The year is 2006, and three gigantic franchises are all releasing new movies with drastically different expectations.
Daniel Craig has just taken on the mantle of James Bond in Casino Royale, a gruff and “realistic” updated version of the classic British spy. Craig is asked in the movie if he wants his martini shaken or stirred, and he surprises us by responding “Does it look like I give a damn?” It was a new Bond, an electric charge in the franchise that would briefly push 007 to the forefront of a new wave of gritty post-Jason Bourne action hero.
The same energy had just been reignited in Mission: Impossible, with Tom Cruise binging the tv show Alias and personally lobbying for its creator J.J. Abrams to direct M:I III in hopes of making the series fun and cool again. Abrams did more than just that, he made Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt a real person, with a real life (and wife), and in a masterful performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman, gave him a real bad guy trying to take that all away. Bond and Hunt were both spies, sure, but you would never get them confused. You’d find one flirting at a high stakes poker table, and the other sneaking around the freaking Vatican wearing a latex copy of someone else’s face. These new Craig Bond movies seemed to be above ridiculous action, while Abrams was pushing Mission:Impossible to embrace it completely. They were still occupying pretty different spaces.
And then there was the Fast and the Furious franchise, dying on the vine with a third entry that was one step away from being straight to DVD. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift did not have any of the charismatic star power that made the first film a surprisingly enjoyable riff of Point Break with street racing. At this point the films were almost exclusively about who can soup up their car the most, and who can still win a race with just their pride of being from the streets. It would have been a real stretch twelve years ago to say that these three franchises would soon end up being merely tonal shifts of the same plot: elite secret teams of indestructible people in fast cars traveling the world in search of the latest technological McGuffin before the “this time it’s personal” bad guy could get their hands on it and exact his revenge.
Now all three franchises seem to be involved in an escalating game of “can you top this action sequence,” thrilling fans with individual set pieces while leaving a trail of completely unmemorable plots in their wake. You always enjoy seeing Bond or Ethan or Dom chase down a bad guy, but rarely do you remember why that chase needed to happen in the first place.
To really illustrate how similar they are now, think about this: if you were asked to guess which franchise ends up in space first (disregarding the fact that Bond technically already went in a past life in 1979’s Moonraker), it is not an easy answer. Somehow Fast & Furious would probably be the smart bet at this point! But you can definitely picture all three figuring out a plot that required its characters to fix a satellite or board a space station (and Tom Cruise would no doubt demand to actually film it on the moon, continuing his fetishistic obsession with doing his own stunts to honor Xenu).
How did this happen? Let’s take a look at how each franchise got into this “space race,” and if there’s anything left still separating them from each other.
Daniel Craig’s Bond
For the purposes of this comparison, we’ll only be looking at the four Craig Bond movies. Craig’s Bond has been reset to the beginning of his career, as he is just getting his “license to kill.” But he is still the gold standard that the other two franchises are constantly trying to evoke with lavish set pieces in exotic locales.
When you think of the plot of a James Bond movie, you know a number of things are certain. He’ll have to travel all over the world as he tries to figure out who he can trust in pursuit of the bad guy (who will most likely have some sort of bizarre physical attribute). He’ll attend some sort of fancy event all dressed up, order a martini and follow somebody to learn who they’re working for or with. There will be at least one beautiful woman to seduce/save/ultimately doom, and he’ll get to use some fancy new gadgets provided to him by Q. And there always has to be a car chase.
For all the exciting moments in a Craig Bond movie, the plots of the first two movies were surprisingly dull. Take Casino Royale for example. You might remember he had entered a poker game, but probably not because he was trying to stop a terrorist financier from recouping the money he lost betting on the bankruptcy of an aviation company. Or Quantum of Solace, where Bond ultimately uncovers a plot to control all the water in Bolivia. The stakes were relatively low, Bond was only taking on shadowy power players trying to make more money. It was a job for James Bond precisely because the mission was in the shadows.
But by the time Skyfall rolled around in 2012, though, the effects of Cristopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight reverberated through every action movie. Trying to keep up with the excitement, Bond was coming back from the dead, Javier Bardem was obsessed with revenge, and getting caught on purpose to initiate his master plan. Craig’s Bond movies always had moments of extreme action in them, but now the plots were being streamlined into high concept adventures to give audiences what they wanted .
The most obvious thing that sets Bond apart (besides him being British) is that he’s very much alone. He has a boss in M, he has ill-fated coworkers and contacts in the CIA, and whatever love interest is involved the current problem, but he seems forever doomed to be truly alone. He was burned at the end of Casino Royale after trying to give it all up for love, and now he seems to only live for the next mission. Dom and Ethan Hunt hope to give up the dangerous life and just spend time with the ones they love, but Bond doesn’t have that option. He has obvious chemistry with Moneypenny, but we all know it would never last long if they tried.
Mission: Impossible
Ethan Hunt, Bond’s American counterpart, was not a character in the original television series the franchise is based on. He was created for the movies, and him and Tom Cruise are one and the same at this point. Each movie seems to mostly exist as a convoluted vehicle to provide Cruise an opportunity to do a crazy action stunt. As the years go on, it becomes clearer and clearer that this will be the role Cruise is remembered for most. If Mission: Impossible is know for one thing, it’s the action sequences and stunts.
Some of the original cast of the show hated the first movie (and assumedly everything since). Martin Landau was quoted as saying it was “basically an action adventure…(while the tv show) was a mind game.” Tom Cruise was jumping off of helicopters and repelling into secure rooms. He was still sneaking into places instead of blowing up the front door, but the action definitely jumped to another level from the 60s tv show. Hunt seems to always need to gain access to absurdly secure facilities himself, by having to hold his breath or free climb all while not dropping a bead of sweat, while Bond would just sleep with the wife of the man who has the key.
While Bond’s most unique feature is that he travels solo, Mission:Impossible always seems to force Ethan Hunt to figure out who he can actually trust within his own agency. Someone sending him on the mission has ulterior motives, and one of his bosses always seems to end up double crossing him in the third act. As Henry Cavill muses in the trailer for the latest movie Fallout, due in July of this year, “How many times has Hunt’s government betrayed him, disavowed him, cast him aside? How long before a man like that has had enough?” (we, of course, know that Ethan Hunt, like 007 and even Dom, will always end up doing the right thing).
And yet, as the movies have gone on, Ethan has also assembled a team of people that he does consider trustworthy. He is given a team of fellow operatives, each with a specific expertise, and he considers it a failed mission if any of them don’t come back. Counting Fallout, Ving Rhames has been in all six films with Cruise, while Simon Pegg has been in the last four since Abrams involvement and Michelle Monaghan will make her third appearance. If there wasn’t some secretive list of every active spy being constantly leaked, you could easily picture Hunt barbecuing in his backyard, having Coronas with his version of familia.
The Fast & the Furious
You would never mistake Dom Torreto for a spy. While rarely successful, Bond and Hunt are usually tasked with accomplishing their entire mission without even being noticed. Dom does not roll like that, nor is he expected to. He wants people to know not to mess with him and the familia, and this rampaging demand can be parlayed into happening to save the world, too. He is at his core nothing but a “humble” street racer obsessed with his friends and family. But somehow Fast & Furious transformed him and his crew into a group that were comfortable taking on secret missions from secret government agencies.
The Fourth Film, “Fast and Furious” set everything in motion by elevating Dom and the crew into international fame. They go from the harmless crime of hijacking fuel trucks to being forced into drug running, and ultimately have to all break Dom free from heading to prison. But Fast Five is really the movie that really allows Dom to occupy even remotely the same space as Bond and Hunt. This all works by introducing The Rock’s character, an elite American soldier who is tasked with tracking down Dom’s crew all over the world and bringing them to justice. By the end of Five, The Rock respects them, and the table is set for him to actually ask them to help in the future.
That gets us to Furious 7, where Dom and the crew are trying to recover God’s Eye, a powerful surveillance program that Bond or Hunt would both love to recover themselves if given the chance in their own films. The change in each Furious movie is subtle, slowly progressing each street racer into special ops superheroes. Somehow Ludacris improbably transforms into one of the worlds best hackers, when he was introduced back in the second movie as nothing more than a guy who occasionally hosted street races. Dom and Brian and Letty are all now comfortable jumping out of moving vehicles, engaging trained assassins in hand to hand combat.
And now that this crew is traveling all over the world and saving the day, they need to look cool doing it (no doubt due to a request by Vin Diesel himself). Fancier cars and clothes become a necessary part of the story, and James Bond is the obvious inspiration behind this desire. But fans of this series don’t see themselves in James Bond or Ethan Hunt. Part of the appeal here is seeing Dom and the crew rising from rags to riches, going from being chased by the government to begged by them to help out.
It used to be that different movie plots would call for the differing expertise of these franchises: the suave emotionless precision of Bond, the fearless calm calculations of Hunt, or the raw muscle badassery of Dom. But now all of them can race any car, jump onto any train, and track down any missing briefcase you need returned. And the way things are going, they will all set foot on the moon soon enough. Is this a good thing? I’m not sure. But I’m still going to see all of them.
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