Boy Movies #34

The Mission: Impossible issue

You’re reading Boy Movies, a newsletter that for the month of July will focus entirely on blockbusters. I have some fun stuff planned for the weeks ahead and am excited for another themed month after the record-breaking (don’t worry about what records) success of Fincher February. I hope you’re all excited as well, especially as we look ahead to the releases of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One and Barbenheimer. Thanks as always for reading and do consider a subscription if it moves you. 

I’ve been catching up on the Mission: Impossible series in preparation for the release of the seventh film, Dead Reckoning Part One. Because these movies are extremely fun, this has been an extremely fun undertaking, filled with laughs and screams and repeated utterances of the words “He looks good here!” (I am of course referring to Tom Cruise when I say “he.”) Having watched them all relatively close together, I can’t help marveling at the sheer scale of these films, and how that scale has found ways to grow and adapt through the Marvel age. Even with an increasing deployment of CGI, the draggy (girl, it’s always masks and disguises with these people…) Mission: Impossible films maintain a certain sense of old school filmmaking panache throughout. That might sound insane, but if you get it, you get it.

this is from Ghost Protocol (more like GOATocol) but 1. I love it, and 2. I guess today is July 4th

I watched 2018’s Fallout last night, finally bringing me up to speed. Now, people have been talking my goddamn ear off about this movie before I even began my M:I journey. If I expressed boredom with recent action schlock, if I made any sort of Scientology joke, if I dared utter a word against Henry Cavill (chiseled to the point of desexualization, sorry), I was met with some version of, “Okay, but have you seen Fallout?” This movie — honestly, the M:I franchise as a whole, but Fallout specifically, I’ve noticed — has a borderline cultish hold over people. And, yeah, I get it now: Fallout rocks.

Watching Fallout felt like being thrown into psychological turbo drive over and over. Fifteen minutes in, you’re hit with an elaborate ruse involving a fake hospital room and Simon Pegg in a Wolf Blitzer mask. Then there’s a glorious fight scene set in a men’s bathroom at a nightclub, and oh would you look at that: it’s Cavill reloading his biceps like they’re guns. Then there are these back-to-back chase scenes through the streets of Paris, and then there’s a reveal of Simon Pegg in yet another mask, which is almost too kooky to be remotely believable but who cares, it’s the kind of twist that’ll make a full grown adult laugh and clap like a baby observing a game of peekaboo. There’s Cruise looking nervous about jumping out of the window of an office building as if it’s the craziest thing he’s done so far. There’s a wild helicopter showdown. There’s a Cruise-Cavill fight on the edge of a cliff. There is so much of the classic Cruise run. I didn’t know how to calm down afterwards.

To my surprise, the longer the M:I franchise has gone on, the more it’s become about the power of male friendship. The fallout of Fallout happens because Ethan was unwilling to let his unfailingly loyal best bud Luther (Ving Rhames) die. Every M:I movie is obviously a boy movie, but I appreciate such soft humanity taking prevalence across the later installments. It reminds me of the softness of Top Gun: Maverick, a film about, among other things, the fraught love between an older guy and his dead best friend’s son. We as a society talk a lot about the apparent death wish Tom Cruise has (the man is definitely trying to kill himself on every movie, yes?), but there’s something else here, too — an acknowledgement of the importance of connection as one ages.

I can’t speak to what this says about Cruise as a person without engaging in speculation, but I do know, as we all know, that connecting to the film-going public is his chief concern in this life. His indefatigable commitment to entertaining, to getting butts in theater seats, has been well documented. He’ll quite literally risk his life in order to give us something to gawk at for two-ish hours. As the future of movie theaters becomes more dire, and as the general public’s general interest in movies wanes, and as Hollywood prepares for the forthcoming Mattel cinematic universe (???), I can’t act as if I don’t feel a gravitational pull toward Cruise’s mission. Maybe we’re that connection all of his characters seem so obsessed with finding — I don’t know. It’s a possibility. Perhaps something to think about as we all settle in for this month of blockbuster releases, just as Cruise wants us to. And with that, I’ll see you at the movies.

• Only slightly related, but obviously have not stopped thinking about this clip of Jeremy Strong talking about Maverick for even a moment since I saw it. Literally love him, can’t not.