There are many things wrong with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One: its ridiculous storyline about AI, its bloated runtime, the plot holes as wide as Tom Cruise’s gleaming megawatt smile, but the most jarring of all? How Pom Klementieff’s supporting role as Paris, a savage assassin, is transformed into the tired stereotype of the silent Asian, who is largely mute throughout the film.
Paris is part of villain Gabriel’s (Esai Morales) crew. She’s on screen for many of the fights and action sequences including a thrilling car chase through the streets of Rome. All kamikaze glee and thigh-crushing aggression, she’s more than capable of giving Cruise’s Impossible Mission Force agent, Ethan Hunt, a run for his money. But the French actor, who is half Korean, barely utters a word throughout the whole thing.
Admittedly, no one comes to a Mission: Impossible film for the dialogue. They come for spectacular set pieces and death-defying stunts performed by Cruise in breathtaking locations – and on those fronts it certainly delivers. But joining those segments together are multiple scenes featuring reputable actors trying to keep a straight face while saying the words “key”, “open”, and “the entity” over and over again in various formations, as the story unfolds about a supersized ChatGPT going rogue.
Despite this, it seems the writers couldn’t spare many of those lines for poor Klementieff. Her most expansive moment comes when she says: “See you soon,” in French, until the very end of the film when she strings together a few more sentences to impart some Extremely Important Information to Hunt. Which makes it even more bizarre that she was so silent before that.
She’s even asked a direct question at one point by Denlinger (Cary Elwes), director of National Intelligence. Does she reply? Does she heck! No, she responds in the language she knows best - full-on violence, pulverising any bodies that happen to be in her way.
After all the fine work done by Asian-led films such as Everything Everywhere All at Once, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Crazy Rich Asians in blitzing Hollywood free from its crusty old stereotypes, I had hoped that the trope of the silent Asian was on its way out. Instead it remains stubbornly persistent.
You don’t have to look too far in the past to see how it has permeated western films and TV. Take Hana Mae Lee in the Pitch Perfect films. The Korean American actor plays Lilly Onakuramara, a painfully shy student who speaks in a barely audible whisper for most of the three comedy films. Sonoya Mizuno, a British actor of Japanese, English, and Argentinian descent, gets to boogie on down with co-star Oscar Isaac in the cerebral sci-fi thriller Ex Machina, but says nothing as Kyoko, a mute, sexy robot.
Similarly, Japanese star Rinko Kikuchi is a spark of joy in the comedy caper The Brothers Bloom as Bang Bang, one of the film’s main characters, but only says a few words. The message to Asian actors is clear; you can be part of our film, a major part even, just don’t expect to actually say anything substantial.
Actor Jimmy Wong, who starred as Ling in Disney’s live-action adaptation of Mulan, called out the trope, posting a tweet with pictures of mute superhero Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) in The Boys and Ben (Justin H Min), the ghost in The Umbrella Academy. “Least favourite acting thing I’ve noticed during pandemic binge watching: incredibly sexy and good looking Asian actors playing characters with barely ANY dialogue because it’s supposed to be … mysterious?”
The silent Asian stereotype taps into the myth that Asians, particularly Asian women, are meek and submissive. Paris, of course, is the opposite of meek and submissive – you can tell that just by her Harley Quinn-esque makeup, her white face powder made up, no doubt, by the ground bones of her long dead enemies. She joins the ranks of Hollywood’s other largely silent Asian assassins, including Devon Aoki’s Miho in Sin City and Bai Ling’s Mysterious Woman in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – powerful women who are only allowed to lacerate with their fists rather than their verbal wit.
Klementieff’s character points to the franchise’s at times questionable treatment of women. Who can forget Thandiwe Newton’s Nyah in the second instalment? Despite her professional capabilities as an accomplished thief, it’s made clear she’s only recruited by Hunt to seduce her ex, a rogue agent (Dougray Scott). “She’s got no training for this kind of thing,” Hunt complains to his mission commander (Anthony Hopkins). He replies odiously: “To go to bed with a man and lie to him? She’s a woman, she’s got all the training she needs.”
Don’t get me wrong, there have been some great female characters over the years, most notably Vanessa Redgrave’s Max, a cunning and manipulative arms dealer, in the first film. But many of these women disappeared after a single outing, never to be seen again including IMF agents Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), Jane (Paula Patton) and Zhen (Maggie Q).
Hunt’s wife Julia, played by Michelle Monaghan, did make reappearances in Ghost Protocol and Fallout after starring in the third film. But in the Mission: Impossible world, women, it seems, are largely disposable, unlike Hunt’s constant companions Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames).
It’s only in the most recent films that we’ve seen other recurring parts for Vanessa Kirby’s mysterious broker Alanna Mitsopolis, AKA the White Widow, and Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust, the MI6 operative, who can match Hunt punch for punch.
Paris will presumably be returning too for Dead Reckoning Part Two, although her fate is left hanging as precariously as Hunt on a motorbike teetering by a cliff’s edge. Will she survive to talk more in the second half? We will find out in 2024. Until then, Hollywood, this is your reminder – please unmute Asian actors, it’s really not such an impossible task.
• This article was amended on 17 July 2023 to correct the caption information on the second photograph. It shows Michelle Yeoh with Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan, not with Jenny Slate and James Hong as an earlier version said. It was further amended on 18 July 2023 to clarify that Michelle Monaghan has appeared in three films in the series, not two.
