Since the genre shifted off the page and onto the realm of the silver screen, the great game of espionage has always been presented as a gentleman’s game. Most spy films revolve around boys wielding gadgets, guns, and their weaponized ideations of duty and national security. For the longest time, if a woman were present, it was as either a helpless sexualized object to be overcome like an obstacle, or won like a trophy (the earliest Bond girls are a perfect example), or they were the “honeypot,” a cinematic representation of a very real policy that forced regular women to seduce enemies of their state to gain secrets (Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious is probably the best film centered around this).
The first few films in the Mission: Impossible film franchise are like a case study of this trend. Thandie Newton’s alluring thief Nyah quite literally fills the honeypot role in M:I-2, and Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) civilian wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) is kidnapped in M:I-3 and dangled like a damsel-in-distress by Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s ruthless villain. Paula Patton’s vengeful IMF handler in M:I-4 was a step in the right direction but literally never appears again; it wouldn’t be until the fifth film, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, that we’d be introduced to a character who shattered the expectations of the female spy on-screen and became one of the best characters in the entire genre in the process.
