Mission Impossible – Fallout is a 2018 action film where Ethan Hunt and his IMF team race against time after a mission gone wrong.
If you’re even a passing fan of action movies and know anything about Tom Cruise, you know that the guy is dedicated to the craft of making it look real, and by that I mean he’s by all accounts certifiably insane. He’s always taken to pushing himself on his movie sets, yet with the Mission: Impossible series, he’s sort of taken the title to heart, committing himself to increasingly unbelievable stunts that have audiences slack-jawed in response. That train bit in the first one was like a gateway drug.
Certainly, many actors have done plenty of their own stunts, with the likes of Harrison Ford and of course, the great Jackie Chan being names in modern films that stand out. But Cruise is doing things that can only be qualified as, well, maybe outliers, not so much looking to wreck his body with fight sequences and bursting through walls, though he does plenty of that, but rather staging a stunt that is particularly visually entertaining, and more importantly, categorically life-threatening. That really seems to be first priority.
You all remember his scaling of the Burj Khalifa for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and the arguably more impressive plane sequence in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, an astonishing bit of madness that is still jarring to watch today. Well, a new Mission: Impossible film is coming this summer and yup, Cruise is at it again, though is a probably more subtle way. He’s flying a helicopter.
When you watch the trailer (above), your brain is telling you right away that what you’re seeing in this short sequence is Cruise in a mock-up in front of a green screen projecting footage shot by a professional stunt pilot, but you can go ahead and tell your brain to shut up, cuz what you’re seeing is actually one hundred percent real. Yes, that’s Tom Cruise. Alone in a H125 Airbus Helicopter. Flying it. Through the mountains. Very fast.
The video at the top of this post is released from Paramount Pictures and gets us behind the scenes of the actor and filmmaker’s preparations for filming the stunt. It’s pretty evocative and certainly makes you respect the guy for his efforts to entertain. He’s got my money.
What’s your favorite stunt in a Mission: Impossible movie?