It’s strange to look back on now, considering the image he has chosen to project into the world for the last two decades or so, but it’s true: Tom Cruise used to specialize in playing jerks. Not unlikable jerks, and certainly not losers, but definitely guys who rode their extreme cockiness a bit too close to the sun. He did it time and time again. Because this was the 1980s and the early ’90s, when being a jerk was kind of in fashion, he was able to become the biggest movie star in the world doing it.
Usually, the Cruise Jerk would find redemption and true heroism by the end of the movie. Maverick in Top Gun is the cartoon version of this, while Charlie Babbitt in Rain Man is the more nuanced read. In the early days, in more cynically minded pictures, he would sometimes double down on his jerkdom (The Color of Money) or the movie would sort of shrug its shoulders at it (Risky Business). Later, there were cunning twists on the theme. In A Few Good Men, Cruise’s buttoned-up, whiter-than-white moral certainty is actually what makes him a jerk. Meanwhile, Jerry Maguire‘s endearing premise is: What if known jerk Tom Cruise stopped being a jerk at the start of the movie, but everyone else took a while to catch up?
This is where Cruise was when he starred in the first Mission: Impossible and originated the role of Ethan Hunt. This Ethan hunt is unrecognizable as the self-negating, Christlike superhero of the latter films. Look at him jerking it up all over the place, with his spiky ’90s hair, his leather jacket over an unforgivable V-neck shirt, his wicked grin, his cocksure quips, his taunting close-up magic routines. Cruise also looks astonishingly young for someone who, at that point, had been a megastar for a full decade. He is firmly still in his Jerk Era.
Photo: Paramount Pictures via Everett Collection
Truthfully, the character doesn’t change that much over the course of the film. But by virtue of the situations it put him in, Mission: Impossible indelibly rewrote the mythologies of both Ethan Hunt and Tom Cruise, which have been inextricable ever since. This is when the seed was planted for the Jerk to become the Savior. And it all happens in the first 30 minutes.
In this stretch we’re introduced to Hunt as the point man for an Impossible Mission Force team that also includes several other actors who were then very famous: Jon Voight, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emilio Estevez, Emanuelle Béart. By the end of the half-hour, which is a masterclass in suspense by director Brian De Palma, they are all dead (or appear to be), and Cruise’s Hunt is framed as the traitor who killed them all.
It’s just a textbook sequence. The script hits all its marks, elegantly introducing characters and Mission: Impossible staples like disguises and gadgets while spinning the plates of the plot and hiding the ball on the twist. De Palma moves through the atmospheric night shoot on location in Prague with his usual punchy visual grammar, making cunning use of first-person to bring the audience into the story while obfuscating key details. And Cruise brings his legendary intensity to a beautifully staged climactic scene in a restaurant in which he faces IMF director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) after his entire team has been wiped out.
Photo: Paramount Pictures via Everett Collection
This was a genuinely shocking twist at the time for a movie that had appeared to be setting up a new franchise with Cruise heading a luxury all-star cast. Mission: Impossible leaves Hunt more or less alone, betrayed by everyone except Ving Rhames’ expert hacker Luther Stickell. Gradually, the franchise would build a team back up around him, including Rhames, Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn, and Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust. But the more people that surrounded him, the lonelier he would be. After some ill-advised romantic plots in Mission: Impossible 2 and 3, the series’ producers (Cruise among them) and screenwriters settled on a formula: Hunt must begin and end every movie on his own, a lone figure who emerges from the shadows to save the day, and then selflessly recedes into them.
This change in character dynamic isn’t explicit in Mission: Impossible. In fact, the movie’s plot is driven by personal stakes: Hunt’s desire to clear his name and get revenge against the real IMF traitor. There’s no world-ending threat here, just convoluted wrangling over a computer file that lists a bunch of CIA assets. It’s one of the ways De Palma’s film is starkly different from the series it spawned. Though it has memorable set pieces, including Hunt’s unforgettable heist of the files from CIA headquarters, it’s much more of a spy thriller than a stunt spectacular, and its tone is more smartly cynical than dizzyingly urgent.
Photo: Paramount Pictures via Everett Collection
But symbolically, Mission: Impossible set Cruise up perfectly to reshape his image, and Hunt, as jerky as his beginnings were, was the perfect vehicle for him to do it. After the unseemly emotional mess of Eyes Wide Shut, his divorce from Nicole Kidman, and his eerie mania on Oprah’s sofa, Cruise found it necessary to recede from the human plane, like Hunt at the end of a movie. And irretrievable loss of the people around him in Mission: Impossible‘s first 30 minutes was the perfect narrative frame for that.
For Hunt, and for Cruise, there would be no undoing the tragedy and the treachery of those 30 minutes for the next 30 years. The jerk seeking redemption had become the lonely exceptionalist, a guy who loves his friends but can never let them come too close. He is just too special, and it is just too dangerous. He must bear the burden of saving us all on his own.
Mission: Impossible is streaming now on Paramount Plus.
