In 1996, as Tom Cruise was suspended upside down in the heart of the CIA headquarters in Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible , a stylish, twisty spy thriller was born. From the searing music, the gadgets and masks to the stunts and the A-list international cast that included Jon Voight, Emmanuelle Béart, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Redgrave, Jean Reno and Kristin Scott Thomas, the film was an addictive, adrenalin-fuelled ride.
A year before, on the other side of the pond, a suave super spy was rebooted with GoldenEye . Pierce Brosnan’s introduction as James Bond in the movie is also coincidentally with a dizzying bungee jump. GoldenEye came out six years after Licence to Kill . With a new Bond (Shakespearean actor Timothy Dalton resigned from the role), M (Judi Dench) and Moneypenny, the franchise looked all set to make itself relevant in a drastically-changed world.
Bits and bytes
Like other blockbusters of the time, technology has a starring role. Luther in Mission: Impossible and Boris in GoldenEye are programmers who do magic with their tip-tapping on keyboards. Brosnan played James Bond in three more films following GoldenEye — Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is Not Enough (1999) and Die Another Day (2002). The movies devolved into silliness, smarmy lines and preposterous premises.
FILE - This undated publicity file photo provided by BMW, shows Pierce Brosnan, as Bond, and Michelle Yeoh, as the Bond-girl, Wai Lin, in a scene from the James Bond 1997 movie "Tomorrow Never Dies." Who qualifies as a Bond girl has also changed over the years, as the blue-eyed, buxom blonde has given way to more diverse leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh (Tomorrow Never Dies) and Halle Berry (Die Another Day). Modern Bond girls also present a more formidable challenge to the suave secret agent. (AP Photo/BMW)
In the meantime, Agent Hunt climbed sheer cliff faces and hung suspended off some impossibly-tall buildings, while pigeons floated here and there in John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II in 2000.
Six years later, reboot king JJ Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III came out. There was the McGuffin in the form of the Rabbit’s Foot, and Cruise made for a handsome priest in the Vatican, but the movie belonged to Philip Seymour Hoffman as the arms dealer Owen Davian.
Back to the beginning
This was also the year of the most dramatic reboot of the James Bond series yet — Casino Royale . The movie went back to basics, to Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel introducing the super spy with a licence to kill. In Daniel Craig, with his coldly cruel mouth, we had a Bond as close to Fleming’s blunt instrument as possible. Craig’s Bond was also more physical (his kill in the toilet to earn the double O is particularly nasty) and he could parkour like the best of cinematic secret agents, including that amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne.
James Bond 007 (DANIEL CRAIG) at Perla De Las Dunas, Bolivia. Location: ESO Paranal, Chile
Post reboot, Bond and Hunt followed their separate trajectories. While Bond moved in luxurious settings, casinos, manic bad guys, cold-blooded violence, broken women and ruined buildings, Ethan continued to run straight and true. It is almost as if none of the uncertainties of the day touched him.
In their relationships, while Hunt stays true to his wife, Julia, though he cannot be with her, like some chaste warrior priest, Bond is the dark knight with his substance and alcohol abuse and his love and leave them attitude to women. The Bond girls, from Vesper to Agent Fields (her first name is Strawberry!), Sévérine and even M come to sticky ends. There is also that homoerotic charge running through the Bond films from the torture scene in Casino Royale to Silva’s tête-à-tête with Bond in Skyfall.
Hold your breath
Incidentally, Léa Seydoux who plays Dr Madeleine Swann, with whom Bond drives off into the sunset at the end of Spectre , plays the assassin Sabine Moreau in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011). In the movie, Hunt stops a nuclear war with brief stopovers at Dubai to climb the Burj Khalifa and an approximation of India with Anil Kapoor playing a silly maharaja -type billionaire. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) introduces the Syndicate, a network of assassins, while the stunts include running after a plane and getting yet another McGuffin from an ultra-secure facility underwater.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout running in a theatre near you continues Hunt’s run in with Solomon Lane, the rogue MI 6 agent who ran the Syndicate, which has now morphed into the Apostles — echoing Blofeld and his criminal organisation, Spectre, in the Bond movies.
After declaring he would rather slit his wrists than appear in another Bond film, Craig has been confirmed for Bond number 25 which will be out in 2019, when Craig will be 51. Cruise at 56 is still running to save the world as Hunt. While there seemed to be an attempt to pass on the baton to Jeremy Renner’s Agent Brandt in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol , with Renner missing from Mission: Impossible – Fallout , that idea seems to have been shelved.
Unlike James Bond, it is difficult to imagine anyone but Tom Cruise play Ethan Hunt. The way forward for the franchise might be to have another agent. That strategy, however, didn’t work with The Bourne Legacy (Renner again). With Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie deep in discussions on an M:I 7, we can enjoy watching Hunt accepting yet another deliriously impossible mission.
