Cruise Blues
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Cruise Blues Does M:I:III signal the end of the franchise? by JOHN PODHORETZ There's a moment late in Mission: Impossible III in which Tom Cruise runs like hell down a crowded riverside street in...
...All that intensity is in the service of nothing...
...You prefer him in two dimensions rather than three...
...Aside from that boo-boo, Abrams and co-writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci do a decent job of trying to add twists and layers to this car-toonish action-adventure franchise...
...Why does this accomplished performer, who has held the attention of America and the world for almost a quarter century, now seem more a simulacrum than an actual human being...
...But something has gone very wrong with Tom Cruise, and it's not just because the box-office numbers are disappointing that Mission: Impossible III is such a calamity for him...
...Mission: Impossibles...
...Cruise has become profoundly uninteresting, and that is the worst possible thing for a movie star to be...
...Why, then, as the camera tracks Cruise—and it is the real Cruise who is hurtling along, not a stunt double, down an actual Shanghai street—does he begins to look less like an actual person and more like a figure in an X-Box video game...
...They keep something in reserve, which is one of the reasons we find it tolerable to watch them...
...And if you don't want to think about a movie star, you don't want to watch him, either...
...He's the Pete Rose of actors...
...And Cruise isn't just running...
...If they were as raw and emotionally exposed as, say, a great stage actor, it might be intolerable to watch them...
...The problem is that the person climbing is clearly not Cruise, but the Oscar-winning Hoffman himself, because Hoffman has about six inches and 30 lbs...
...There have been news stories a-plenty about how the movie's disappointing box office is due to Cruise's very weird behavior over the past year —attacking women with post-partum depression for taking medication, jumping around like a chimpanzee on Oprah Winfrey's couch to profess his love for girlfriend Katie Holmes, buying his own sono-gram machine so he and Katie could watch their unborn child grow, saying he might eat some of the placenta, and using his fame to begin preaching the tenets of his cult faith, Scientology...
...Ethan Hunt, the secret agent played by Cruise, has located his missing wife and is trying to get to her before the villains decide to take her life...
...The effort to humanize Mission: Impossible III centers primarily on Cruise's character, and Cruise acts his heart out...
...Unlike most movie stars, Cruise doesn't underplay...
...He has flattened out, gone two-dimensional...
...All great movie stars have one thing in common: There's something mysterious about them, which is one of the reasons they are often most eloquent when they are silent...
...That may be true, but it can't explain Cruise's dispiriting flatness in Mission: Impossible III...
...It's an exciting bit of footage because the location is so beautiful and unusual, wonderfully well-used by director J.J...
...The general presumption is that Cruise's conduct has been offensive to the public and has turned audiences, mainly female audiences, against him...
...He is in extremis in one way or another for most of the film's two-hour running time...
...I have no memory of the plotline of either of the earlier John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD's movie critic and the author of Can She Be Stopped...
...on Cruise...
...Yes, the machine that explains the assignments still self-destructs after five seconds, just as it did in the original television series 40 years ago...
...What Cruise destroyed through his real-life antics was the distance that stars must maintain from their audiences if they are to remain objects of fascination...
...After all, they come at us as these colossal, larger-than-life images on a screen that projects them at five to ten times normal size...
...by JOHN PODHORETZ There's a moment late in Mission: Impossible III in which Tom Cruise runs like hell down a crowded riverside street in Shanghai...
...He cries on cue, he is wounded, he mourns, he rages...
...It's not an accident that as Cruise has chosen to emerge from two decades of carefully handled personal obscurity to reveal himself as a full-bore eccentric in real life, he has lost the capacity to dazzle on-screen...
...All I remember is the mask-yanking...
...The earlier Mission: Impossibles are best remembered for scenes featuring some obscure performer or other reaching down under his chin and giving it a good yank to reveal that, in fact, the obscure performer is really Cruise or one of his co-stars wearing a mask...
...The mask bit reappears in Mission: Impossible III in an unfortunate way, when Cruise dons a Philip Seymour Hoffman mask and then starts climbing up through the catacombs under the Vatican (don't ask...
...He's sheer desperation in motion...
...For the past 23 years, every time he's up, he gives it his all...
...There's no point in speculating about Tom Cruise any longer...
...A person who announces he would like to eat some of his baby's placenta is probably someone you would rather not spend a lot of time thinking about or talking about...
...Mission: Impossible III tries to bring the continuing story of Ethan Hunt and his Impossible Missions Force down to human scale, a filmmaking choice that marks a welcome change from its predecessors...
...He's always brought uncommon intensity to his work, whether he's playing a bartender with dreams of glory in the unimaginably bad Cocktail or a sexual self-help guru in the interminable Magnolia...
...Abrams...
Vol. 11 • May 2006 • No. 34
