Some years ago I went to Arles for the annual photography festival and discovered that, on Saturday nights, the local bullfighting school put on a show in the Roman amphitheatre. I paid my ten euros and watched three young matadors in training kill their bulls while the locals treated this like a high school football game, making notes in little books, placing bets and discussing the fighters’ reputations with their friends. The fourth fighter started well but made an error – I don’t know what because I was too busy stopping myself from screaming – and ended up getting trampled. I watched a bull step on a man’s head and the audience around me reacted by booing. They booed!
After the assistants got the bull away this student got up, threw away his torn jacket, slapped himself in the face and started again. With a welt the size of the shod foot of a bull rising on the side of his head, he proceeded to kill the bull so expertly that by the time it was down the crowd was giving him a standing ovation. He did so well that one of the teachers came into the ring, cut off the bull’s ears and presented them to him, an unusual acknowledgement of an especially good kill. The butchers in their bloodstained aprons used their horse-cart to drag the bull’s body away, and I watched the final two students make their kills with new eyes. I knew how dangerous bullfighting was, of course I knew, but until then I had not really understood. The earlier students were so good that they made it look easy, that their opponent in the ring wasn’t an angry animal weighing a ton and they were risking their lives just by getting close to it. The appeal of the bullfights suddenly made sense to me (as did why all the restaurants nearby served a whole lot of steak).
This latest, perhaps final, instalment of the Mission: Impossible series of movies suffers from this bullfighter’s problem. The stunts involved are so psychotically dangerous and made to look so easy that it’s very easy to forget just how much of a goddamn risk Tom Cruise is taking every time he pushes himself this far. As part of the promotion he joined the special talk given at the Cannes Film Festival by director Christopher McQuarrie, with whom he has now made eleven films. As they finished each other’s sentences I realised that these stunts in these movies are only possible because the star and the director trust each other implicitly. Mr. Cruise really is the only true major global movie star right now – can you imagine anyone else being allowed use of an aircraft carrier like this? Even the movie stars in India can only get cargo ships! But only Mr. Cruise is committed to this level of real-life stuntwork onscreen, only Mr. Cruise is who he is, and only Mr. McQuarrie can put the framework in place around him to make all of this insanity possible. So the greatest mistake Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning makes is forgetting that we cannot appreciate just how much hard work it takes to make things look this easy. None of the rest of us are bullfighters too. And because this movie is so supremely well made, we risk being an audience so jaded by all the expertise on display that we could boo a man on the brink of death.
Other critics have complained that the screenplay, written by Mr. McQuarrie and Eric Jendresen, is too basic. The movie is already over two and a half hours long; if some friendly chitchat had been added we’d never leave the cinema. But the trouble with the screenplay is not its focus on exposition but that it suffers from the comic book cinematic universe problem. All the previous movies in the series are no longer stand-alone adventures, meant to bump along like summer reruns. Now all the previous Mission: Impossible films, going all the way back to the Brian De Palma version from 1996, have been retconned to turn everything into interconnected lore. This means that all the concern about the sentient AI called the Entity, which has taken over cyberspace in order to gain international nuclear launch codes and wipe out all of humanity, is equal in importance to showing how everyone is related to various people from the previous movies. Though in the face of global annihilation, everybody, like it or not, has to work together. The only way to stop the Entity involves sticking together two goobers: one created by Luther (an underused Ving Rhames) which is on a pendant around the neck of the very evil Gabriel (Esai Morales having a wonderful time), and the other hidden in the Russian submarine that sank at the start of 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning.
So naturally Ethan (Mr. Cruise) must convince the president (Angela Bassett) to let him catch a ride from an American submarine which will drop him off for a spot of underwater retrieval in the middle of the Bering Sea. And then naturally the team, which also includes loyal sidekick Benji (Simon Pegg), fashionable assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), new gunman Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) and expert pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), will end up in an off-the-grid underground South African server farm while the stunt sequence spoiled by the movie’s posters takes place in the skies above. Naturally men played by Henry Czerny, Shea Whigham, Nick Offerman and Holt McCallany must think all this is insane, and naturally there must be a lot of talk about fate and sacrifice and living in the shadows. It does go quite a bit too far, but in the context of what it took to make this film perhaps the mild comparisons between Tom Cruise and Jesus are just about acceptable. This is of course a fine line.
There’s clearly been a deliberate attempt to ensure the people with all the power to help Ethan – or not – are almost all women. Grace, Paris, the president, the captain of the aircraft carrier (Hannah Waddingham!) and the diver whose suit Ethan uses for his underwater field trip (Katy O’Brian). The series’ fondness for the financial district of London, known to locals as The City, continues, though Londoners also know there’s no tube station in Trafalgar Square. Tramell Tillman as the submarine captain gets to display a wonderful smile when he informs Ethan that if he wants to poke the bear, he’s come to the right place. And one other small part, which should not be spoiled, does remarkable work in tying the whole series together. But we all know we are really here to see Tom Cruise push himself into as much danger as it is possible for a person to be in and not die. We are there to see a five-minute sequence which required for its making four thousand separate flights. We are there to see what happens when unsecured missiles bonk around a water-filled underwater chamber with a human body in the middle of it risking getting squished, or drowned, or maimed in some horrible way. We are there to see a matador kill a bull while dancing, it is so easy to do.
Mr. Cruise referenced both Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton from the stage at Cannes. The days of stuntwork like theirs – with no safeties in place, relying only on their setups and their willingness to be injured for our entertainment – are long gone, which is only for the good. But there’s a frisson to the work they did which – and I cannot believe I am saying this – doesn’t exist in this movie, and that is largely because of the lengths Mr. McQuarrie and his team have gone to make all this as safe as possible for Mr. Cruise to do. Nobody needed to go to hospital for this, but removing that edge of risk means that even Mr. Cruise wing-walking on an upside-down biplane needed the score to emphasize what we were seeing. Of course, since stunts have been introduced at last as a new category in the Oscars for films released this year, maybe they’ll win and we can all relax, safe in the knowledge that Mr. Cruise no longer needs to work so hard. That maybe his next movie will be completely unexpected and unpredictable. Maybe, if through that unpredictability we see him make a mistake, audiences will like him a whole lot more. And then maybe he finally figure out how to show us a good time without needing to set himself up to be trampled in front of an audience waiting to boo.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning will be in theaters on May 23, 2025.
Learn more about the film, including how to buy tickets, at the official website for the title.
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