At Wednesday night’s Cannes Film Festival premiere of “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” the film’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, shared a story with the audience about his imaginative childhood, then clasped a hand on the shoulder of his star, Tom Cruise.
“I got to grow up and have my very own action figure,” McQuarrie said.
With his deep tan, blinding smile and He-Man haircut, Cruise surely looked the part of a kid’s favorite toy. Certainly, Cannes has proved ever eager to play with him: Even in recent years, when Cruise has moved away from auteur-driven dramas to focus almost exclusively on action films, the festival continues to find new reasons to welcome him back.
Three years ago, Cannes honored Cruise with a fighter-jet flyover for the premiere of “Top Gun: Maverick,” where he sat with an obsequious moderator for a 90-minute talk about his devotion to big-screen filmmaking. This time, Cruise’s presence was more subdued. Instead of a solo spotlight, he made a surprise appearance at the end of McQuarrie’s panel, and while major studios often hold lavish parties at Cannes, Paramount staged no such celebration for what’s been billed as the final chapter of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise.
(Perhaps the movie’s rumored mega-budget of around $400 million played a part in the studio’s penny-pinching.)
The “Final Reckoning” premiere had to stand on its own, then, and Cruise ensured that it would. At two hours and forty-five minutes, the film already dwarfed every Cannes title in competition for the Palme d’Or (though the movie, which opens May 23 in the United States, isn’t in the running for the prize). Cruise further goosed the experience beforehand by signing autographs outside the Palais, where the festival is held, for fans who offered him hand-drawn portraits and beckoned him in for selfies. Even on the red carpet, even as the film’s sprawling cast gathered for a group photo, most photographers kept their cameras focused solely on Cruise.
The 62-year-old actor mostly let McQuarrie do the talking at the premiere, though the way he has conceived “The Final Reckoning” still spoke volumes. At times, the movie almost seems like a meta-treatise on Cruise’s still-potent star power.
Perhaps because he was told so often that the billion-dollar gross of “Top Gun: Maverick” saved movie theaters, the messaging in the new film feels messianic: Over and over, Cruise’s rogue agent, Ethan Hunt, is reminded that he is the only man in the world powerful enough to bat back a technological calamity. (In the film, that danger is a rogue A.I., but in the real world, it could just as easily be the streaming platforms Cruise is famously wary of.)
As Hunt demands total trust and an exorbitant expense account to complete his mission, you can imagine Cruise making that same case to wary Paramount executives. And when he doffs his shirt in four separate sequences — even performing two crucial action scenes in tiny boxer briefs — it’s clearly meant to demonstrate that even in the era of buff superhero bodies, Cruise remains competitive.
Will this truly be the final reckoning for his three-decade franchise? The eighth installment in the series certainly has the feeling of a finale, but it’s unclear whether Cruise would willingly step aside at a time when new action superstars are in short supply. As long as Cannes keeps bolstering him and few new contenders emerge for his crown, Cruise may see it as his mission to stick around.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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