In order to preserve his movie-star specialness, Tom Cruise decided he needed more control. It was a counterintuitive move; when Cruise was perceived as melting down during the promotion of his 2005 blockbuster War Of The Worlds, it was the increasing insularity of his Scientology-focused world that seemed like a major culprit, potentially squashing an astonishing 20-year mostly winning streak. Not long after, Cruise and producing partner Paula Wagner cut ties, and by the dawn of the 2010s, Cruise seemed to be well into self-managed crisis-management mode, sacrificing partnerships with A-list directors (or maybe flat-out alienating them) in favor of journeyman stuff like Knight And Day or Rock Of Ages. Maybe Adam Shankman movies would be the price of whatever he was demanding. But a last gasp of Cruise’s auteur-heavy era—Valkyrie, a 2008 World War II thriller from a pre-disgrace Bryan Singer—held the true key to his future. The film was written by frequent Singer collaborator Christopher McQuarrie.
McQ, as the star now calls him, eventually became Cruise’s right-hand man, the center of his brain trust. Despite his sometimes unnerving can-do attitude, Cruise did not and does not have the resources to simply write, direct, and produce all of his films himself. Yes, he could learn how to fly a helicopter for a Mission: Impossible – Fallout scene where he would then act, pilot, and also operate the camera needed to capture the acting and the piloting. But in those cases, it would help to have someone on the ground. Maybe such a person could, say, finish up the movie if the star died in a massive helicopter explosion. Well before Cruise reached the helicopter-piloting stage of his career, Christopher McQuarrie became that man.
As the antagonist in a Cruise movie might say about one of his characters, Cruise is the exception to every rule. Not even a humble pop-culture critic, far from his sphere of influence, is immune to this tendency. I’ve been writing this Together Again column on and off for nearly a decade, and in that time, I’ve stuck to the arbitrary but logical parameters set way back for the first installment: These essays explore collaborations between actors and directors who have worked together in those specific capacities on at least three movies that are not sequels to each other. Ergo, Al Pacino and Francis Ford Coppola do not qualify, because they worked on three Godfather movies, and nothing else. Milla Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson do, because they made Monster Hunter and The Three Musketeers in addition to all those Resident Evils.
By these rules, Tom Cruise shouldn’t get a Together Again at all. He’s worked with a lot of directors twice: Tony Scott, Cameron Crowe, Steven Spielberg, Edward Zwick, and Doug Liman, who could actually make it to three non-sequels in the next few years, as he’s prepping a new project with Cruise and McQuarrie. But McQuarrie is the only one who’s actually directed Cruise more than twice—and even then, directing four Mission: Impossible sequels alongside one Jack Reacher doesn’t qualify. But McQuarrie also worked on Valkyrie, Edge Of Tomorrow, The Mummy, and the Top Gun sequel as a writer and/or producer. In fact, McQuarrie has had a hand in almost everything Cruise has made for the past decade-plus. Cruise has either found his ultimate creative soulmate, or he has subsumed a promising filmmaker into his alien being.
In the earliest days of the Cruise/McQuarrie partnership, Cruise was flirting with self-conscious self-parody and, as with some other things he seems like he would be good at—being a romantic lead; not crusading against psychiatry during a promotional tour 25 years into his career—there’s something ineffably off when he does it. That’s not to say he isn’t funny in Tropic Thunder, where he disappeared under makeup to play a venal studio executive, or Knight And Day, where he parodied his crazy-guy reputation, or Rock Of Ages, where he took starry aloofness to obtuse extremes to play a debauched rock star. There’s just a kind of strenuousness about his work in all three (especially the first two) that distracts from the comedy. Ultimately, Cruise is funniest when his strenuousness is the joke, like in Jerry Maguire, not when it’s his method for pursuing the joke, like in Tropic Thunder.
McQuarrie, meanwhile, was for years known primarily as a screenwriter. He won an Oscar for only his second produced screenplay, 1995’s The Usual Suspects, and subsequently flopped with his directorial debut The Way Of The Gun. Put those two together, and you could be forgiven for assuming McQuarrie was simply the most relatively successful of the post-Tarantino wave of faux-postmodern crime-movie hotshots. Compared to the extremely screenwriterly Usual Suspects and the overwritten, well-directed Way Of The Gun, his second movie as writer-director—and first time directing Cruise—is ’90s-thriller normcore. In fact, Cruise’s actual ’90s career largely avoided anything as pedestrian-sounding as Jack Reacher, an adaptation of the popular mystery-novel series about a Hulk-sized ex-military man who drifts into various towns to crack cases and/or skulls.
Tom Cruise, notably, is more Ant-Man than Hulk, and fans protested this supposed downgrade, preferring the later TV series that more accurately cast Alan Ritchson as Reacher and had him, you know, bust through zip ties with his bare hands and stuff. Coiling up Reacher’s physical prowess into Cruise’s smaller frame, however, puts him in sync with McQuarrie’s directing style for the movie, which despite a somewhat protracted 130-minute runtime has passages of ruthless filmmaking efficiency, especially in the setup. McQuarrie gets from the central crime (a horrific shooting of five people) to a suspect’s imprisonment to Cruise’s entry in about 12 minutes flat, the first eight of which are dialogue-free. When exposition does emerge, it’s punchy and terse, with Cruise setting the tempo. No longer boasting a youthful shit-eating grin, his confidence has a little more edge to it, freed of the desire to project insouciant charm.
Make no mistake, Cruise still plays a nigh-unstoppable superman who just happens to be outfitted in Goodwill clothes. Later in the movie, McQuarrie stages a car chase where Reacher outdrives both the cops and the criminals at great length before disappearing into an unquestioningly loving crowd of strangers. While those elements would later recur in Mission: Impossible sequences with both muscular action shooting and weird messianic undertones, it’s notable how the scene uses the old car-chase auditory cliché of screeching tires to convey actual traction and resistance, and how much of it plays out through shadowy yet legible images, again short on dialogue. It’s also the only car chase in recent memory that ends with the hero quietly boarding a city bus. The very smallness that might have seemed meager to the Cruise of the ’90s here feels like McQuarrie exerting some control over his star’s image.
It was a lot to grapple with. In the first half of the 2010s, McQuarrie was navigating, in an unspoken way, any perceived toxicity surrounding Cruise’s personal relationships, particularly with women. Edge Of Tomorrow, which McQuarrie only co-wrote, but had a clear hand in throughout production, is the only movie since the early 2000s to make Cruise into a convincing romantic lead again, however fleetingly. William Cage is a classic Cruise character—the callow slickster who applies some discipline to win at life and possibly love—with the middle-aged asterisk of his self-serving slickness being his character’s only real skill (no innate abilities at pool, piloting, or bartending lurk within, waiting to redeem him). Through a Groundhog Day time loop and training under fellow time-looper Rita (Emily Blunt), he becomes a powerful warrior in a battle against invading aliens, while falling in love with a woman whose feelings toward him reset every time he dies and starts his day over.
Edge Of Tomorrow is still careful about allowing Cruise and Blunt to consummate any relationship on screen; this restraint is exercised nominally for plot logic, though it seems pretty likely that just about any other version of this story (either Cruise earlier in his career or another actor at any time) would probably add a little more to the love story. But it’s clear that William has fallen for Rita, and that all comes through in the bittersweet final shot of the film: William’s face filling with relief and happiness when he sees Rita again, despite her lack of recognition. However one-sided it may be in the moment, it’s definitely not the businesslike mutual respect and possibly deeply sublimated attraction Jack Reacher shares with a local defense attorney (Rosamund Pike). Cruise’s strange combination of magnetism and discomfort with sex was once incorporated into some of his best and most varied roles in Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, and even the ostensible rom-com Jerry Maguire. Jack Reacher reinvents it as a kind of rigorous honor code known only to the opaque, compact superhuman at its center.
It’s that warrior-monk style that most informs Cruise’s later period movies, where he mostly plays Ethan Hunt. His revival of his most beloved character in Top Gun: Maverick, yet another movie with a McQuarrie co-writing and producing credit, is the exception that proves the rule; some of the poignancy of that legacy sequel comes from how Maverick has and has not changed over time, in parallel with the actor who plays him. The spark of his romantic scenes with Jennifer Connelly are nonetheless obligatory—not to the demands of the screenplay, but our desire to see Maverick as less lonely. And watching something like The Mummy, the decision to favor Reacher over Tomorrow as a model makes sense; that movie’s attempts to make Cruise a dashing, sexy rogue fall painfully flat. (The only real sexual heat in the film comes from Sofia Boutella’s mummy, who I think we can all agree did nothing wrong.) Take a look, too, at what else Cruise was up to on screen the year Jack Reacher came out: singing “I Wanna Know What Love Is” into Rock Of Ages co-star Malin Akerman’s ass.
Maybe it gradually dawned on Cruise that he could preserve his movie-star dignity—and, for that matter, a healthy chunk of his movie-star vanity—if he didn’t give himself the opportunity to act too much like his old self. A little of that daredevil energy would help, yes, as would the general image of his superstardom—only reborn as a version of Cruise designed to inspire awe about his physical stunts, not questions about the fixations that drive him (which were publicly rebranded as a pure, borderline innocent love of the movies as a whole).
The Mission movies became a lynchpin of this strategy. On the basis of their Jack Reacher success and his contributions to the screenplay of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, McQuarrie was tapped to jump into the Mission series for fifth installment Rogue Nation. Revisited now, in light of the three additional installments the pair would make together, it feels like a finale to the original (if accidental) progression of the film series, where a new director takes over and applies their own visual style and sensibility to some potentially similar spy adventure stories. Given how modest his directing CV was before Rogue Nation, McQuarrie slots into the formula with surprising ease; Rogue Nation looks little like the four previous movies, despite sharing cinematographer Robert Elswit with Ghost Protocol. Like Reacher, it’s rich in espionage-friendly shadows in sequences like the one set at the Vienna opera house while also adding a roaring-engine bigness to the action sequences. Past Missions directed by Brian De Palma and John Woo have looked to Hitchcock for inspiration (in De Palma’s general sensibility and the second movie’s blatant Notorious thievery), and McQuarrie’s vibe is sort of a muscle-car Hitchcock, an approach that shouldn’t make any sense yet really sings here.
It’s impressive, too, that McQuarrie’s subsequent Mission movies Fallout, Dead Reckoning, and The Final Reckoning don’t closely resemble Rogue Nation, or always each other; there are even distinct visual and tonal differences between the jauntier playfulness of Dead Reckoning (more muscle-car Hitch) and the apocalyptic heaviness of its supposed companion Final Reckoning. Yet the films also start to repeat themselves more directly. Recent viewers of the Reckoning movies, where Ethan Hunt fights the Entity, may be surprised to realize the 4-D chess strategizing—the scenes where someone says lines to the effect of “Ethan, what if that’s exactly what he wants us to do?” about the central A.I. villain—begins with Rogue Nation, where it’s more specifically a heightening of past movies’ disavowal plots and spy games. (Here, the entire IMF is disbanded, yet persists on the basis of sheer will, a “good” flipside to the nefarious autonomy of the bad guys in the Syndicate.) In Rogue Nation, the velvety Alec Baldwin pronouncement that Hunt is “the living manifestation of destiny” plays delightfully tongue-in-cheek; the subsequent movies make more statements like these, and take them more seriously. It’s almost as if Cruise wasn’t in on McQuarrie’s self-referential joke and ran with what he mistook for genuine sentiment, trademark intensity never flagging after literally bringing Hunt back from the dead halfway through Rogue Nation. In the context of the movie, it’s a playful joke, albeit a grim one. Future installments, and Cruise himself, appear to regard this as more akin to Christ’s resurrection.
That makes Cruise sound like kind of a dummy, which is obviously not the case, or a monomaniac, which might be true, but isn’t a terminal condition. Glimmers of his range are a regular feature of the later-period Mission movies, often teased out by the film’s women; the way he regards Hayley Atwell’s wily pickpocket Grace in Dead Reckoning has a late-period Cary Grant mixture of charm and paternalism and his lost-love devotion to Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust shows greater-yet-simpler humanity than the larger-than-life man all those meaning-of-Hunt monologues describe. Still, the way that McQuarrie shoots these characters changes, too; there’s an old-fashioned male gaze toward Ferguson in Rogue Nation that is largely avoided in the sequels. That sounds progressive; it could also be the filmmaker surrendering to his star’s machinery—the camera is no longer his to leer with. The resulting movies are terrific fun. They’re also increasingly run-and-gun feats of strength, as if McQuarrie has entered into a never-ending Cruise training program.
If so, it’s not as if McQuarrie has betrayed some early purity. The Usual Suspects and The Way Of The Gun are pulpy balderdash, and Jack Reacher is a vacation paperback with the neo-noir teased out. Rogue Nation is Tom Cruise Saves Everyone Part Five, and it’s easily McQuarrie’s best movie as a director. McQuarrie may have been the perfect subject for Cruise to mold and motivate: talented, hardworking, and not quite visionary enough to resist his star’s hands-on approach. If his spectacular achievements in action cinema leave viewers a little murky about what precisely interests him as a filmmaker, well, he wouldn’t be the first to turn himself into a vital appendage of a world-famous star. At this point, maybe it’s more important to be the best.
