would work with his own sister and fellow Scientologist, Lee Ann. Of course, Tom Cruise is and was an adult who makes his own decisions, but it does very much seem as if, during that period where his sister worked for him, the dog had been let off the leash.
During this time, and overlapping with the Katie Holmes gossip, Cruise picked a completely random fight with Brooke Shields for her use of antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression as part of a general anti-psychiatry, pseudo-science bullshit. campaign obviously influenced by his Scientologist beliefs.
This made him look like a complete dick. It was part of a wider pattern of letting his Xenu flag fly more openly, like his systematic lobbying of Western leaders to list the Church of Scientology as a nonprofit for taxation purposes, or a pattern of weird donations he made.
Cruise had been affiliated with Scientology since 1986, so you might wonder why it only became a problem now. Well, the history is complicated. The Church, spearheaded by David Miscavige, worked to groom him as the face of the organisation over years, a slow process that hit a setback when Cruise did not take to the wackier aspects of Scientologist mythology. It was only when, after he wrapped Eyes Wide Shut, that senior exec Marty Rathburn approached Cruise on Miscavige’s orders and started the hard sell again. Only a few years, then, passed between his real conversion and this, and we can assume Kingsley kept a lid on some of that.
No longer, though. The image stuck. Everybody knew Tom Cruise now as the cultist nut who belonged to the wacko church. This was a problem. The kind that would end some careers. This was Tom Cruise… cancelled.
Running headlong into showbiz’s 2005 gossip story, I can’t help but find that talking about it in a normal, sane way is next-to-impossible.
Truthfully, reader, I deleted a whole bunch of this section because it got accidentally close to a narrative of vindicating Cruise as some sort of victim of cancel culture. See, while the sofa jump is an important part of Cruise’s story, it is also an incredibly dumb one. Cruise spent most of the mid-2000s cartwheeling through endless PR disasters, and some of them - cf: the whole anti-antidepressants thing - are genuinely disturbing and condemnable. The memories of those controversies remain, but the sofa jump is the image that has come to exemplify what Dewey Cox would call “a dark fucking period” for Tom Cruise. A moment that is unsettling and strange and a little creepy, but doesn’t exactly constitute an act of evil.
In a moment of desperation and narrative confusion, I asked friend of the newsletter Isaac for his take on this whole situation, and true to Isaac, he summarised it with a clarity I would frankly love to have going in my writing. Everything in this following paragraph is attributable to him. We needed a simple image to get to discuss the inherent strangeness and overwhelming bad vibes of Cruise, and the sofa jump was as simple as they came. It’s easier to talk about how Cruise broke the cardinal rule of sofas (you sit on them, you don’t jump on them) than his complicity in a sinister cult with his tentacles deep into Hollywood’s orifices.
It is possible, I think, to get to the bottom of the Tom Cruise situation - to hammer out how to reconcile the different emotions we (I) feel towards this weird man. But the sofa moment didn’t really help anyone do that. It didn’t speak to the legitimate questions you could ask about Cruise’s public persona or his private scandals. It was just spectacle, to gawk at and project onto, to learn nothing from.
Did we learn nothing from talking about it? I mean, probably. But, you know, this is what we all signed up for when choosing to write about Tom Cruise.
Fittingly, in parallel, Mission: Impossible III underwent a slightly tortured process of getting off the ground.
In a further instalment of “famous prestige directors almost making a Mission: Impossible movie”, the original choice for Ethan Hunt’s third round was David Fincher, fresh off the cult success of Fight Club. Imagine, if you will, a Mission with Fincher’s gritty sensibilities, before throwing that away, because it didn’t happen. Much like Wong Kar-wai, Fincher won: his next film was Zodiac.
However, unlike the M:I 2 situation, III went through more rounds of production shuffling. Under the stewardship of Joe Carnahan, who had previously directed two bloody crime movies, a version of III emerged that starred Scarlett Johansson (post-Lost in Translation), Carrie-Ann Moss (post-Matrix sequels) and Kenneth Branagh (post… Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, I guess). It seemed to have gotten pretty far down the pike, but this nascent III vanished when Carnahan left the project.
Third time lucky. Tom was tired of movie guys with their movie egos. Enough of that. TV is getting hot, right? The Sopranos, The Wire. Real stories on the small screen. You’re not getting Davids Chase or Simon in here, but surely there’s some young buck with the potential of a moviemaker. Someone, ideally, who has even directed several episodes of his own show about spies and their missions.
Surely such a perfect fit couldn’t exist…
Good lord, that’s J.J. Abrams!
Odd as it is, Mission III was Abrams’ feature debut. Cruise really just plucked him from his ABC spy show Alias and sent him to the movies.
It’s my sincere regret that, while I could barely speak to the careers of celebrated auteurs Brian De Palma and John Woo, I have a fearsome and complete knowledge of the directorial career of J.J. Abrams. This is a man who has stewarded three of the biggest franchises in American cinematic history. A man who changed the face of television, in many ways.
You know what? I’ll say it. J.J. Abrams is one of the most influential figures in the Western popular culture of the 21st century. And if you think that’s hyperbolic, I can draw you diagrams between the success of The Force Awakens and literally everything that’s now happening in our culture.
He is - or was - a man fiercely debated, a man who stirred controversy everywhere he went. A man who has made six features, of which only one wasn’t a sequel or reboot of an existing property. From his lens flares to his near-scientific harnessing of nostalgia to revitalise old franchises, the guy offers a lot to talk about.
It actually feels kind of quaint and retro to relitigate the career of J.J. Abrams, something which was obscenely popular between around 2009 to 2016. This is because the debate kind of got settled, really. His most recent feature, the abject piece of garbage trash shit The Rise of Skywalker, a failure of imagination, commerce and of the ability to respect God, crashed the Star Wars theatrical franchise and embarrassed everyone involved. These days, he’s just a producer, and I suspect he will never direct again. If anyone bothers to discuss his work as a director, it’s probably to describe him as a hack.
Funnily enough, that has nothing to do with Mission III. People actually forget he directed this one. Think of this as J.J.’s Ghost of Christmas Future moment. If only he had turned back after making this movie. We might have actually remembered Super 8.
Good lord, that’s a lot of context. Good thing we’re almost -
Oh, right, yeah, South Park.
Believe it or not, the animated show South Park, at the zenith of its popularity in the mid-2000s, is a major player in the story of Mission: Impossible III’s tortured production.
I barely know a goddamn thing about South Park (Cartman?), but what I do know is that it loves nothing more than seizing on a hot-button culture war story and getting a take in really early. There was nothing else going on in 2005, so for its ninth season, Trey Parker and Matthew Stone turned their withering satirical gaze on Tom Cruise and all things Scientology. The result was the episode “Trapped in the Closet”, which aired in November 2005, a few months before Mission III released.
I don’t know, man. I’m not especially inclined to back South Park on anything. Using the Scientology debate to construct a joke about how Tom Cruise is secretly gay and using his cult religion as cover feels somewhat lame and hacky to me. Comedy in the mid-2000s tended to be like that. It’s really a miracle that Superbad holds up as well as it does.
It was all very well and good to take the piss out of Cruise - in 2005, everyone was doing it - but South Park was (and is - shit’s still running) owned by Paramount, the studio responsible for distributing Mission: Impossible. The proverbial rubber hit the road in March 2006, when a repeat of the episode was suddenly pulled without explanation. Hollywood tabloid stories instantly popped up to allege that Cruise and his team had been responsible for this, with Cruise threatening to back out of promotional duties for Mission III if the episode was aired.
He denied it, but nobody believed him. This was fair, because Cruise was famously litigious, and every time he spoke about it in interviews, he sounded a little like a mafia boss. It subsequently became a whole free speech situation, where “Scientology is bad” became a bold and subversive political stance for like two months.
I mean, it’s not that hard. I did it right up there, and I wasn’t scared.
All this foot-stomping did not endear Tom to his bosses at Paramount, as we will cover next week. Further stormy waters awaited Cruise, not least in the motion picture Mission: Impossible III.
Thank God for John Woo, huh?
The hard left turn of Mission: Impossible 2 set the template for Mission: that there was no template. Ethan Hunt was barely a character, and more of a vessel, and the IMF could go anywhere. If we wanted to make Ethan Hunt a husband who works in a spy office, that would be fine, right? No rules against that.
It’s hard to avoid the meaningful implications of the decision to make Cruise’s character an all-American house husband this time, especially in his introduction as the king of the suburban dinner party and object of chaste lust for middle-aged suburban mums. The Ethan Hunt of the previous films was a weird loner who had no obvious place in society, which worked just fine in Cruise’s successful era, but stood out as an uncomfortable reflection of reality in this one.
The thing about Ethan Hunt is that he is not Tom Cruise as he really is: he is Tom Cruise as he wants to be seen. Only in the McQuarrie films, really, does the character coalesce into something somewhat independent of Cruise’s star persona. Before then, he’s a glorified public relations vessel - and in Mission III, the message is clear: Tom Cruise is a normal man, and he belongs in American households.
The extent to which this is intentional is debatable. Abrams was by far the least prestigious director Cruise had worked with on these movies, and the script was handled by Abrams acolytes and total journeymen Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, so it’s easy to imagine Cruise exerting a more powerful creative influence than ever over the script.
(Brief sidebar. Orci and Kurtzman’s story is a fun one. They were the absolute kings of Hollywood for a few years after this, scripting the first two Transformers, Star Trek 2009, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and, um, Cowboys & Aliens. Unfortunately, their partnership broke up - amicably, allegedly in the mid-2010s, and their careers forked hard from there. Kurtzman directed the regrettable Mummy reboot starring Cruise, but immediately rescued his career by building the ongoing Star Trek empire on Paramount+, and now presumably sleeps on money like Scrooge McDuck. Orci almost immediately burnt out after his attempt to create a telenovela about a footballer who was a spy by night failed. Shakespearean.)
It’s probably not as obvious as that - the narrative that Cruise made an entire movie as career rehabilitation propaganda is very funny, but not overly realistic. It is, however, pretty fair to say that Mission III was convenient for Cruise, a man who had a hell of a lot to prove in the summer of 2006. When his career desperately needed a shot in the arm, here came one of his most reliable creations.
As a movie, Mission III feels fairly resistant to analysis. It’s solid. It’s real meat and potatoes studio actioner stuff. Abrams’ vision for the series is one of clean edges and general uniformity, and it’s a snug enough fit for a franchise that always pivots around formulas and detailed plans. There’s an outrageously bullshit MacGuffin (the Rabbit’s Foot? Really), a going rogue against the cranky boss who eventually comes good narrative, a mole hunt, a glamorous party infiltration and an incredible amount of Tom Cruise doing that weird little run he does. Workmanlike, in this case, is not an insult. It is not overly interesting, but it barely needs to be. It’s propulsive and fun and confidently directed. It’s almost certainly what all involved needed from the project.
Okay, there is one thing.
They invented the phrase “he didn’t need to go that hard” for Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible III.
On paper, his antagonist, a generic arms dealer called Owen Davian, is a boilerplate action movie baddie with no motivations and no real characterisation. To this virtually thankless role, Hoffman brings the commitment of an electric guitar solo. He is playing the game of his life at Sunday league.
The film starts with him, in a flashforward that’s really quite a clumsy way to generate early suspense, and you are practically magnetised to the screen by how angry this man is. Hoffman makes Davian into a real world monster, a man you can fear because he is real. Then, at one point, a series of wacky mask antics allows Hoffman the opportunity to play Tom Cruise trying to play Philip Seymour Hoffman, and it is magnificent.
It’s an absolutely remarkable performance that this basic-ass character did not remotely deserve, and it elevates the movie far beyond what it should have been. God, he was a talent. Rest in peace, my guy.
Was Mission: Impossible III enough to save Tom Cruise’s career?
Ish. You’ll see. It would take some time to turn the car around after the shitshow of the past few years.
But did it help? Absolutely. Even as Mission III has faded into becoming the prologue to when the franchise really worked itself out, it kept the fire burning for just long enough to keep Cruise in the spotlight. It gave him time, and what he did with that time was pretty darn cool.
But should it all have ended here? Did Tom Cruise really deserve a second chance, after all the weird and disturbing shit he had done? Is the fact that his career and his flagship franchise continued successfully for decades more after this an indictment of our ability to absolve our favourite movie stars out of convenience? Am I part of the problem by setting up a comeback narrative here?
I mean, um. Maybe? I don’t know.
Except the bit where I’m part of the problem. That one is fair.
Next time: Are we out of the woods yet? Are we out of the woods yet? Are we out of the woods yet? Are we in the clear yet?
Good question, Taylor Swift. See you on the Eras Tour in London in, like, fucking 2025. The disrespect to the UK, man.
Sorry. Tom Cruise was not out of the woods. He was vulnerable, and in his moment of weakness, there are those who sought to take his crown. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is the story of what happened when he took that challenger and slam dunked him into next week.
when you got movies like tom cruise in them, you can't lose!
some of your best work I think