Tom Cruise Hangs On For Dear Life To His 'Mission' To Save The Movies

Tom Cruise Hangs On For Dear Life To His 'Mission' To Save The Movies
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Tom Cruise is back to do his own stunts in Mission. In The Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. Top photos and comments hide Skydance

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Paramount Pictures and Skydance

Tom Cruise seems like it's been a one man's job to save the movies for a while now. In 2020 when the mission is underway in England. Impossible Earlier this year, Steven Spielberg publicly credited Cruise for saving Hollywood with Top Gun. With a Maverick punch .

Now, with the box office still struggling to return to pre-pandemic levels, Cruz has become an evangelist for the theatrical experience, urging audiences to buy tickets not just to his movies, but to other big summer titles like Barbie and Oppenheimer .

Cruz's passion for movie preservation goes hand in hand with his billed reputation as Hollywood's last major star. This is the seventh mission. In Impossible , the 61-year-old actors still risk their lives for your viewing pleasure, performing outrageous stunts in action scenes that use minimal CGI. So we see Cruise's Ethan Hunt, whether a member of the Mission Impossible Squad or an FMI agent, speeding through the streets of Rome in a tiny yellow Fiat, riding a motorcycle off a cliff, and, in the most unexpected sequence, surviving a fatal train crash.

The plot that connects these sequences makes no sense, of course, but it's easy enough to follow. In very timely fashion, this time the mega bad guy is an artificial intelligence, a self-aware technological entity called a Object. It is an invisible danger everywhere and everywhere. Data systems can mess up, control the flow of information, and bring them to their knees.

Hunt and his team from the IMF are determined to destroy the organization before it becomes too powerful or falls into the wrong hands. But his former boss, Eugene Kittredge, played by the villainous Henry Cherny, warns Hunt against allying with the United States government, which wants control of the organization and the New World Order.

It's the first time we've seen Kittridge since Brian De Palma's Mission Impossible in 1996, the first in the series and still the best in my opinion. However, director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie has done some great work lately with Rogue Nation , Fallout , and now Dead Reckoning Part One .

Here, he seems to pay homage to the 1996 original, even elevating its harrowing opening sequence, as Hunt watches helplessly as his IMF colleagues are slaughtered one by one. formative trauma. This explains why Hunt repeatedly risks his life for his friends, in movie after movie.

If you've been following the series, you'll catch a glimpse of the friends here, including Hunt co-stars Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Rebecca Ferguson. You may also remember that Vanessa Kirby reprises her role in Fallout as the ruthless arms dealer, and in a solo sequence, perhaps the best performance of the movie. There are also some exciting new characters, including the devious thief, nicely played by Hayley Atwell, who leads Hunt in a long game of cat and mouse. Pom Klementieff steals a few scenes as the mysterious killer, as does Isaiah Morales as an enemy from Hunt's past.

They are the characters, double crosses, chases, fights, escapes and explosions to follow. But even at two and a half hours, and that's only the first act , the movie never loses steam. A screenwriter first and foremost, McQuarrie tells the story beautifully, building and dropping tension at regular intervals.

Compared to the visual effects of most Hollywood films, Dead Reckoning Part One feels like a marvel of old-school craftsmanship, complemented by slicker gadgets. Even Hunt uses his diabolical insolence with surprising ease and grace, spending most of the movie's third act carrying out even his most daring adventures for laughs. It's not that the actor doesn't take his job seriously. I don't know if Tom Cruise can keep the movie alive, but somehow I never get tired of watching him try.

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