<em>Mission: Impossible</em> Is the Only Action Series to Get Better (and Better!) With Each Release

There’s an action sequence in the eighth and final Mission: Impossible movie, Final Reckoning, that is so insane, so flat-out fucking bonkers, that it really has to be seen to be believed. Hell, I’ve seen it and I still don’t believe it. And while reading about the scene in question can’t possibly do it justice, I’m going to give it a shot here anyway. It arrives a hair past the film’s two-hour mark. By this point in the movie, we’ve already watched Tom Cruise beat the snot out of a thick-necked henchmen with the help of a medieval-looking meat tenderizer. We’ve seen him turn popsicle-blue from hypothermia after plunging into the freezing waters of the Bering Sea. And we’ve witnessed him writhing in agony and passing out from the bends after diving thousands of feet to the ocean floor to retrieve some high-tech whatzit from the bowels of a sunken Russian submarine. In other words, his Ethan Hunt has been put through the wringer…and, in a way, so have we. But Cruise, God bless him, is saving the best for last.

Gabriel, Final Reckoning’s sadistic, shark-grinned villain (played here and in its predecessor, Dead Reckoning Part One, with bespoke menace by Esai Morales) escapes from an underground South African server farm a step ahead of Ethan. He jumps into the cockpit of an old-school biplane that looks like it’s been in cryofreeze since the armistice ending WWI was signed. (The plane’s been conveniently left idling nearby and Gabriel jumps in and gets behind the stick.) But Ethan somehow manages to stow away on a second biplane piloted by one of Gabriel’s interchangeable goons, clinging to its underbelly. Gabriel and Ethan are both after the same thing—an apocalyptic AI doomsday program known as The Entity. I won’t bother going into how it works because frankly I have no clue how it works. I’m not even sure that Cruise or writer-director Christopher McQuarrie know how it works. Not that it matters. It may be the least important techno-McGuffin in the history of cinema. What matters is that Ethan is dangling like a melting icicle from an ancient propeller plane at a ridiculous height that no human should ever be at without a parachute (even then, I’d argue it’s a terrible idea). As Cruise inchworms his way onto the wing, knocks out the anonymous henchman, and slithers into the cockpit, we can see the skin and muscles of his face whipping in the wind, rippling like a G-force Jell-O mold. It’s exhilarating. Pure popcorn bliss. And it’s not nearly over.

As the Mission Impossible franchise went on, Cruise kept pushing himself harder and further, no doubt as much for himself as for us.

Cruise steers the plane close enough to Gabriel’s to leap onto its wing. And like a replay of the gonzo aerial stunt we’ve just chewed our cuticles through, Cruise cranks things up a notch by walking on the plane’s wing. The stunt’s not nearly as graceful as that sounds; Cruise keeps stumbling and falling and desperately clinging onto whatever tiny piece of the aircraft he can grab. And he does this with such white-knuckle terror in his eyes that you begin to wonder if what we’re watching is what we’re meant to be watching. Was it planned this way or are we just witnessing footage of that crazy time that Tom Cruise nearly killed himself? It’s only after this outrageous orgy of daredevil, deathwish mayhem comes to its breathless climax that it finally hits: The ageless, 62-year-old icon has been risking his goddamned life for our entertainment for nearly 30 years.

When Brian DePalma’s first Mission: Impossible hit multiplexes over Memorial Day weekend in 1996, Cruise was already one of the most famous actors on the planet. He didn’t need to risk death for his or anyone else’s benefit. And to be fair, the gooseflesh volleys of stunt-heavy action we’ve now come to expect from this franchise were relatively low-key in the earlier chapters. Sure, that really was Cruise dangling from a wire in the first film’s Langley break-in sequence. And yes, that was him sprinting away from a massive exploding fish tank at a Prague café. But as the franchise went on, Cruise kept pushing himself—and his stunt coordinators—harder and further, no doubt as much for himself as for us. In Mission: Impossible II, he fearlessly free-climbed Utah’s Dead Horse Point. In Ghost Protocol, he skittered up the vertiginous face of the Burj Khalifa. And by the time Fallout rolled around, he was pulverizing his ankle into dust leaping from one London rooftop to another. Cruise’s hairy, DIY stunts had become the franchise’s de facto M.O. We went into each sequel desperate to find out what totally bananas new shit he’d pull off this time. Rarely did he disappoint. If anything, Cruise just kept raising the bar. After a while it started to feel like the only way that Cruise would be able to top himself would be to die in IMAX.

In Final Reckoning, Cruise’s single-minded dedication remains something we don’t see anymore in this era of synthetic CGI spectacle.

The good news with Final Reckoning is that Cruise doesn’t die (spoiler alert: neither does Ethan). But before the final chapter even earns a single dollar at the box office—and my gut tells me it will make more than that—the franchise has racked up more than $4.2 billion. But that’s just accounting. Even more impressive is the fact that Cruise gifted us with the only action series in Hollywood history that actually managed to get better and better as it went along. I’d even argue that the past five have all been straight-A tentpole masterpieces. Compare that to something like the 007 saga, whose quality, when charted, looks like the EKG of a cardiac patient suffering a Code-Blue infarction. If you go back and rewatch a James Bond movie like Moonraker, not only does its jumping-out-of-an-airplane scene look tame, it clearly isn’t Roger Moore doing the jumping. Cruise probably put a lot of talented stuntmen out of work, but in the process he redefined what a movie star can do.

The Mission: Impossible films weren’t the first time Cruise went full Method Knievel, risking his neck and more for our entertainment. There’s plenty of footage on YouTube of him in the cockpit of an F-14 Tomcat while making Top Gun. And he actually did hit 180 mph behind the wheel in the otherwise disposable NASCAR flick, Days of Thunder. But the Mission: Impossible movies allowed him to take his death-defying exploits to baroque new heights. And in the process, while all of his Tinseltown peers took up golf and went soft, he kept right on hanging off the edge of Russian cargo planes by his fingernails. It's more than entertaining. It's downright admirable. Cruise’s single-minded dedication—to his work and our slack-jawed amusement—is something we don’t see anymore in this era of synthetic CGI spectacle. And it’s very likely that as this indelible franchise fades to black, we’ll never see it again. That’s why, as much as he downplays it, Cruise is the movies’ last true thousand-watt star. Godspeed, Ethan Hunt. And Tom Cruise. With any luck, he’ll be back for another Mission.