How ‘Mission: Impossible 2’ Transformed Tom Cruise From Movie Star To Action Hero

John Woo’s action blockbuster, which opened 20 years ago today, began Tom Cruise’s evolution from an actor who occasionally starred in thrillers to a full-blown action hero.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II. The John Woo-directed action thriller was a follow-up to Brian DePalma’s Mission: Impossible. That 1996 blockbuster was a then-rare merging of high-profile IP (the 1960’s TV show with the face masks and the catchy theme song) and A-level movie star (Tom Cruise). While the first film emphasized stealth, intricate plotting and evasion over confrontation, the sequel was an exercise in glorious action excess, showcasing Cruise not just engaging in action heroics but being an action star. Clad in leather jacket and shades, the floppy-haired Cruise would run, gun and motorcycle his way to victory. It would begin Tom Cruise’s evolution from an A-level actor who occasionally drove cars, flew planes or outran baddies to a full-time action hero.

At least in terms of his 80’s compatriots, Tom Cruise was a unique movie star in that he didn’t necessarily need to make an action blockbuster in order to score a big hit. His breakout role, Risky Business, was that of a do-gooder high-school student embroiled with a prostitute (Rebecca De Morney). Ironically, his only flop for decades would be Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sorcery fantasy Legend. The movie that turned him into pop culture icon was Tony Scott’s Top Gun, a fighter pilot melodrama that, despite some crowdpleasing aerial action, was more of a romantic drama between the cocky youngster and his older flight instructor (Kelly McGilliss). It would gross $176 million domestic and $357 million worldwide, becoming a definitive 1980’s blockbuster and capitulating Cruise to the A-list.

The ten years between Top Gun and Mission: Impossible are noteworthy for their relative lack of conventional action heroics. While (for example) Harrison Ford struggled as a box office draw when he wasn’t punching people, Cruise found relative success as a pool player (The Color of Money), a bartender (Cocktail), a selfish guy who discovers he has an autistic brother (Rain Man), a disillusioned Vietnam vet (Born of the Fourth of July), a race car driver (Tony Scott’s Days of Thunder), an immigrant trying to make a life in 1890’s America (Far and Away), an underachieving military lawyer (A Few Good Men), a young lawyer who realizes that his new firm is in cahoots with the mob (The Firm) and a gay vampire (Interview with the Vampire).

That those films were directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, Neill Jordan and Sydney Pollack made Cruise a role model for the generation that followed. The next generation of male movie stars, the Matt Damons and Brad Pitts of the world, would make a point to work with distinguished auteurs and would strive to be actors first and movie stars second. The closest thing to a bomb among those films were the “Top Gun with race cars” flick and the immigrant adventure flick. Even Mission: Impossible was in line with Cruise’s post-Top Gun output. There was a bare minimum of conventional action and violence (the film contains just four gunshots) and there was an esteemed auteur at the helm.

Brian DePalma’s Mission: Impossible, which was very much a Brian DePalma movie within an established franchise sandbox, earned a then-record $75 million in the first six days of release before ending its run with $181 million domestic and $457 million worldwide. But the movies that would follow between Mission: Impossible and Mission: Impossible II were even less conventional than his 1986-1995 output. He would play a sports agent who starts his own idealistic firm in Cameron Crowe’s romantic blockbuster Jerry Maguire, he would play alongside his then-wife Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut and he would take a supporting role as a hyper-masculine pick-up artist in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. As such, John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II was an even bigger departure for Cruise than the first flick.

It was a balls-to-the-walls action adventure movie, with Cruise living out his inner 9-year-old boy action fantasies as he romanced Thandie Newton’s jewel thief, matched wits with a rogue IMF agent (Dougray Scott) and saved the world from a killer virus. The film was a loose riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, one that actually held most of its big action sequences for the third act, but the sequences we got, the prologue free-climb sequence, the lab shoot-out and of course the extended motorcycle chase climax, was both impressive on a technical level and very much a change of pace for both Ethan Hunt and Tom Cruise. It would earn $215 million domestic and $546 million worldwide that summer, and it would change Cruise’s career forever.

His next picture was Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, a mind-bending fantasy melodrama (and remake of Alejandro Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes) that legged out to $100 million domestic and $203 million worldwide in late 2001. It would arguably be the last non-action movie which Tom Cruise would headline for 16 years. He would star in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi thriller Minority Report in the summer of 2002, and then Edward Zwick’s action melodrama The Last Samurai in late 2003. He would play the bad guy in Michael Mann’s Collateral in 2004 and a mediocre dad protecting his children from an alien invasion in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds in 2005. It would earn $234 million domestic and $592 million worldwide, a personal best for the actor.

That film, which has aged very well as a metaphor for the Iraqi invasion disguised as a 9/11 parable, was what Cruise was promoting when he got a little excited about his new romance with Katie Holmes during an interview on the Oprah Winfrey Show. That, coupled with some discomforting statements related to Scientology’s displeasure with psychiatry, led to a near-instant backlash to the otherwise beloved movie star. Whether the PR meltdown had an effect on J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III, released in 2006 and featuring Hunt romancing and rescuing Michelle Monaghan, I can only speculate. But the early 2006 summer flick disappointed with “just” $133 million domestic and $393 million worldwide on a $160 million budget. Cruise still made money off the film, but Paramount did not.

The 2005 “couch-jumping” (to be fair, he never actually jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch) and the 2006 disappointment of Mission: Impossible III led to what is a “Is Tom Cruise still a movie star?” debate that continues to this day. Moreover, whether because Cruise enjoys his newfound role as the American Jackie Chan or because he is trying to maintain the notion that he is a huge box office draw and is thus making films that stereotypically make bank around the world, his post-2008 output (following a supporting role as a scary conservative senator in Robert Redford’s underrated Lions for Lambs in 2007 and a self-mocking extended cameo in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder) has been almost exclusively action hero fantasies where Cruise is essentially “Mr. Awesome.”

He tried to kill Hitler in Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie in late 2008, and he co-stared with Cameron Diaz as a comedically over-the-top action hero in James Mangold’s “007 movie from the point of view of the Bond Girl” action comedy Knight & Day in 2010. His stardom retained some of its shine with Brad Bird’s superb Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol in late 2011, as the stunt-filled (and comparatively violence-lite) action spectacular legged out to $209 million domestic from a $13.5 million IMAX-only opening and $692 million worldwide. This film slightly altered Ethan Hunt so that he was an action bad-ass who occasionally screwed up, had to improvise and was scared sh**less jumping out that window. Hunt became relatable, and thus Cruise was (again) too.

He had a supporting role as a rock star in the jukebox musical flop Rock of Ages, in June of 2012. He starred as a former military cop in Christopher McQuarrie’s top-notch Jack Reacher. It would overcome pre-release skepticism (Lee Childs’ novels imply a character looking more like Dwayne Johnson) and earn $218 million on a $60 million budget. Edward Zwick’s inferior Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, would gross just $162 million on a $96 million budget in late 2016. Cruise would star in Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion ($286 million on a $120 million budget) in 2013 and Doug Liman’s acclaimed Edge of Tomorrow ($375 million, but on a $175 million budget) in 2014, while headlining Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation ($682 million) in 2015 and Mission: Impossible – Fallout ($792 million) in 2018.

The Mummy was intended to launch a “Dark Universe” of action/fantasy/horror flicks based on Universal’s classic monsters. Alas, the film put the cart before the horse and frankly wasn’t very good. Heck, it’s probably Cruise’s worst big-budget starring vehicle and thus even a $408 million global gross (just $81 million domestic) on a $125 million meant the Dark Universe was DOA. The film had its problems, but it stood out as Cruise attempting to retain his stardom by appearing in a stereotypically successful movie (ditto Universal making a movie that felt like an attempt to mimic Disney or Warner Bros. blockbusters). That said, 2017 ended with Doug Liman’s American Made, a comedic drama about the Iran/Contra scandal which represented Tom Cruise’s first non-action starring vehicle since Vanilla Sky.

It was a modest hit ($135 million on a $50 million budget), but it represented both exactly the kind of movie that once made Cruise an A-list draw and exactly the kind of movie which he no longer makes. That it opened concurrently worldwide (in certain markets) with Jackie Chan’s The Foreigner (a more serious and grimmer political thriller, courtesy of Martin Campbell and co-starring Pierce Brosnan) than expected from the action icon) marked a skewed irony. Coronavirus delays notwithstanding, it is a cruel irony that this year will feature Tom Cruise in Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick. It’ll arrive 34 years after the Tony Scott blockbuster, but 20 years after the John Woo adventure that began Cruise’s evolution from all-purposes movie star to full-time action hero.

Mission: Impossible II with its kamikaze motorcycle stunts, impossibly cool (and hot) heroes and villains and gloriously romantic (in a literary sense) big-screen moviemaking, was the first time Tom Cruise had starred as a stereotypical action hero in a stereotypical action movie. It was also the last time a real-world, star-driven action flick would be expected to dominate the summer movie season. Fantasies about wizards, superheroes, supernatural pirates and robots would soon dominate the landscape as IP and marquee characters would become more important than actors and actresses. That’s why Tom Cruise AS Ethan Hunt IN the latest Mission: Impossible sequel is still a top-tier attraction. Save for the exceedingly rare likes of Vanilla Sky or American Made, Tom Cruise has become a full-fledged action hero.

In 2020, old-school stardom is essentially impossible. We might despair the notion of Tom Cruise making only action/sci-fi fantasies, but the likes of A Few Good Men or Jerry Maguire would never break out theatrically in today’s IMAX-friendly theatrical environment. To be fair, Cruise’s “I can make a hit out of almost anything” run from 1986 to 2005 was rare even back in the glory days of wide release studio programmers. He stood alongside, offhand, Leonardo DiCaprio, Will Smith and Sandra Bullock in their prime, as butts-in-the-seats draws who could get audiences to show up for comedies, dramas, action movies, toons and melodramas. 20 years after Mission: Impossible II qualified as a jolting change of pace, it has become, in hindsight, the prototypical Tom Cruise starring vehicle.

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