Tom Cruise s Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible 3
Credit: Film Stills/Stephen Vaughan
“Be honest,” the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Josh Olson asked on Twitter yesterday. “Without looking it up, can you remember the name of Tom Cruise’s character in the Mission: Impossible movies?”
The answer, obviously, is Ethan Hunt – aka “the living manifestation of destiny,” as Alec Baldwin snarled in the series’s fifth instalment. Olson’s underlying point, I think, is that Ethan Hunt isn’t a distinctive name for a man whose athleticism and daring makes him one in seven billion – it doesn’t stand out from the crowd like, say, Norville Quinge. (“Quinge is the living manifestation of destiny!” “This isn’t Mission Difficult, Mr Quinge, it’s Mission Impossible!”) Yet it has always struck me as one of cinema’s great action-hero names, and its smooth simplicity might be its greatest asset.