Every “Mission: Impossible” movie can be boiled down to a single, central image. Tom Cruise in glasses and a black vest, hanging by wires, inches above the floor. Tom Cruise dangling from a rocky cliff ledge. Tom Cruise sticking like a gecko to the glass panels of the Burj Khalifa. Tom Cruise in some kind of spacesuit, hurtling through the air toward the camera. Tom Cruise in midair again, arms stretched backward as a motorbike falls below him, making it look all the more as if he were flying. For the newest and purportedly last installment in the series, “The Final Reckoning,” the iconography has been perfected: We see Cruise dangling from a banana-yellow biplane as it hurtles through the sky. Oh, and the plane is upside down.
In the opening minutes of “The Final Reckoning,” all of the iconic images from previous films are repeated back to us, reminding us that what we are here for is to see Tom Cruise perform breathtaking stunts. Of course, if you were in the theater, then you would have been sold on this idea already. The film’s marketing has made the sight of the upside-down biplane so familiar that before the movie had even started, I overheard a couple in the seats behind me discussing how the stunt might have been done. (“Where are the wires, you think?”)
We’re compelled to know how these stunts were done for one very simple reason: We believe that Tom Cruise really is clutching the side of a skyscraper or an upside-down plane. This is because Cruise and many, many other people have worked hard to ensure our belief that Tom Cruise does his own stunts.
‘How can we involve the audience?’
Some of this belief-bolstering work is technical and filmic: The cameras move close to Cruise and linger there, convincing us that it really is him doing the thing. But a monumental part of the effort has to do with Cruise himself, and his ability to persuade us that if we buy a ticket for his movie, we will see him create a harrowing spectacle. On one hand, we will be watching a movie about a fictional character named Ethan Hunt, whose mission seems impossible. On the other, we will be watching Tom Cruise, a movie star we have known for 40-plus years, doing the seemingly impossible.
This collapsing of character and star has become only more central to the films as the franchise goes on, sometimes sabotaging the movies’ impact, sometimes making them more interesting, sometimes both at the same time. For example, the antagonist in these final two installments is a runaway A.I. called the Entity. For a series that once had the great Philip Seymour Hoffman play a villain, evil software feels like a step down. But Ethan Hunt/Tom Cruise battling a faceless, ageless superintelligence that is able to fake practically anything? That is a rich text.
Like Hunt, Cruise has lost women he loved — maybe not to international assassins and the like, but this is what keeps happening to Hunt, in film after film. He cannot maintain relationships with women, he cannot protect them, because he has devoted himself to saving the world. Cruise has also cast himself as a kind of savior — not of the world, but of cinema. He refuses, for example, to allow the movies he stars in to make their first appearances anywhere other than inside a movie theater, and preferably on an IMAX screen. He seems dedicated to the grandeur of the old-fashioned blockbuster; a Tom Cruise film must be big, a spectacle in the oldest, most cinematic sense. I suspect that his continued interest in pulling off huge stunts has, more than anything, to do with his understanding of what we are seeking when we go out to the movies. His stunt work, and this series of movies he has made effectively built around that work, is a monument to his particular belief in the power of that act.
When we watch a movie, when it is really working on us, we are provoked into participation with it. This happens only when the film gives us some information, but not all of it. If a movie can require “the audience to complete the ideas,” the film editor Walter Murch once told an interviewer, “then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work.” One piece of information we have about Tom Cruise is that he does his own stunts. Another thing we know, as we watch these films, is that the stunts are incredible — as in, it is difficult to believe that Tom Cruise is really doing them. Yet we do believe. It’s within this gap, between our momentary disbelief and our ultimate acceptance, that the movie has pulled us in. We have been provoked into participation because we do not know just how or why Tom Cruise is doing these extremely dangerous things.
Only — what if we did know exactly how he did the thing, and why? Before the previous installment of the franchise, “Dead Reckoning,” Paramount released a nine-minute featurette titled “The Biggest Stunt in Cinema History.” It was a behind-the-scenes look at that midair-motorbike moment, tracking how Cruise and his crew pulled it off. We saw a huge ramp running off the edge of a Norwegian fjord. We heard about Cruise doing endless motocross jumps as preparation (13,000 of them, the featurette claims) and skydiving repeatedly (more than 500 dives). We saw him touching down from a jump, his parachute still airborne above him, and giving the director Christopher McQuarrie a dap and a casual “Hey, McQ.” We heard a chorus of stunt trainers telling us how fantastic Cruise is (“an amazing individual,” his base-jumping coach says). And we hear from Cruise himself, asking his driving question: “How can we involve the audience?”
The featurette was an excellent bit of Tom Cruise propaganda and a compelling look at his dedication to (or obsession with) his own mythology (or pathology). But for the movie itself, the advance release of this featurette was completely undermining. When the jump scene finally arrived, it was impossible to ignore what you already knew about it. The monumental ramp had disappeared, replaced with mossy, rocky, computer-generated cliffside; if you were aware of this trickery, your involvement was diminished. Because of the featurette, you knew too much, and could fill that vital information gap Murch spoke of. In wanting so badly to show you his extraordinary work, Cruise had diminished it.
One of Cruise’s cinema heroes is Buster Keaton. The action set piece immediately following his cliff jump, in fact, has him aboard a runaway steam train that falls off an exploding bridge, a clear homage to a famously expensive Keaton stunt from the 1926 film “The General.” Keaton, like Cruise, knew how to use that knowledge gap to involve the audience. He, too, did his own death-defying stunt work. But he did it all with a face so blank as to be entirely open to interpretation — a face that belied the effort behind the stunts, making it all seem accidental, even casual. That face is the information gap. When we watch, we are not thinking about Keaton’s effort; we are wondering what he is thinking.
Cruise has always wanted us to know that he is working very hard. But with “Final Reckoning,” he has clearly learned from past missteps. This time, there is no analogous prerelease featurette giving away the upside-down biplane stunt. Instead, at the end of the film’s trailer, he — or Hunt, or probably both — simply tells us, looking straight to camera, “I need you to trust me, one last time.” When, in the movie itself, he is at last dangling from that banana-yellow biplane, the clock, attached to a bomb, is ticking, and the fate of the world is at stake. Exactly what Tom Cruise is thinking as he dangles there, the wind blowing his cheeks back, is unknowable — which is the whole point.
Ryan Francis Bradley is a writer based in Los Angeles. He has previously written for the magazine about the Los Angeles fires, the director Ti West and the band Khruangbin.
Source photographs for illustration above: Paramount Pictures and Skydance; Paramount, via Everett Collection; Antonio Olmos/Paramount Pictures and Skydance; Christian Black/Paramount Pictures, via Everett Collection; John Phillips/Getty Images.
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