The most thrilling set-piece in Ghost Protocol – and the image the studio hung the whole marketing campaign on – sees Tom Cruise scaling the facade of the tallest skyscraper on Earth: the Burj Khalifa. Cruise actually performed this entire sequence for real, albeit with a couple of harnesses edited out by the VFX team, swinging from the side of the building at a dizzying altitude like a true-to-life Spider-Man.
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Since then, the M:I movies have been defined by their breathtaking in-camera stunt work. Cruise’s practical stunt work is refreshing in an era of action cinema rammed with weightless CGI. It harks back to the old-school techniques of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns and the original Indiana Jones trilogy. Ever since Cruise scaled the Burj Khalifa, the Mission: Impossible series has become an exercise in one-upmanship as the actor keeps pushing himself to new extremes. This franchise tradition must be a nightmare for the studio’s insurers, but it’s a dream for moviegoers.
After Ghost Protocol took not only the franchise but also the entire action genre to new heights of spectacle, a lot was riding on its follow-up. For the next M:I movie, 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Cruise reteamed with Jack Reacher director Christopher McQuarrie. With Rogue Nation, Cruise and McQuarrie’s primary goal from the very first frame was to outdo Ghost Protocol’s Burj Khalifa sequence. The movie opens with Cruise hanging on the side of a plane during take-off. Much like the Burj Khalifa set-piece, Cruise acted out this whole sequence in real-time with a couple of unseen harnesses. He jumped onto the wing of a plane, clung to the side of it, and held on as it took off.
McQuarrie captured this stunt in a stunning long take from a camera strapped to the plane as Cruise soared into the sky and the runway disappeared behind him. It’s a truly astounding sequence – and that’s the problem. The movie opens with the biggest, boldest stunt it has to offer. None of the action in the rest of Rogue Nation could top that opening scene. It’s not a bad movie by any means, and it does have plenty of great stunts in the second and third acts, but after opening with the plane sequence, the whole rest of the movie can’t help but feel anticlimactic.
When McQuarrie signed on to direct the sequel to Rogue Nation, he made minor movie history as the first Mission: Impossible director to return for a second movie. Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, and Brad Bird all departed the franchise after one movie, but after the success of Rogue Nation, McQuarrie came back to helm 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout. And from the opening scene of Fallout, it was clear that McQuarrie learned an important lesson from Rogue Nation’s fatal flaw.
After Rogue Nation suffered from opening with its most exciting sequence, Fallout went the other way. The sixth Mission: Impossible film has a relatively low-key opening with a shadowy rendezvous in an underpass that seemingly goes horribly wrong for our favorite IMF team. Then, in the following scene, they trick a terrorist with a Wolf Blitzer disguise (featuring a cameo appearance by the CNN reporter himself). This sequence doesn’t hinge on a life-threatening physical feat like Rogue Nation’s opening; it’s a dialogue-driven scene of classic spy movie trickery.
After the Blitzer cameo kicks off the opening title sequence, the rest of Fallout features huge, mind-blowing, Burj Khalifa-level stunts every few minutes right up to the end of the movie. Throughout Fallout’s whopping, yet briskly paced two-and-a-half-hour runtime, the audience is never more than a couple of minutes away from watching Cruise put himself in harm’s way for the sake of their entertainment. On the way to the big finale – in which Cruise hangs from a helicopter, hijacks it, then chases another helicopter through a narrow valley – the fearless A-lister does a HALO jump out of a plane, leaps from rooftop to rooftop (and sustains an actual broken bone that made it into the final cut), and hops on a motorcycle and takes the French police on a wild goose chase the wrong way around the Arc de Triomphe.
Cruise is currently working on back-to-back seventh and eighth Mission: Impossible movies, set to arrive in theaters on July 14, 2023, and June 28, 2024, respectively. These movies are both being written and directed by McQuarrie. When Mission: Impossible 8 is in the can, McQuarrie will have directed as many Mission: Impossible movies as all the other Mission: Impossible movie directors combined. This double whammy of M:I is planned as a send-off for Ethan Hunt, following the ongoing trend of two-part franchise finales also seen in Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Twilight, and the upcoming Fast & Furious finale. If Cruise and McQuarrie continue their Mission: Impossible trajectory, the seventh and eighth movies could feature an even higher stunt quotient than Fallout.
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