Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Paramount Pictures
When Mission: Impossible III raced into theaters in the summer of 2006, it arrived with a fireball of controversy at its back. This was, after all, the first starring role for Tom Cruise after he blew up his public image the previous year. By now, the details of how the actor’s reputation imploded are the stuff of PR-firm legend, a cautionary tale for the ages. There was the row with Matt Lauer on the Today Show, and the appearance on Oprah where he leapt on the couch to convey his supposed ardor for girlfriend (and soon-to-be fiancée) Katie Holmes—a performance that made him look more unhinged than besotted. And there were the increasingly unsavory revelations about his role in the Church of Scientology, which would continue to shift into unflattering focus in the years to come, spilling from the pages of Going Clear.
M:I III was supposed to make us forget all that. But the funny thing about the movie was how much it seemed to reflect, and even channel, the conflicts of Cruise’s very bad year. The plot, in which Cruise’s Ethan Hunt has to stop a nefarious arms dealer who’s kidnapped his wife (Michelle Monaghan), essentially collides the personal and professional lives of the hero. Back in 2006, as we watched Cruise’s secret agent sprint across rooftops to save his true love, it was hard not to think of that notorious bounce on the couch. We were seeing devotion, the power source of any wife guy, converted into pure kinetic energy.
Art imitates life fairly often in the Mission: Impossible movies. On the (glorious) surface, there’s nothing remotely personal about these finely tuned set-piece machines, which send Hunt and his team of fellow espionage experts through an escalating series of life-or-death dilemmas. Yet they remain passion projects for Cruise—and, in the control he’s exerted over the shape and direction of the series, a way for him to express himself. Parallels to his real life are as inevitable as they may be accidental; that they’re all over the latest, seventh entry in the series, Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning Part One, is a reminder of how consistently the series has operated as a shadow meditation on Cruise’s time in the spotlight.